Orlando is an opera, a performative installation combining conscious movement, video installation, architecture and live music performance. Julie Beauvais choreographed conscious movements with seven Orlandos of today, embodying the post-binary new paradigm in Berlin, Kinshasa, Marfa, London, Varanasi, Lisboa, Chandolin, Patagonia, North Sea. Slow motion is used as a means of revelation, enabling an expanded consciousness, a clairvoyance. Horace Lundd chosed vast horizon lines to capture these essential movements at the blue hour. She films fragments to form a continuum and to create the Orlandos common breathing. Sibylle Kössler and Wynd Van der Woude designed a set device allowing the videos to be projected simultaneously, merging the seven horizon lines into one. Christophe Fellay composed an open score for guest musicians and sound artists invited to re-invent our experience at each performance. The proposal was to suggest through music what the videos do not say, to deal with the multiple temporalities present, to put the filmed characters in relation to each other and to assume the live performative element of the installation. Moreover, each performance is intended to be interpreted by different musicians: academic, instinctive, lyrical performers, popular singers, slammers, beatboxers, improvisers from different cultures, contexts, techniques and backgrounds.
Working with audio scores (sound flow, rhythms, vocal aspects), each musician will thus benefit from a ‘framework’ and an intuitive musical writing (a different approach from written scores) to which the performer can add its own perception. The audio scores are broadcasted within the video installation, as a support, an immersive sonic structure evolving in time for both the performer and the audience.
Julie Beauvais, Horace Lund, Christophe Fellay, Video installation, music, performance (2018-2022)