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We always adapt our interventions to the local context, over a period of several days and in collaboration with our host groups, in order to create an event that is of direct relevance to the needs of our hosts. Foremost, our goal is, more than presenting a show, to conceive of an active relationship with the audience. That is why we are proposing, aside from the performance of Génération Chaos' main production, GÉNÉRATION CHAOS 2, a flexible menu of workshops, round-table discussions, collaborations and skits.
An 80 minute musical theater play by Génération Chaos, with 5 musicians, 3 dancers and 6 chorus members. In 2 acts : SENSIBILITY TO THE INITIAL CONDITIONS and THE ORACLE'S ENIGMA.
Génération Chaos has invented a performance that is not a show. It was invented to function as a catalyst, to break apart the role of the spectator/consumer - passive, cynical, despaired and having seen it all before. A performance conceived to wake people up, shake them up, jolt them up, a performance that will have to be followed by real political work, in the sense that politic is, first of all, the invention of ways to live together
-- Isabelle Stengers, On Génération Chaos 2's impact
An expressing machine where those who act on stage and those in the audience are both considered to be actors. A chorus has been set up to try to put the audience member in a situation to answer and become one actor/author on par with the performers. GÉNÉRATION CHAOS 2 is an ideal tool to begin shaping an active relationship with our audience.
Actors, musicians, dancers and the chorus do not seek to present the audience with "a truth through its artistic representation" or the "artistic representation of a truth through a spectacle", but rather to attempt to be present on stage as human beings, actors acting on a stage in order to show what it means to understand and act in the realm of the living, the social and the cultural.
Staging Director : Marc'O. Musical Director : Jean-Charles François
Create a situation where everybody would be fully responsible for whatever they had to create... a group composition that would be built slowly and collectively from the point of view of playing, not from the point of view of writing the music
... first recognizing that the differences are very important, but then working out a situation where these differences will not be denied and the sum of those differences would make a whole that would be coherent-musically
Not improvisation from the point of view of spontaneity, nor composition from the point of view of something that is fixed in writing but it's something in between, extremely fixed by constraints, constructed through a slow process. But there is still those aspects that every performance of the composition is, in the situation where each musician is responsible to play his part in an improvisatory way, so that it may fail or not fail at any time
-- Jean-Charles François,
On the creative process of Génération Chaos 2
Francisco Varela, on the meaning of the word enactment :
Separate vision from action... There is no such thing as an external image that is processed. There is a record of activities that is rather coherent.... This is what I call the enactive vision of knowledge.
-- from Knowledge and Representations
...extremely well rehearsed, and prepared and thought out... extremely, well, forceful. They engage. If you watch these, you cannot just sit there, and relax. They draw you into their critique and anger and anguish and you are forced into questioning your own life situation
-- Bertrand Masquelier, On witnessing the skits
The skits enact, or enhance, musically and theatrically, texts taken from the general news, from magazine Les Périphériques Vous Parlent, from theoretical texts... They present the issues of concern to the group (education, politic, economy, communication, philosophy, etc..) using communication methods developed by the Laboratory.
Minimal technical set-up is required (one tape player, one speaker, one microphone, one chair).
Skits can be performed in the streets, as a tool of promotion and communication with local audiences.
Historical references in their case are not relevant. Even though there is probably a history of alternative theater, whatever that means, I don't think it's fair to say that [what Génération Chaos] does is an offshoot of those forms of alternative theater.
-- Bertrand Masquelier, On Génération Chaos' work
Some current skits :
- Les Périphériques Vous Parlent
- An introduction to Magazine Les Périphériques Vous Parlent's editorial line.
- Les États du Devenir
- A powerful call for cross-societal collaboration to imagine, and act for, the future of France.
- Un Enfant sur Trois
- A scathing indictment of current European ultraliberalist policies, whose tragic consequences are brought to light by recent statistics on poverty among British children, as printed in a minuscule paragraph of French daily paper Libération.
- Philosophes Debout
- Philosophy as an act of, not an echo of knowledge. From a text by Schopenhauer, on the teaching of philosophy in the universities.
- Jakobson's Communication
- Where theatrality "la Chaos Enterprise", Jakobson's communication theories and Nietzsche's famous phrase, "Only he who acts, understands", interact for an introduction to the group's practices.
- Moruroa
- A raging indictment of France's atomic testing policy in the Pacific.
New skits are added to this list on a regular basis.
Theatrality as the mean of emergence of a know-how-to-be, as opposed to a know-how.
-- Les Périphériques Vous Parlent. Issue #4. 1996
The Workshops are based on the Laboratory's methods : practical and theoretical processes using theatrality in the realm of interpersonal interaction. They can also lead to experimentations on the relationship between spoken word, dance and music.
The workshops, initiation to change, are a situation of joint experimentation. We learn a common language and see how we can enrich ourselves mutually. We study how the individual reacts in a specific context, in a stage precisely circumscribed. We experiment and see how to adapt and evolve, what can change and what are the criteria to understand the nature and stakes of that change.
- Musique/Danse Overflow
- Mastery of Self in an Unstable Environment
- Individual and Collective Behavior in "Unpredictable Situations"
- Development of the Taking of Responsibility and Development of Individuality
- Music/Dance Interaction
- Musical Theater and The Theater of the Living
- Street Intervention Specifics
- Collective Musical Composition from the point of view of Playing, not Writing
- Experimental Composition from the Written Text
- Reclaiming Text from Meaning : En-Actment
- Musical Instruments : Creation and Usages
- Creating the Audio Version of the Musical Theater Activity
- Chaos Music : Confronting Instability
By trying to "act" to understand what is happening within the realm of the "living", we make the participants realize, on a practical level, the real changes that are occurring today, at the individual level in relation to the group, and on the group level in the current social and political context.
Workshops have been organized with students and professors of Parisian Universities, health workers at the Ville Evrard Psychiatric Hospital, upper management at the Institute of Management of EDF/GDF (France's public power/gas company), youth and coordinators of various community centers, city workers, etc... Interventions in "hot" areas always engage local coordinators and community workers.
Overflow. From the computer world. What do you do when the sum of information is too great ? And isn't it one of our problem today ?
-- Jean-Charles François, on the stakes of Musique/Danse Overflow.
Interactive workshop and performance set up, where members of the public are invited to come and dance in front of Génération Chaos' musicians. Consequently, the music is modified accordingly to what the dancer does.
But MDO is not for the musician to do an illustration of the dancer, a sort of portrait, but it's really to take the global information and try to process it in an interactive way. A double interaction between the dancers and the musicians, and the musicians and the musicians, where music is elaborated by musicians looking at a dancer and also trying to elaborate a collective music at the same time.
-- Jean-Charles François, on the setup of Musique/Danse Overflow
A perfect exercise in communication. Develops the ability to listen and to take responsibility for one's self in a stage setting. Easier said than done.
Audiences in normal situations are very shy, so MDO is not really a concert set-up but something that works best if it happens at the end of a week in which Génération Chaos presents its work, from the musical and theatrical point of view, but also where there have been interactions from the point of view of all the aspects of the work - political as well as artistic.
-- Jean-Charles François, on the workshop.
What they do is basically an attempt at being critical, positively critical of life's circumstances. It's a cultural critique, artistic critique, even though they refuse any sort of obvious linkage to standard artistic forms.
Bertrand Masquelier, On Génération Chaos
Led throughout the whole residency period, after performances and during workshops by :
- Laboratory of Change
- Organigram of The Laboratory of Change. Introduction to the Laboratory's Methodologies, Major Productions and Focus of Research.
- New Dynamics of Production/Research/Training : the Model of the Laboratory
- Actor- vs Interpretor-Type Behavior : Social, Economic, Political Challenges
- WWW, Production, Politics and Usages of New Technologies
- Multiactivity
- Editorial Team of Magazine Les Périphériques Vous Parlent
- Role of the Written Tool for Activists
- Competitivity and Ultraliberalism
- Economic and Cultural Issues facing the Youth in France
- Crisis of Education, Crisis of Society
- Crisis of Work, Crisis of the Art Work
- Alternative Economy and Production
- Agriculture in Crisis : Proposition from Chartres' Agrinovators
- Anti-Psychiatry and Resistance to Exclusion
- Group Les Philosophes Debout
- Philosophical Praxis vs Philosophical Teaching
- Contemporary Philosophical Practices in Europe
- The Teaching of Philosophy : a Contradiction in Terms ?
- Dance and Thought, a Collaboration
- Génération Chaos
- Communication Technics and Group Dynamics on Stage
- Theater of the Living : A Catalyst for Action
- Case Study : From Rap to Rags, Music Industry and Culture in France
- The Role of the Chorus in Chaos Music
- The Actor vs the Interpreter : The Theater of the Living
- Instability and Chaos Theory on the Stage of the Living
- WWW - Living Links with Europe
- Usages of the Site are discussed in relation to The Laboratory's methodologies.
- Connections to partner sites include :
- Arbres de la Connaissance, with Pierre Lévy and Students from Paris St. Denis University Campus
- Université d'Urgence, with its Paris School of Beaux-Arts multimedia antenna
- The Village Associatif and Grassroots Networks in France, with Editorial Team of Les Périphériques Vous Parlent, from its WWW Site in Paris.
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Les périphériques vous parlent, last updated on march 26, 03 by TMTM
