REFACE (FR) | Performance

Les Idoles

06/10/2024 | Sunday | 20:30 (40’)

@Vinegar Factory

 

REFACE is a performative project for two performers and a live musician. We choreograph a hypnotic facial striptease in which, using materials and hairpieces, we slowly and insidiously transform our postures and faces. We search for economy in both artifice and gesture. By repeating and reusing physical and plastic materials until they wear out, we gradually decompose and distort previously established images. Attracted by the strange, vaporous identities of Bergman and Lynch films, and by the photographic work of Cindy Sherman and Nadia Lee, REFACE claims a plastic, cinematic aspect.

Through the body, lights, and sounds, REFACE offers different layers of interpretation and listening experiences. The musical composition was created in parallel with the physical elements and also contributes to the ephemeral nature of the images that emerge on stage. The soundtrack acts as a new perspective, a third presence, and evolves through repetitive, slow, and enveloping layers, much like the bodily exploration. We employ various sound diffusion systems (global and proximity) to achieve precise spatialization of sound. Whether noisy, electroacoustic, or tonal, the sound materials create illusions, double meanings, suddenly highlight an image, or blur its meaning. Scenes that are at times theatrical or abstract, monstrous, grotesque, or familiar inevitably unfold in an open space. Like a blank page where everything can be written and read, the scenography aims to be raw and stripped down, oscillating between a doll’s display case and contemporary plastic installation. Everything coexists to allow the audience to be hypnotized and fearlessly immerse themselves in an intimate space, in our imaginations, and our delusions.

REFACE is a place to play, a place to pretend to be someone else. Who is it? What is it? A ghost? A child? Laughter or terror? All is confusion and illusion. Games and artifice. Cinema and lies.

REFACE is a physical and musical research project based on the idea of transformation and deformation. Everything is transition: our bodies, our memories, our social environment, our relationships. REFACE aims to make visible these imperceptible and incessant metamorphoses, which manifest the complexity of our identity.

Credits

Choreographers/Performers: Chandra Grangean and Lise Messina

Live Music Creation: Martin Malatray-Ravit

Makeup Design: Chloé Herouart and Les Idoles

Costume Design: Lucie Grand Mourcel

External Perspectives: Natacha Kierbel and Tom Grand Mourcel

Composition Assistance: Jacopo Greco d’Alceo

Lighting and Set Design: Johanna Thomas

 📷 Tom Grand Mourcel

 

Artists’ Website