Carte blanche for Aleksi Barrière

On November 16, 2019, Aleksi Barrière was invited to present an evening-​long retrospective of his work at the Finnish Institute in Paris. This event took the form of three short forms, recapitulating different projects undertaken by the company.

Presentation by the Finnish Institute

French-​Finnish author-​director Aleksi Barrière presents various aspects of his work in three short formats: three opportunities to discover his way of creating a dialogue between text and music, body and voice, in the company of his most faithful collaborators, brought together this evening by La Chambre aux échos, the music theatre company he founded and leads together with conductor Clément Mao-​Takacs.

Presented by the Finnish Institute of Paris, in collaboration with La Chambre aux échos and Secession Orchestra.

Programme

17:00. GIVE ME A FEW WORDS (2017) 

In this virtuoso one-​woman-​show, singer Marianne Seleskovitch performs several works for a cappella voice from the last sixty years, and explores the physical origins of vocal expression. Setting off in search of her own voice, the singer finds several within herself, and her travel beyond language might take her too far…

18:30. VOIX INTÉRIEURES /​INNER VOICES (2015 – 2019) 

Since 2012, Aleksi Barrière has collaborated regularly with Secession Orchestra, contributing program notes, artistic counsel, texts, and translations, in addition to joint projects with La Chambre aux échos he has directed. Commissioned by the ensemble, the monologue Elle qui dit oui, written in dialogue with a work by Jean Sibelius, meets translations of poetry by Eeva-​Liisa Manner, and an excerpt from Juha T. Koskinen’s Ophelia/​Tiefsee, presented together in Paris (Festival Présences, Radio-​France) and Helsinki (Festival Musica Nova /​Finnish National Opera). In the dialogue of forms and the crossing of linguistic and geographical borders, the red thread of listening to the Other within oneself, central to the performance concepts of La Chambre aux échos, unfolds.

20h. THE FATZER SOLDIER’S TALE (2019) 

A blend of music theatre and cabaret performed by Secession Orchestra musicians and actor Thomas Kellner, this show features Aleksi Barrière’s reworking of Stravinsky and Ramuz’s classic. Back in 1917, the massacres of war could turn into a world revolution. Deserters, Lenin, Bertolt Brecht and his character The God of Happiness take us where history is being made – where egoism, Communism and Finnish tango are the order of the day.