BIBILOLO
chamber opera in 12 tableaux for animated objets and electronic keyboards
music Marc Monnet, directed by Arno Fabremusical theater, contemporary opera, contemporary music - for 3 pianists, 3 manipulators and 1 videographer
60 minutes - tout public - width 12 m, depth 10 m, height 6 m - audience 400 people.
BIBILOLO, it's as if we had overturned the toy boxes in the middle of the stage, hung Aunt Germaine's chandelier between the Grandfather clock and the piano, lit candles in the decorated cave and dismantled the boat to invite the storm ... An acidic, poetic and dreamlike show, resolutely atypical, halfway between contemporary opera, mechanic performance and theater of objects.
Despite the subtitle, this is not really an opera, there is no libretto, no story, no singers. It is not a ballet either, there are no dancers, despite a millimetric choreography of manipulator-machinists performed in music. It’s not a concert, yet there are three virtuoso pianists playing contemporary music. This is not circus, although the musical compositions are named after clowns and it looks like a show "by numbers". It's not really a puppet show, although there is at least one, maybe two, and lots of threads. It's not a kid's room, but it might look like it. It’s not a dream, but it’s the closest thing to it.
So, if we had to classify it, we could say that Bibilolo is a decidedly atypical show, halfway between contemporary opera, machinic performance and object theater. We would also say that it is a dreamlike poem, a chamber opera in twelve tableaux, for manipulated objects and electronic keyboards ...
photo : © Alice Blangero
Bibilolo is a set of sounds
imagined by Marc Monnet who, far from any
dogmatism or academism, chooses for his first fully
electronic piece to work with machines that are no
longer in fashion. Obviously, he handles them with a
learned flippancy, full of disrespect and humor. His
music is a game, a babbling where freedom and pleasure
dominate. In the manner of a Bosch painting, it is
populated, dense and teeming, cries of birds alongside
laser shots, pygmy songs respond to the ringing of a
Grandfather clock, while a storm at sea s' cut down on
an Irish ritornello.
Without
being mistaken, I can say that Marc loves clowns,
automatons and freedom. In any case, when he offered me to
work on the staging of his Bibilolo, that's what we talked
about. I remember especially that he said to me
" You
do as you want, you can cut in the music, you can hide the
musicians, but first of all, make yourself happy !
" This is what I did, I invited Latifa the
puppeteer, Pioui the graphic designer and pruner and
Frédéric the Martian videographer to play with me at the
artistic accumulation to invent the improbable show: a
chamber opera, without actors or singers. A ballet for
plastic animals, miniature cameras, exterminating robots,
pulleys, ropes, mainsail and cast shadows ... "
The show is like a child's room, the stage is a space-world
that lends itself to the game of explorations and
transformations, the place of dreams, of fantastic and of
terrifying. The place where the dolls are made up as much
as they are pulled apart, where the umbrella mechanisms
become Birds of Heaven, where the shadows dance ... There
is no narration or an action, but rather an action of
actions. As in a dream (or in the succession of numbers in
a classic circus show), scenes are linked and transformed
without apparent logic, the progression seems to be made by
rebounds and breaks. But from the succession of these
tableaux, a more intimate, deeper and dreamlike feeling
appear, a new vision that takes on meaning and tells an
indescribable story.
The main actors are toys, machinery, projections,
automatons. Everything is manipulated on sight by a team of
artist-manipulators who are puppeteers, machinists,
cameramen, lighting technicians, chemists ... depending on
the needs. They perform their tasks in the service of
object-actors. Without any desire for theatricalization,
their work shows itself in its functional necessity. The
show is there too. We are as if facing the complex cogs of
an industrial machine, where there is something fascinating
both in the object produced and in the improbable
choreography of these mechanisms.
We invite
you to a fun and demystified experience of contemporary
music. Of course, it is about childhood, but in what
it has of marvelously free to invent chimeric, of
frightening to be cruel and of extremely serious in the
work of playing. It is resolutely in Hieronymus Bosch,
Boltanski (Shadow Theater) and Calder (Le Cirque) that I
thought of when imagining this show : the grotesque, the
burlesque, the mysterious and the reversal of the world.
Because, by following the dramaturgy of the dream, it is
indeed the metamorphosis that is the main action of the
show.
“This
piece, I made it with great freedom, I really wanted to
have fun, that is to say not to forbid myself, including
when I imitate a rock group from the 60s or traditional
Indian music. "
Marc Monnet speaking about Bibilolo to
Arno Fabre.
composition
Marc Monnet
direction
Arno
Fabre
artistic accumulation, construction and manipulation
Latifa Le Forestier,
Eric Dubert (Pioui),
Arno Fabre
musician (keyboards)
Lætitia Grisi, Julien
Martineau, Stephanos
Thomopoulos
light and video live
Frédéric
Blin
light creation
Frédéric Blin, Arno
Fabre
video research
Frédéric Blin, Joris
Guibert
sound computer
Thierry Coduys, Sylvain
Nouguier
costume
Florence Garrabé
production and coordination
Laurence Larrouy,
Muriel Dutrait
Production and distribution
C15D
Co-production
Printemps des Arts de
Monte-Carlo
GRAME Centre national de création
musicale - Lyon
Greek National
Opera
Cerise Music
With the support of
La Région Occitanie
DRAC Occitanie
CNC - Dicréam
ADAMI - La Copie Privée
Occitanie en Scène
Residence
Théâtre Le Hangar
Le Moulin de Roques
La Nouvelle Digue
Gare aux Artistes
Mairie de Mazères sur
Salat
photo : © Alice
Blangero
