The project « speech » comes from the strong need of two artists to re interrogate their main
sphere of work and creation: the space of living art. These young creators –Felix Ott and Camille
Louis – can’t follow in it without asking the question:
What can we still do with stage today?
With and not “on” because what can make stage still exciting for them, what give them the desire
to deal with it, is precisely the fact that it is not just a space for representation where one can put a
good produced object, ready to be merely consumed by a passive audience. At the contrary, they
see it as a kind of environment, a specific area shared by a community in a very specific moment
and tension guided by this common desire of letting and seeing something happen. Something as a
meaning, a significance that demands the involvement of everybody : the ones on stage as well as
the audience with his sensibility and mental activity encouraged by the performance.
They want to work stage not as a “support”, a tool for giving a message but as a language in itself:
a structure of expression that allows a real experiment of contemporary communication,
precisely because it can be considered as the ideal space where a subject can today take a speech.
Take his speech, in the form he would like to see it appear and that will obligatory speak about
him at the same moment where we can say it will speak about “us”. Indeed, the space of living art
deals with our sensibility, our senses called in the here and now of the performance when this one
does this bet to be in adequacy to its time thinking itself as a moment, an experiment of dialogue
more than an object. It obligatory has to do with our contemporary ways to be, to express, to
receive meaning that today are done of “pluri”, of multimedia, multi layers…
And stage allows to use them in their multiplicity, allows to mix the different kind of languages
that we can find in words but also in pictures, in sound writing, in bodies construction…
”Speech” is the attempt to make a language (the one of the living art? the one of our
contemporary subjectivities?) goes out of this multiplicity by working it concretely and under the
criteria of the ex-pression, the communication, not of the object’s production. It implies the
invention of a new structure, an original writing done of different media, not by their addition but
by their progressive meeting, their possibilities to slide from one to an other creating a complex
surrounding done of its complexity, a particular network, net at work with the performers as well
as with the audience.
Today, Felix Ott and Camille Louis wants to take speech and they find the possibility in
this stage’s language that implies the gathering of these different levels, materials and media
through this organic and “horizontal” writing, not orientated toward a final point but attentive to
the process and what it gives not obligatory at the end but also in the “middles”.
In this intention, they asked to a sound creator, a light designer, a video artist, an author…the
same question they asked to themselves:
How would you find and take, with the space of living art, your contemporary speech?
The answers will be different, dealing with quality of sound for some, of space or images for
others… and this multiplicity is really wanted and necessary to build, progressively, a network.
Each artist has to focus, first, on his own media, as if it was the only one of the piece because it’s
by assuming its specificity that it can really meet the others and start with them this process of
communication. This one will always have to deal with the present: the present of the encounter
of the participants, but also with the audience, the specific frame of each performance.
As a contemporary “speech”, the creation is a never ended one even if it assumes an identity that
will see itself a little moved, a little displaced in each version.
Game of the same and the differences, game of the living art, game of the art that these team of
young creators needs to keep alive.