Totem Dance

Inside Your Bones is a 60-minute spatial work for four musicians (bass trombone, bass clarinet, baritone saxophone and viola), an audio and visual installation featuring 12 vibrating plates (1.2 x 3 metres stainless steel plates with a mirror finish, expanded with a 15” loudspeaker) and a dancer/choreographer.

The show draws from the creative bone marrow of the artists and brings them out of their comfort zone. It deploys itself through a clear but flexible narrative which the audience can appropriate and interpret in their own way. The musicians and the dancer interact with each other, but also with the vibrating plates and the audience. Spectators enjoy a privileged position as they share the stage with the artists, in the middle of movement and sound waves.

From practically nothing, the work creates something complete. By freeing up a part of the space it inhabits, it reveals its full scope. By framing a “void,” it gives this void purpose. The result of a search for simplicity, Inside Your Bones immerses the audience in a sonic ceremony enlivened by musical materials made of vibrations and resonances.

Inside Your Bones is the pure unfolding of droning sounds that generally lack rhythm, where form is flow, stasis and silent evaporation. It showcases the simplicity and richness of its instruments. Featuring a music of colours, the work aims at presenting the fluctuating evolution of similar timbres organized through accumulation and proliferation, fostering the rise of an extremely organic sound universe. Polyphony becomes nothing more than global harmony, a macro timbre that hides incredibly animated units behind its quasi-static totality.

Through simple writing, simple execution, and simple listening: the work’s rich sound is born not of compositional virtuosity nor of structural complexity, but simply of the listening talents of its performers and audience.

The sound environment, the choreography, as well as Samuel Bourdeix's delightful lighting design create an atmphere that motivates spectators to get carried away by the work and take an active part in its narrative.

Sound materials, audience and performers are invited to share a common experience, united as a single tribe by the vitality of the work, an out-of-the-ordinary experience that brings us back to our deepest selves.

The show was co-produced by Productions Totem Contemporain, Ars Nova Ensemble and TAP (Theâtre Auditorium de Poitiers). Productions Totem Contemporain received the financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Thanks to: Eric Lamberger, Mathilde Comoy, Alain Tresallet and Jacques Charles for their incredible musicality and implication in this particular project.

Music composition & Scenography: Jean-François Laporte
Choreographer/Dancer: Benjamin Bertrand
Lighting design: Jean-Baptiste Delacroix & Samuel bourdeix