Playing sounds in the light as one could paint on a canvas with his hands …

LiSiLoG / Christophe Lebreton, interactive device design – Jean Geoffroy, artistic & educational development

Since 2004, the date of the creation of Thierry de Mey,‘s Light Music piece, based on the movement of the performer in a wall of light, produced by Grame (National Center for Musical Research of Lyon), Charlerois Danse (Brussels) and the GMEM (Marseille), Christophe Lebreton interface designer and Jean Geoffroy creator of the piece, have continued to develop the interface.

From the point of view of the conception (computer lutherie) or from the point of view of the interpretation, this work has allowed Light Music to become a reference piece.

In 2010 a film directed by Thierry de Mey ends these years of research, proposing a final version of Light Music.

It is from these years of work and research that was born the Light Wall System, produced by Christophe Lebreton and Jean Geoffroy in collaboration with Grame.

New interface allowing a scenographic composition, crossing different artistic expressions with the movement: visual arts, sound design, music, dance … multidisciplinary creation platform based on the potentialities of the gesture, which makes it a tool of creation and an educational tool scalable.

With the Light Wall System, it is possible to create new scenic situations in which the performer, musician, choreographer, dancer, actor, artist designer or circus artist finds himself in the middle of different and evolutionary spaces, thus creating the stage as an instrument, allowing him to develop a new relationship to sound and space. The main idea is to create new situations seeking to define new artistic concepts, and a new relationship to the stage.

A flexible interface that evolves throughout the creation process, it allows among other things to integrate its own sounds, to record live, to work on recorded sounds, work on the acoustic / electronic balance, proposing an experimental and exploratory dimension that makes this tool a unique sound and scenic research tool.

This interface aims to put back at the center of our approach, not a dynamic of pedagogical creation but a pedagogy of creation, so as to ensure that young children and students, through this tool can find themselves without pre-required knowledges, with only their ears and the innate relationship between the movement of the body and the sound, and by extension, their relationship to space and stage, a sensitive border between gestures producing sound and choreographic gestures. It will be about manipulating the sound in time and space.

It is also a question of providing a tool adapted to the teachers and pedagogues (of the general or specialized education) which will be able to create, with or without the accompaniment of external actors, situations based on the different approaches of the gesture and the sound incarnated on stage.

The use of the Light Wall System device must be, at first, intuitive, innate and linked to the pleasure of discovery … It’s all about playing, in the true sense of the word, by the gestures of the arms, hands, body, in connection with our perception of light and sound that induce these movements.

Far from distracting students from conventional instruments, the Light Wall System, allows them to find them differently, from sound and a renewed listening.

Since 2017 in the educational framework, many workshops and residences have been organized around the Light Wall System, in France (Strasbourg – Toulouse – Nice – Lyon – Paris – Ghends – Freiburg – Chambéry ….) but also abroad (Shanghai – Taipei – Buenos Aires…) allowing a work of appropriation, of interpretation, then of writing for the gesture and its transmission, residences proposed to the students musicians, dancers, actors, composers, choreographers, stage directors, visual artists, designers.

At the same time creative shows are planned for 2020, especially with the company Leonore Leal (Seville), but also the young ballet (Lyon) or Créama (Seoul)

“… relearn simple actions, relearn their strength, but also and especially their fragility. Gestures of the hands, of the body, in a line, a curve, everything is said. “

Jean Geoffroy – Christophe Lebreton

An illuminated space with narrow beams of light made by cut-out projectors, allows to define an air of play whose variations of light are captured by a camera and then analyzed to manage interactions with various sound and visual treatments.

The “Light Wall System” technology is a camera-by-camera recording and analysis of motion. A simple webcam and appropriate lighting allows you to play with light to interact with various devices, sound and/or visual.

LiSiLoG develops the necessary software and adapts it to each project. An educational version is shared at the Workshops and can be specifically trained.

SOFTWARES:

• LWSvideo is the video analysis software. It is currently only OSX compatible (10.12 or later). The control of this software and the reception of data from movement analyzes is done via OSC (Open Sound Control). This application is designed to work with LWSplayer but can be used with your own developments.
• “LWSvideo” and “LWSplayer” software are free. In the absence of documentation, it is preferable to have attended a training session to use it correctly.
  To obtain this software, please contact us.

The musician must be here and now. This is probably the point at which we need to rethink our approach as a teacher. Go to the sound, and from improvisations tame it through the innate movements of the body. Re-learn to listen to both the sound emitted but also the space and time in which it is played. Space of the stage that itself becomes an instrument, the moment of the concert that pushes us to surpass ourselves.

Transmission through listening is, at first, at the heart of our approach, and then comes the time of transmission through writing; be able to “gommer”, to take the same idea to develop it, to take it further and us with, to ultimately make sure that others can appropriate it in turn.

Endless loop that that of transmission where we find ourselves in turn taught and teacher.

Public :

Any audience interested in the stage and its appropriation:

Primary and secondary school students / Students of the Schools of Music and Dance, Conservatories, CRR, CRD, CNSM / Students of arts schools, Choreographic Centre, Choreographers, Plasticians, Scenographers…

Objectives :

– Discover digital capture and writing processes for gesture

– Rethink the place of the performer, and his relationship to gesture, sound, movement, space, dynamics, silence and stillness

– Appropriate the stage as a new playing space, playing light as one plays an instrument, incarnation of sound through gesture

– Re-work on notions of musical forms, from the initial sound material by transforming it

– Recover a form of musical and sound intuition, instinctive, innate

– Re-discovering “instrument” yourself

– Write and be able to transmit the pieces created during the workshop.

Content :

– Appropriation and use of LWS

– Writing and setting up a restitution (depending on the framework)

– Taking charge and training in the LWS software (according to the chosen formula)

Speakers : Jean Geoffroy and/or Christophe Lebreton according to the selected project.

For more information, please contact us.