Opéra de national de Paris: 3e scène
Internet is a public place, a collective meeting place, a place for expression and creation.After the Palais Garnier in 1875 and the Opéra Bastille in 1989, the Paris Opera has decided to build its 3e Scène (3rd stage) in the digital world. In this new space, the Paris Opera intends to continue its dialogue with the public and also to make new friends. The 3e Scène’s spectators live all around the globe, speak every language, and love art in all its forms.
As of September 15, 2015, the 3e Scène opens wide its doors to visual artists, filmmakers, composers, photographers, choreographers, writers, and invites them to come and create original works relating to the Paris Opera. The relationship between the Opera and the works created may be forthright, robust, subliminal, drawn-out, extended or even distended. But above all we want the artists to make the Opera their own, to draw on its resources, roam within its walls and meet its talents in order to reveal places, colours, history, questions and people through creation.
This 3e Scène has neither equal nor model. Open to the world, it invents a space where tradition, creation and new technology unite as symbols of modernity.
Alignigung
“For years, Rauf“RubberLegz” Yasit and myself have been independently focused on choreographic strategies involving threading the body into its own negative spaces, while Riley Watts and Rauf have been intensively performing these kind of threadings, Riley with The Forsythe Company, and Rauf in his own unique work. This film brings together these three work streams by intertwining two bodies to form what I like to call “optical puzzles”. In these puzzles, it is obvious to the viewer that there are only two persons in the composition, but the complex threading of their two bodies creates optical conundrums that frequently defy the apparent logic of the situation. The title ALIGNIGUNG is also a threading of two languages. The English word align sounds like the German word allein, which means alone. That English word has been inserted into the German word Einigung, which means agreement. So the “threaded” result is a pun and a hybrid, which could mean aligning in agreement with oneself and another, on one's own.” WILLIAM FORSYTHE
Dancer
Riley Watts
Rauf“Rubberlegz”Yasit
Compositor
Ryoji Ikeda
OP.1 (for 9 string)
Director
William Forsythe
Choreographer
William Forsythe
Rauf “Rubberlegz” Yasit
La grande sortie
After starting a successful career as a photographer, Alex Prager made her début as a filmmaker in 2010 with “Despair”, which evokes the 1948 ballet film “The Red Shoes”. Her works, which have been exhibited in renowned galleries and museums all over the world, are carefully staged with a keen sense of drama, and they reveal a strong interest in movement, makeup and costume.
The artist, who is drawn to theatre and ballet, was thrilled to get to know the dance world from inside and contribute to a project which aims to keep the Paris Opera’s impressive classic tradition alive and make it relevant to the public. Her film for the “3e Scène” links a romantic perception of the ballet world with a resolutely modern perspective. Drawing on her own experiences on stage, Alex Prager imagines the evolution of the dance of a couple, the Paris Opera’s Étoiles Émilie Cozette and Karl Paquette, with a touch of fantasy.
Author
Alex Prager
With
Emilie Cozette
Karl Paquette
Laurent Novis
Christine Amiot
Ludovic Wystraete
Metamorphosis
Matthew Clark is a Founding Partner and the Creative Director of the London-based multidisciplinary art studio United Visual Artists, which has designed the scenography of the first world premiere of the Paris Opera’s 2015/16 season, a ballet by Benjamin Millepied.
The challenge of working for an institution with a rich heritage that represents the highest level of classical and contemporary opera and dance piqued the artists’ curiosity. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the art of ballet, they chose to observe it through the lens of digital technology.
UVA’s film for the “3e scène” offers a new perspective on a seemingly familiar subject: the human body in motion. It captures the dance of the ballerina Eve Grinsztajn as a three-dimensional point cloud of data, transforming her into a moving sculpture. Her movement is expressed through abstracted forms, and a story emerges. The film, which revolves around the themes of rebirth and renewal, is accompanied by a Baroque-inspired score by Mira Calix.
Dancer
Eve Grinsztajn
Animator
Cai Matthews
Christopher Davenport
Compositor
Mira Calix
Director
United Visual Artists
Creative director
Matt Clark
Nephtali
The legendary Disney animator Glen Keane, who invented characters such as Ariel, Tarzan, Pocahontas and the Beast, perfectly remembers his first encounter with the Paris Opera : as he was sitting in a nearby café, he could not stop drawing “the most beautiful building I had ever laid eyes on”. Dancing has always inspired his art which circles around the creation of movement, and he was excited to lift the curtain and enter a world which seemed even more magical than the performances on stage.
His film “Nephtali”, which refers to Jacob’s blessings and Psalm 42, was born from the comparison between the grace of a dancer and that of a deer. In a choreography which Glen created with Marion Barbeau, he depicts the journey of a soul that is drawn towards a higher power, fights a struggle and is eventually liberated.
By using both film and drawing, Glen Keane and Marion Barbeau manage to overcome the constraints of gravity and attain the freedom towards which a dancer’s body and spirit always aspire.
Dancer
Marion Barbeau
Compositor
Arnaud Vernet Le Naun
Animator and director
Glen Keane
Live-action director
Arnaud Vernet Le Naun
Patterns of life
Whichever medium he uses, Julien Prévieux, laureate of the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2014, has been interested in movement for a certain time. In his film “What shall we do next ?”, gestures that have been copyrighted by companies, especially for the use of future electronic devices, are interpreted like choreographic instructions.
The Paris Opera’s invitation to participate in the “3e Scène” allowed him to pursue this train of thought with a group of exceptional dancers.
His film “Patterns of life” deals with the ways in which movements have been recorded and measured since the photographs which visualised human motion in the late 19th century, with the help of points of light that were attached to the body. In six different settings, five dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet execute choreographies starting from protocols and scientific results, while a voice-over alludes to the economic, military and political context of each experience.
Dancers
Allister Madin
Camille De Bellefon
Yann Saïz
Ninon Raux
Grégory Dominiak
Voice
Crystal Shepherd Cross
Director
Julien Prévieux
Screenwriter
Grégoire Chamayou
Julien Prévieux
C’est presque au bout du monde
“When the Paris Opera invited me to shoot a film for the “3e Scène”, I was caught off guard. Like many people of my generation, I almost did not dare to approach ballet and opera, since these art forms seemed too noble. My only memories of the Opera were my parents’ Melodia vinyl records and the soporific performances of Nutlake or Swancracker, when I was forced to go to the Bolshoi with my mother during my childhood years in Brejnev’s Moscow.
So what to do?... Maybe just start from the novice’s pure physical fascination : where do these inhuman voices come from? Where in the body is the source of this unsettling anomaly of singing, where does it find its softness and power? The vibration, the air, the sound… Could it be that between the cry of the baby, the spell of the lullaby, the terror of Hitchcock’s heroine under the shower, the respiration at work or the groans of pleasure, Barbara Hannigan whispers the way to me?...” Mathieu Amalric
Director
Mathieu Amalric
Singer
Barbara Hannigan
Je vous emmène
The first time writer Eric Reinhardt went backstage at the Paris Opera was in the autumn of 2004. It was to keep a logbook on a creation by Angelin Preljocaj, Le Songe de Médée. It was then that he fell in love with the magic of the Palais Garnier. It was also at that time that he struck up his lasting friendship with étoile dancer Marie-Agnès Gillot. Eric Reinhardt returned to the Paris Opera five years later—to Bastille this time—when Angelin Preljocaj commissioned him to write the libretto for his ballet Siddharta.
So it was no surprise that for the Paris Opera’s 3e Scène he thought of Marie-Agnès Gillot and the Opéra Bastille’s colossal 80-meter-deep stage. His only requirement: that all the areas behind the proscenium be entirely empty and stripped bare to allow him to relight them and film Marie-Agnès Gillot lost in the abstraction of an indefinite, metaphysical space. Eric Reinhardt had already asked composer Sébastien Roux to compose a soundtrack based on an extract from his novel Cendrillon, read by Laurent Poitrenaux.
An eight-minute soundtrack, overlaid with an eight-minute sequence shot, combining the voice of a man recalling an undreamt-of encounter followed by a loss as cruel as it is inexorable: Je vous emmène results from the simultaneous combustion of sound, text, image, body, time and space in order to release a slow and unique sensation—that of the pure present, the demands of here and now, opportunities we never seize.
Sound designer
Sébastien Roux
Voice
Laurent Poitrenaux
Image
Madjid Hakimi
Author
Eric Reinhardt
Dancer
Marie-Agnès Gillot
Matching numbers
Whether he exhibits outside on a public square in Bordeaux and in the gardens of the castle of Versailles, or in museums from Paris to Tokyo, visual artist Xavier Veilhan is a master of staging. It is therefore unsurprising that he has seized the opportunity to freely explore the two monuments of the performing arts that constitute the Paris Opera. In his film “Matching numbers”, Xavier Veilhan unites these two geographically and stylistically distant entities through a cinematographic ellipse which breaks free from spatial logic, and builds new bridges between the Opera and the outside world.
To a hypnotic score by Zombie Zombie, the artist creates a dream-like universe in which unusual objects and characters enter the Opera, move about, float, run, wade, pivot, dance on bikes… Instead of focusing on the performances on stage, he captures the spectacle of the architecture, the different lights, machinery and its majestic technical games.
Director
Xavier Veilhan
Artists
Marie-Agnès Gillot
Gaspard de Massé
Morgan Vassor
Les chiens du rallye trois forêts
Compositor
Zombie Zombie
Matching number theme
Étoiles, I see you
The film director Wendy Morgan has shot numerous videos for well-known musicians and clients in which dance, an art form that she loves, plays an important role. The Paris Opera’s proposal to contribute to the “3e Scène” has given her the exciting opportunity to work again with the American dancer Lil Buck. In “Étoiles, I see you”, Wendy Morgan transposed this star of “street dance”, who is famous for his adaptation of “The Dying Swan”, into one of the most history-laden temples of classical ballet worldwide.
Thanks to his commanding presence, this extraordinary performer not only stands his ground there, but the artworks of the past seem to communicate with him. His movements, look and style find unexpected counterparts in the sculptures and paintings of the Palais Garnier.
Wendy Morgan’s film captures the beauty of these different art forms which transcends time, but it also conserves a note of lightness and humour that corresponds to her subject’s personality.
Director
Wendy Morgan
Dancer
Lil Buck
Compositor
Antonio Sanchez
Channels of energy
Curator
Amélie Couillaud
Figaro
Figaro is a comedic film inspired by the music of The Barber of Sevilla. An opera singer loses his voice during rehearsal and goes through a night of debauchery, before coming back and being able to sing.
“I was very flattered to be approached by the Paris Opera and surprised that they gave me a lot of freedom-I wanted to do something slightly humorous and use moving images as a raw material to play with on an opera track. I don't think it's that dissimilar thematically from what I'm usually attracted to--there's definitely a decadence at play here but I didn't want the film to take itself too seriously-so we looked for ways to make it over the top and comedic. There was an energy on set that was infectious and funny and hopefully you can get that from watching Figaro.”
Director
Bret Easton Ellis
Opera singer
Philip Rhys
Compositor
Gioacchino Rossini
Le Barbier de Séville
Post-production