20-30/08/2020
Stalt Wehlen, 14/09/2020 Praha, 30/04/2022 Clermont-Ferrand, 26/10/2022 Kulturni Centar Lab/Novi Sad.
<<
...Brahmins believe that every sound in the physical world awakens a
corresponding sound in the invisible realms
and incites a force to action. According to them, the sound of a word
is an effective magical agent and the main
key to establishing communication with immortal entities... >>
Alexandro Jodorowsky, Manuel de psychomagie.
antez, march 2022, " L'Invisible " revue Studium & Punctum, Le
Fotomat', APPEP.
Having
been a musician from an early age, I have always been attracted to
experimenting with musical language and expanding its techniques. I
quickly focused on drums and percussion instruments, understanding that
they were privileged tools to explore the close relationship between
vibration and gesture. The drums being an instrument where each member
can be an actor in the sound process, and this in a direct way and not
by a gestural combination. Because of its coordination of movements and
the need to have a good body anchorage, this instrument is finally very
close to the practice of martial arts. I taught drums for a few years
in a music school in Grenoble, and I always started my lessons with one
or two kata of qi kong or kung fu. I could appreciate the difference in
the preparation of my students with and without this moment of
introduction to the harmony between gesture and breathing,
allowing to
stimulate the connection with the void.
Many percussionists in search of sound use the rubbing technique.
Whether it be through a bow or directly on the membrane or another
sound body. Like them, I tried for a long time in this direction, until
I simply realized that it was impossible to explore the depth of a
vibration in these conditions of movement, that of a gesture going out
and another for the obligatory return, interrupting the continuity of
the first and then the second*.
Like the impact of the backwash of a
wave.
That's when I started to do my first circulatory walks, around a drum
studied as a vibratory amplification.
It was a few years after I started
presenting this project on the continent that I, during an action in
the south of France, met a writer who came to ask me:
<< ...Do you know what you are doing? >>
Yes, I think I do, I resonate the space and what it contains by using
an acoustic amplifier and the reflections of the surrounding
surfaces...
<< yes he said, you do that, but also another thing that in Latin
is called circumanbulation, I am an ethnologist and I have been working
for several years on this subject... >>
I have remained in contact with this man and the documents he sent me
afterwards helped me to better understand the phenomena that were
difficult to explain.
Over the last twelve years I have developed this unique technique of
drumming, and I have had the opportunity to perform actions in places
that are sometimes very old, charged with the past.*² This has
sometimes had consequences, both on the visible and present audience,
and on other parallel dimensions... So I can affirm today that this
vibratory practice has the capacity to open what could be described as
a vortex.
A connection between the earth and the sky and I am only one
of the agitators of one of these ancestral processes.
Last summer I was invited as a "pedagogical expert" to lead with
others an artist residency in Stalt Wehlen, near the Czech border. At
first I proposed a workshop that was familiar to me, based on the
observation of cognitive biases and the possibility of interpreting
them,*3 but I quickly interrupted this work because many people were
asking me for an initiation to my drumming technique. Until now I had
been reluctant to let people I didn't know touch my objects,
considering that everything is fluid and magnetic energy. I have
therefore overcome this fear, even if it may require some work
afterwards. I have often wondered about the impact that the
mystification and sacredness of objects and rituals can create.
Considering that everything remains within reach of everyone, it is
only a question of will, faith or obedience.
We were therefore about fifteen participants, but after two days I
decided to continue this work with only two people for the remaining
ten days. It seemed obvious to me that they had real predispositions in
comparison to their fellow participants. Their movements and body
anchors seemed to me to be a promising basis. It turned out that these
two young Russians were not "artists" but were also invited to lead a
workshop, a kind of yoga, gym, psychomagic that they proposed to
practice in the forest... I remember that my nights were short
because I spent a lot of time to find the right words, how to talk
about something which was only based on my sensitivity and which after
years had become instinctive to me ?
The intellect has no place in a practice that requires an immersion in
the void, that will itself be filled by the vibration.
We were soon confronted with a
dilemma, their gestures and postures seemed right to me and yet it was
impossible for them to produce certain frequencies that I played to
them with the same objects.
After much thought and attempt,
I realized that it was not just a matter of drawing energy from certain
parts of the body. It was also a question of issuing an intention, of
undertaking a mental projection. This vibration had to be present
before it sounded, it had to be called, desired, and its body and mind
opened to it so that it could exist and be embodied.
Aya and Yam presented an action at the end of the course that impressed
everyone. We met again a month later in Praha and continued this
journey..
Notes :
* It is possible with the rubbing of a bow on strings to maintain the
same frequency during the continuity of its outward and return
movement. But on cymbals or other sound objects of higher density this
seems to me to be impossible or only in high frequency harmonies. In
the body of the vibration, there will always be two discontinuous
frequencies, the outward and the return. Other objects such as a thin
stick rubbed in its length between two fingers of one hand, then the
other, can allow to obtain a continuity of the vibration, but this one
will also remain on the surface and will not draw in the depths of the
matter in vibration. Only a circular movement of the body can maintain
an initial vibratory contact position with the material and choose its
registers.
*² *² *3
Additional information:
Name or circumanbulation used during rituals, non-exhaustive list:
Pradaksinâ for Hinduism and Buddhism, Haqqāfāh for Judaism, Tawâf for
Islam, Kantu ritual (Annamitic chain) South East Asia, tower inside
Ming-T'ang in China, circumanbulation for Christians and Freemasons,
The Irish ritual of church consecration in the Middle Ages, Ambarvalia rite among Romans, The Legend of the Lion of Sardis among
Greeks, practiced by Druids, Shaman...
