Sound designer - Percussionist
Eurydice
Directed by Maxime Suaire
With Jeanne Laffargue
Eurydice is a monologue written and directed by Maxime Suaire for the actress Jeanne
Laffargue. The initial note of intent proposed to give the floor back to great female characters
still apprehended by their man. Isn't the story of Eurydice the myth of Orpheus?
Maxime gave me carte blanche for sound creation.
I sought to create a symbolist universe, but not illustrative of my representations of the Underworld.
I don't believe there is music in the Underworld, so my sound had to be able to exist in my head
of Eurydice, like a reminiscence of his Orpheus; hence the use of plucked strings for his
leitmotif. I also wanted to reinforce the introspective, sickly psychological aspect of the text;
like a dive into the tortured soul of this woman, definitely alone, talking to herself
in an incessant brooding, addressing an audience that cannot hear him.
Ouverture
Faced with an empty stage, the audience enters to the sound of an eternal complaint in an infinite glissando towards the bass, the low, like a need to sink, to descend towards the meeting.
Before being a woman who will speak to us, Eurydice is a myth, a character. He needed a solemn entry, serious and terrible, into this watery place on the banks of the Styx. I also had to develop haunting but limping rhythmic figures, as if disturbed by this place where eternity does not pass, where the cyclical time of life and death is no longer short.
Substrat
It is a question here of a frame, thought horizontally, of an immense accumulation, in crescendo which ends in climax. First thought of as a substrate for speech, it gradually nibbles it, forcing Eurydice to expel and then to scream her words / evils, in the sound mass of these torments, before being completely buried, left there, weary , bloodless in the emptiness of her condition.
Final
The piece being strong, hard emotionally, harsh maybe even in the form, and the sonorous atmosphere being responsible, it seemed to me desirable, for the final, to offer music, and not sound, in order to maintain the intention without austerity and then, perhaps, to provide the viewer with a return to reality more obvious. In the dramaturgy, a return to the cycle is at play for Eurydice, with this choice, not decided in the show, to overcome or not an infernal neurotic spiral, to found or not a new consciousness of itself, de-subservient. to Orpheus.
In the music, I built a motif, a kind of knell, neither major nor minor, on which unfolds a crazy and tortured melody. After a filtered re-exposure, like a reminiscence, it will come back more beautiful, until physical saturation, like a choice that surpasses us.