90 min.

Photo Credit: Bea Borgers

The wealth and strangeness of the most ordinary forms of speech come alive.

Words are born, live, and die in Suite n˚2, a chorale work for five solo voices. The vocalists sing the “spoken” words as uttered on a collection of sound recordings taken from everything from political speeches to bad TV to radical poetry and street conversations. The sound of each word is imbued with the same inflection, rhythm, hesitation, breath as it was originally spoken. Woven into a musical score the “spoken” words create complex harmonies, drama, humor, and a sense of mischief.

From the interplay of voices a rich assortment of situations and contexts emerge: a mode of theater to be heard. The most ordinary and trivial words and sounds produced by the human voice, because they are treated as precise musical scores, suddenly allows audiences hear them in a different way. This virtuoso choral suite of many languages (with English supertitles) takes audiences on a procession of words that dance, words that decide, threaten, condemn, that join ranks and  separate, words that crumble and rise from the dust, naked words, and words dressed in Versace.

Conceived by Encyclopédie de la parole Composition and Direction Joris Lacoste Composer Pierre-Yves Macé Performers Vladimir Kudryavtsev, Emmanuelle Lafon, Nuno Lucas, Barbara Matijevic, Olivier Normand

Photo Credit: Bea Borgers

L’Encyclopédie de la parole is an artistic project that explores the spoken word in all its forms. Since 2007, this group of musicians, poets, directors, visual artists, actors, sociolinguists, and curators have been collecting recordings of words and indexing them on its website according to their particular properties or phenomena such as cadence, chorality, emphasis, saturation or melody. From this collection,  L’Encyclopédie de la parole produces sound pieces, performance and shows, lectures, games and exhibitions.

Co-Producer Bert and Lynne Strieb