Arno Fabre’s irresistible phantasmagoria based on the award-winning musical work of Marc Monnet with the childish and incredible title Bibillolo arrives at the ELS Alternative Stage at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center for four performances on November 5, 6 and 6. It is an “opera” without singers, a “ballet” without dancers – but, on the contrary, with plastic animals, electric trains, remote-controlled bulldozers, robot-exterminators, smoke machines, pulleys, electric motors, cables and imposing skis. A poetic and dreamy spectacle that offers a seductively playful and “infamous” introduction to the kaleidoscopic soundtrack of contemporary music.
Bibillo, co-production of the Alternative Stage of ELS with C15D, Printemps des Arts de Monte-Carlo (Monaco), GRAME – Center national de création musicale (France) and Cerise Music, is a peculiar work for young and old who want to be left to a fantastic landscape without borders, at the same time light, happy and, sometimes, even tragic!
The production is implemented with the support of the donation of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (ISN) [www.SNF.org] to enhance the artistic extroversion of the National Opera.
A few words about Bibilolo
Bibillo means turning the toy boxes upside down in the middle of the stage, hanging the aunt’s chandelier between the pendulum and the piano, lighting candles in the prehistoric decorated cave and dismantling the ship to attract the storm… A caustic and a dreamy spectacle, completely bizarre, halfway between modern opera, mechanical performance and object theater.
Despite its subtitle – “12-room chamber opera for handheld objects and electronic keyboards” – Bibillo is not really an opera, there is no libretto, no case, no singers. It is not ballet either, there are no dancers, despite the calculated choreography for stage operators-engineers, performed on music. It is not a concert, but it has three skilled pianists who play contemporary music. It is not a circus, although it looks like a spectacle with “numbers” and the music has clown names. It is not really a puppet show, although there is at least one puppet, maybe two. It’s not a children’s room, but it could look like one. It’s not a dream, but it’s exactly what it’s most reminiscent of.
“I did this piece with a lot of freedom, I really wanted to have fun, that is, not to forbid anything to myself,” writes composer Marc Monnet about his work, which won the Grand Prix lycéen des compositeurs in 2003. Monnet composed the original version of Bibilolo based on a collection of over four hundred “old-fashioned” electronic sounds produced with a 90’s Yamaha TG77 synthesizer. It is a dense, inexhaustible and chimerical composition, the sounds of which present a suffocatingly rich world of feverish and uninterrupted activity, where humor stands side by side with terror, as in a painting by Jerome Boss.
Known for his sound installations, the artist Arno Fabre signs here his first direction with an unclassified spectacle. Fabre envisions a dreamy and irrational stage space, something like a huge children’s room suitable for associative transformations, hilarious and nightmarish: a space where “toys are cut, dolls are made up and combed, fans play volleyballs and volleyballs, “Durasel” rabbits reach the edge of the world and commit suicide by jumping into space, while continuing to play their drums restlessly “…
Marc Monnet
He could have been born in 1928, 1943, 1947 and 1949. Informal and anti-conformist composer, he reveals himself only through his works. His music is characterized by theatricality and chaos. Unpredictable and inventive, austere or exuberant, tragic or ironic, it produces unique works, imbued with poetry and humor, just like their titles. With high precision writing, the composer does not hesitate to mistreat the audience, in order to break his listening habits. Since 2003, he has been directing the Printemps des Arts festival of Monte Carlo (Monaco).
Arno Fabr
He could be a stuntman for a Western movie, an Antarctic ornithologist, a climber trying to climb Anapurna, an 11th-century stonemason, an apprentice anthropologist in the Amazon, or a hunter-gatherer of the Neolithic era. Eventually, he drove a tractor, rode a bicycle, dismantled his piano, and studied at the Louis Lumière and Le Frenoise schools in France. Today he builds his house, continues to ride a bicycle and creates works that are on display around the world, whether they are complex sound installations or landscape photographs or simple texts written on the wall.
Room opera in 12 images for manipulative objects
and electronic keyboards
5, 6, 7 November 2021
Start time: 20.30 (Sunday 11.00, 19.30)
Alternative Stage of the National Opera
Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center
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