Imagining the Concert

On my train to Rémy’s. Haven’t slept a wink. I was visualizing each song I would do on stage. On our way back from Zürich, Simon and I tried to come up a play list for the concert.

The concert will open with Kristina’s solo, Nina’s Hidden Glass, which will be partly played live by Vanessa, Mouss and Christophe (the cellist). On a screen a picture slide show of the same piece will be projected, with the names of all the performers and the people involved in the concert appearing just like the opening credit of a film. At the end of it, a voice will whisper ‘Ma-ha-bat-nha-ba-la-mat-da’ as the same words will also appear on the screen.

For the Prayer I will be standing centre stage, two singers on each side. We will be wearing ample black outfit and hardly moving during the whole song. I was thinking of  a Shenkai Juku dance piece I saw some years ago, where four dancers were standing on one side of a big plate filled with water, while red liquid was dropping from the ceiling like blood.  They wore what looked like a 19^th century black dress with a red thread running in the middle, their shoulders and face pale white, and bold head, very much inspired by Butô. My cousin Marie who was to be our stylist had her plan of buying a new shop on the Île Saint-Louis hindered by the owner, a racist old French lady who wouldn’t sell it to others than pure breed French, even though she wouldn’t admit the fact, stating that she is left wing. Marie was to go to Viet Nam to have the clothes manufactured for her new autumn collection. She was supposed to design a whole series of clothes based on Chinese shirt and samurai pants. Well, who knows what can happen. I might also ask Nicolas then, hopefully six weeks won’t be too short a time for him.

The Prayer will be followed by Un-me. Nothing much to do stage-wise. I will still have the four singers with me for that song. The audience will be hearing the music for the first time and have a lot to discover, so might as well leave them time to find their marks and not do too much.

Since Love and long for someone is a poem, I want the text to appear on the screen. The idea would be to make a film of me lying on a bed while the text would scroll on my body. It would end with a close up of my eyes wide open. Will we do that???