I’m glad to know you’re doing well

Cine-concert (under development)

For us, concerts and shows are meeting points—places where we are transformed by others’ worldviews and sensibilities. They are collective adventures, shared vibrations. Like any kind of attempt to connect with others, going out is a risk. A call to life in its fullness. Our show is a loud bang, a whimsical cookery enlivened by the desire to tell human stories… An antidote to resignation before the mountains being unearthed at our feet. Don Quixote, Of Mice and Men, Laurel and Hardy are all sources of inspiration, reminders that humanity’s various facets are in fact complementary…

Our stage is a bar. At the counter, sitting at the tables, or walking around—if the space allows it—is the audience… and it’s alive! The scenic aesthetic is inspired by the images of Edward Hopper, Otto Dix, Van Gogh, Brueghel, Ilya Repine, and “super-realism.” In the middle and ready to get to work is the orchestra. And as a plot for the musical composition, a montage of scenes from the three films of The Trilogy of the Living* by Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson, and The Man who Planted Trees by Jean Giono… Strong, vibrant, sensitive and orchestral, the music is full of life, joy and hope, but also depth and solemnity. It is profoundly human.

Roy Anderson’s films depict a world headed toward apocalypse. In the trilogy, which is structured as a sequence of long takes, or “tableaux/farces on the human condition,” horror often meets acerbic humour. There is human vulnerability, humiliation, the inability to make oneself heard, difficulty finding simplicity, lust for life and undue deference to authority… along with all their corollaries: people facing the atrocities they’ve committed, the weight of inaction, public shame… All challenges we just might be able to offset, if we have the courage to take our lives into our own hands.

From a seed, a forest… and its manifold social resonances. Giono’s short story is a luminous parable on persistence, patience, confidence in the virtues of simplicity (including where individual action is concerned), and the great effects the story produces.