THEATRE_MUSIC

Texts: Excerpts from Une saison en enfer, fragments of Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud.

Adaptation & direction: Lukas Hemleb.       
Music: Ned Rothenberg & Kazuhisa Uchihashi.

Stage design: Tadashi Kawamata. 

Costumes, scenery: Tomoyo Funabashi.   

With: Laurent Charpentier, Laurent Manzoni & Pierre Moure.

Executive director: Les Subsistances, Lyon.
With the participation of the Jeune Théâtre National.
With the complicity of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg.
With the collaboration of the Théâtre de la Croix-Rousse.

Intentions by Lukas Hemleb

Reference Works

The show revolves around Une saison en enfer, enriched by a few poems, letters, and fragments from Illuminations.



The “Exploding” Scenery
The scenery is an installation of pieces of rough wood, essentially boards, by the visual artist Tadashi Kawamata.
" The idea is to avoid what is called a décor in the theatrical meaning of the word. Kawamata’s work plays extremely freely with the raw nature of the materials he uses, placing them in unexpected ways in the architectural environment he’s dealing with, creating a very unstable balance, even movement, between order and chaos. At times, we can’t tell right away if this is the work of an artist: it could just as easily be a construction site after a storm or a tsunami. … For me, there is an equivalence between the poetic brilliance of Rimbaud, his explosive character, the tsunami of his three years of overflowing creativity and Kawamata’s esthetic, which seems to represent a movement, a frozen explosion.” 
Lukas Hemleb



The Theater in Music

”The music played live will be very free, improvised, rhythmic or melodic. My research with the musicians delves into all the interactions possible between the music and the text.”
Lukas Hemleb.

Arthur Rimbaud, a time traveler…
With a military father and a very strict mother, Arthur Rimbaud needed to escape through both words and travel. In fact, he tried to run away from home several times and became a genuine bohemian. Upset by the war of 1870, he published Le Dormeur du val (1870) and Les Corbeaux (1872), which are rebellious cries against war. 



Rimbaud traveled through numerous countries. After publishing Le Bateau ivre (1871), he decided to live with his friend Paul Verlaine. With his mentor, he lived a life of scandal and vagabonding throughout England and Belgium. Their turbulent relationship ended with a violent argument on July 10, 1873: Rimbaud was slightly wounded by a bullet, for which Verlaine spent two years in prison. Rimbaud returned to Charleville and wrote Une saison en Enfer (1873).

At twenty-four, to relieve his chagrin, he took up his nomadic life again, abandoning the literary domain and the world of poetry. In 1880, he became the owner of a trading post in Abyssinia, where he traded goods and even arms between Africa and France. Then, from 1888 to 1891, Rimbaud created his own trading company. In 1891, a tumor in the knee sent him back to France, where his leg was amputated. After suffering atrociously from gangrene and cancer, he died at 37 in Marseille, on November 10, 1891.

A free thinker, atheist, and rebel, this poet, with genius as precocious as it was brilliant, left a deep impression on the literature of the 19th century and, even more so, the 20th century.

Fluctuat.net

Major Works by RIMBAUD

Une saison en enfer (1873). A pamphlet of 20 pages of prose poems summing up the spiritual-poetic adventures of the couple Rimbaud-Verlaine. Une saison is a very short period and en enfer marks the debauchery and violence of the two poets, an excess 



Illuminations (1873-1875). A pamphlet of about forty poems written between 1873 and 1875 by Rimbaud. According to Verlaine, the young poet had been interested since 1870 in the prose poem form, which is widely used in this work. Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris by had also captured his interest in this regard.



Reliquaire (1891).

Poésies (1895).

Lettres, Égypte, Arabie, Éthiopie (1899).
Œuvres, vers et proses (1912).

Les Mains de Jeanne-Marie (1872).

Stupra (1923).
Un Cœur sous une soutane (1870).

Lettres de la vie littéraire (1870-1875).

Vers de collège (1932).

Album zutique (1872).

Voyelles, Oraison du soir, Les Assis, Les Effarés, 
Les Chercheuses de poux, Bateau ivre, Premières communions (1884).

How do you plan to construct this show? What texts will you use?
I think the most important thing is the interaction between three elements: the presence of the actors and the text, the presence of the two musicians, and the presence of a spatial installation that will determine things.
I have the impression that with the participation of Tadashi Kawamata, Ned Rothenberg and Kazuhisa Uchihashi, we are already involved in something that is very strong, very important, the manner in which the text will, in a way, deconstruct to be reconstructed differently.
These changes and this metamorphosis will take place through the deconstruction and the interaction with the music.
I discovered that by taking Une saison en enfer as the core, you enter a world where you have the impression that the explosive phase of Rimbaud’s poetry is coming to an end. There is an existential questioning that leads to silence.
This is therefore what I discussed with Tadashi: given that his work sometimes resembles constructions sites that have been swept away by a tsunami, we are in fact in something that is the silence after the tsunami. And I find that goes very well with Rimbaud’s work because Rimbaud’s silence, which is in fact rather eloquent because he was a prolific letter writer, this withdrawal from poetic creativity, is like the lights suddenly going out.
I therefore want to take fragments from “Une saison en enfer” and orchestrate them so they’re divided into three voices. Three voices that are not only complementary, but sometimes also superimposed, that function in counterpoint, in chorus or in repetition, in fact, any musical form imaginable.
 
You spoke of the idea of fairly harsh, or at least very urban lighting. Tadashi Kamawata also speaks of a kind of brutality of the materials. Is this link to brutality one of the keys to your reading of Rimbaud’s work?
Yes, absolutely. Not necessarily brutality, but at least the raw side of the material. I wouldn’t want to take the interpretation that gives this kind of definition too far. For me, it’s more that I can approach this kind of world only by imagining it as a construction site, or a place of construction or deconstruction.
I don’t want to show anything, I don’t want to illustrate anything, I don’t want people to think that this evokes the sands of Ethiopia or Abyssinia, or the sadness and the very low, grey skies of the Lorraine, of Charleville. Since I don’t take this approach at all, I would like people to be confronted with the raw material that each text is, in a way. Not only Rimbaud’s texts, but each text that has the poetic strength to be able to serve as a sponge. In fact, even today, people who pass through the centuries like that are a raw material, so I would like this roughness to become matter for our reflection and our action in a place and on stage.
I find that the funnel has no place in this exercise, it’s better to leave things free to play on the multiple ties we form to a space, an environment, and even to the audience. In the direction we’re taking, I think it’s very good that the audience sees the audience, the people see each other, that there is always this reference to oneself and the other. For that, I think overall lighting like in assembly hall is good; I am sure this is what would be best.
 
What is your own link with Rimbaud’s texts? What touches you deeply? What echoes your own path?
Just the memory. I discovered Rimbaud when I was young, about 17. I carried a little notebook around with me, a bilingual edition of Une saison en enfer. I recall that at that time, I had the impression of understanding nothing while being shaken very violently. And I remember totally relating to a writing that was written by someone of my own age. That touched me deeply.
 
You’ve already started talking to Ned Rothenberg. How did you start working, with what words, on what basis?
We initially met on Skype, which is very handy! So even if we didn’t really meet, it’s as if we had. I saw where he works, his studio, and he saw me and we talked. I think he was relieved at first to know that I didn’t want to set Rimbaud to music. He was very afraid of having to compose music for Rimbaud’s texts, so we understood each other immediately on that. He then read various texts and told me he found Rimbaud horrible, awful! I said, “yes and no,” and we talked about Rimbaud. Then he thought I was creating a show based on parts of Rimbaud’s life, and there again I said that’s not what I intended to do. That raised his curiosity, imagining something that is total abstraction, and from then on he felt that this project could be very close to his idea of musical improvisation.

What were you listening to as a child? Were any of your parents into jazz?
My father was a big jazz fan. He played a lot of Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, the whole swing generation. He wasn't a musician, he was a fan. He went and heard all those people live: Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Chick Webb... My mother is an amateur classical pianist, so I grew up listening to her playing Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. I think that my musical talent probably came from her, but my taste from my dad. Still, I play Bach almost every day, so maybe it does have an influence.

When did you start getting interested in playing improvised music yourself?
When I was 12 or 13. I wasn't any kind of prodigy. I was always into black music more, jazz and Motown, Stax, and R&B stuff. I wasn't a fan of Led Zeppelin, or Pink Floyd, or any of this stuff at the time that it was happening. The one rock musician that we all listened to of course was Hendrix - he had total creativity. Actually, now that I'm older, improvising is everything.
Do you see composing and improvising as two different things?
People often set free improvisation and composed music up as opposing forces, but to me they're just two different solutions to the problem of how I express myself as a musician. Sometimes I've played freely improvised pieces that sound like they were composed. I like to surprise myself, and sometimes things come out that I wasn't expecting. Meaning to whistle, sing a line before playing, and hear it as they go, as opposed to just doing something and then listening to what happens.

Why did you choose to work with Kazuhisa Uchihashi on this project?
First of all because he is one of my favorite musicians. We have been collaborating in Japan and ever since I really miss him! Now he moved to Europe which makes it easy to work with him together in France. He is very experienced with working with dancers and performers. He is able to generate very quickly interesting material. He is very creative, flexible and fast and has a great range of sounds.

Which instruments will you be playing?
Kazuhisa will bring a daxophone which is an instrument designed by the German musician Hans Reichel. Only 7 people in the world know to play it, and he is one of them. Besides he will play base and acoustic guitar.
I will be bringing alto and soprano saxophone, shakuhachi, clarinet, base clarinet, a PC and base flute. The base flute can be very interesting for dramatic situations for example. I don’t know yet if you use all of them each night as there will be a big place for improvisation.
Lukas Hemleb wants us to be very flexible and dynamic so the piece changes from night to night. That is a very exciting idea for a musician. We will come up with something very fresh!

When did you start playing shakuhachi?
When I was 20 it was the first time I'd heard the instrument, and the records of the masters he told me about really moved me: a very particular personal kind of melodic movement, full of colour and full of space. For a long time I did this as a kind of personal meditative project, because the instrument was originally designed for meditation, not public performance. In 1986 I got a grant to go to Japan for 6 months, learned some Japanese, and studied with two very great shakuhachi teachers.

Do you have a special relation to Arthur Rimbaud / as an American, how did you discover him?
I am 54 years now and when I was 18 I was listening to Bob Dylan who talks about Rimbaud in his songs. He was really in fashion at that time but that’s a long time ago and I was rather immature. I think his story is very curious. Especially his letters are amazing.
I bought the complete Rimbaud works but to be honest I don’t have a specific musical idea. It just helps me feeling the context of the piece. Kazuhisa and me will be very spontaneous.