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Luc Amoros - Magic lantern

Wednesday 11 August 2010 , by Jean-Marie Grall , Pierre Abgrall (Translation  Valérie Gooch)

All the versions of this article: [English] [français]

Six artists and a musician write together a “Page Blanche” (blank page) wild with tracks, colors, signs, sentences, sounds, shadows and lights. It is a book of a single monumental page that the readers whom we are do not stop to flip through.

A blank page is either a paper on which we have ever wrote or drew someting yet, either a paper on which what we wrote or drew faded. And what we are then going to write or to draw is maybe only the shadow, the echo, the memory, the continuation or the repetition of what faded.

Page Blanche, the show of Luc Amoros company has something of the palimpsest: Middle Ages parchment which was scratched to be written again. In Cuba, for lack of equipment, the children write with lead pencils on their school exercise books and, at the end of the year, they erase them to rewrite on it the next year. The present knowledge recovers the past knowledge. Today in cities, artists of the ephemera spend hours to paint with aerosol, on walls or fences, images which will only be visible a few days, even a few hours, before being covered by other images painted by other artists. New images cover former images. Endlessly.

Page Blanche plays with the disappearance and the revelation of images and the questions which wrap them and carry them: war, death, art, creation, History... Faithful to the idea that the performing arts are there so that we understand better the reality where we are, Luc Amoros launches questions sometimes on the disappearance of civilizations and languages, sometimes on the art which we sell and consume, sometimes on History and its tracks - Shoah, Hiroshima. And he does it by practising what he names the disciplines alchemy: painting, dance, singing, writing, drawing, creating and “possibly more”... The six artists placed in the nine boxes of the 10m x 10m scaffold do not thus stop to produce, evade, make appear, cover or remove images and texts that they show to the public.

Jérôme Fohrer’s music itself - electrified double bass and electric bass - is a game of percussive and melodic sound layers superimposing which the six artists’ voices also come to strengthen. The whole produces a continuous pulsating flow which gives the tempo to the painters’ gestures whose rollers do not stop to come and go on the adhesive polyane films of the scaffold’s nine panels. Sometimes the artists appear on their storey, strapped up tight like frontage restorers, sometimes it is only their motionless or animated shadows that we see like on a shadow theater castelet, original reference to the shape of the company’s show.

Page Blanche is a spectacular sixty minutes performance which density submerges, wraps, pulls, amazes, questions, dazzles... It is also a monumental object integrated into the urban architecture and whose aim is to enlighten us, the public, who crosses it and looks at it, by revealing us all or a part of the reality of the world, by waking our dull memory, by giving us to read what sometimes escapes or disappears in the vibrations of the world such as it goes. Page Blanche is an inhabited structure which produces shadow and light on what surrounds it. It would have pleased Omar Kayyam, a Persian poet, who wrote around 1200: this wheel under which we turn is similar to a magic lantern. The sun is the lamp, the world the screen. We are the images which pass.

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