Musical works

An immersive music and video creation that deconstructs the music of an iconic composer.
Created jointly with composers and video artists Myriam Boucher and Pierre-Luc Lecours, Heroes is a multidisciplinary show inspired by Beethoven’s music. ​Lecours and Boucher dove into ​the composer's repertoire to extract movements and harmonic and melodic constructions; these musical ideas are modified, stretched ​over time, and reworked with a contemporary​ attention to timbre and sound. Adopting a process approaching sampling, they integrate compositional techniques of contemporary electronic music with those of annotated music, thus bringing together different aesthetic cultures and musical eras in dialogue. The result is a beautiful and uplifting musical work, led by the emotional reactions and improvisations of the musicians - each performance is slightly different from the last.

The musical work is complemented by video projections that envelop and accompany the musicians as they occupy the stage in different configurations. Video excerpts from nature are manipulated to create a fantastical backdrop; interpreted in real time, the visual compositio​n is inspired by the pictorial art of the Romantic period and proposes an aesthetic that is at times expressionist, symbolic, and abstract. The video projection becomes as much an echo of the music as a suggestion (and motor) of its interpretation.

With the amplified sounds, the occupation of the space by the moving musicians and the projections travelling on the walls and the floor, Heroes is a striking immersive experience.

This show was created as part of the festival La Folle Journée de Nantes (France) in January 2020 following a residency at the Centennial Theater in Lennoxville (Québec).