Tour de chant

This collection of specially written songs brings to life a series of portraits of unconventional, rebellious women: nature-inspired, Venus-like figures and characters from the margins of society, improbable survivors of our norm-driven world.

The second instalment of Sabbat, a participatory music-theatre piece in which Christine Bertocchi and Lucie Taffin embodied two self-proclaimed witches, this song recital explores suppressed anger, secret tenderness, pyromaniac impulses and the need for protection. These deeply familiar yet unspoken emotions find expression in distinctive, richly flavoured lyrics, voiced in the first person and shaped into melodic lines that move beyond the conventional boundaries of tonality and atonality.

Composer Jean-Christophe Marti has taken Stéphane Olry’s texts — poetic material characterised by shifting, asymmetrical forms — and transformed them into what he calls “songs”, a term that evokes American musical modernity, as exemplified by Charles Ives, John Cage and Julius Eastman.

These hybrid songs come together almost by magic in this recital, where finely crafted writing meets spirited improvisation. The result is rich in playful moments, contrasts and suspended moments. Christine Bertocchi takes on the role of a nocturnal bird, its song hallucinatory, while Lucie Taffin, disarmingly unassuming beneath a deceptively grown-up exterior, accompanies her on accordion. Together, they lead these curious, unclassifiable musical creations.

Co-produced by La Revue Éclair.