Silence

Adapting and directing the short story En Silence, is a fundamental experience: an act of resilience, echoing the deep wound caused by the silence of my violin.

The paralysed writer Omiya Akifusa is deprived of his language, his ges- tures and his words.

How can a creative individual still live when deprived of his means of artis- tic expression?

What becomes of his story, his past, his present and how does the Other invent his future? Interwoven with questions on creation, transmis- sion, memory, and loss, Yasunari Kawabata’s metaphysical short story oscillates between apparition and extinction and brings into play an alternation between the tangible and the world beyond, the inner and the outer, silence and music.

The road that leads Mita to the home of the Master and his daughter Tomiko is an initiatory journey through a tunnel near a crematorium where errant souls mingle with the ghost of a young woman.

Who is she? What does she symbolise? Will she materialise?

The journey takes us to the edges
of this strange tale in which the audience is led into an irrational, ambiguous world where oft- grotesque humour combines with tragedy to witness the metamorpho- sis of Tomiko, a young woman sacrificed to the father figure.

For this chamber opera production with its spellbinding music and lyrics by Alexandre Desplat, the singers will move about in a horizontal, abstract, minimalist space. Their songs will

seem to be enveloped in a spectral light to create a floating, indistinct, ghostly world.

The ten musicians at the rear of the stage will appear as key characters in the dramaturgy. Dressed in baroque costumes and positioned in a single, slightly raised line, they will appear to represent a luminous chromatic scale: the reminiscence of an orchard in springtime, offering an open and vibrant horizon for the Master’s gaze, a depth of field conducive to brin- ging life to dead souls capable of being reborn indefinitely in this pur- suit of beauty, this quest for Nature so dear to the author.

In the centre of the stage, a black and white space represents the house where the Master will sit in silence with his back to the audience; a fundamental presence facing the musicians and flanked by the two singer-protagonists Tomiko and Mita.

Downstage – an area symbolic of writing – the narrator will perform several roles and take possession of the story.

Between these three materialised worlds, a mental space will emerge through a video haunted by the image of the writer: symbols, calligraphy, phantasms, flashes.

Solrey