The evening before last, the opening of the 4^th edition of [frasq] at the Générateur in Gentilly

The infinite permissiveness that prevails there The first of the performances produced at the Générateur is the feeling of grandiose freedom in art.

I'm not here to talk about the guest artists, nor to describe what they do; that's what the programme is for, and performance is an art form that requires your presence in vivo if you want to know what it's about. I simply want to follow up on a few notes I took that evening in the midst of the performances that were expressed in concert, or more precisely, in a concert of forms that naturally intertwined. For me, these notes are part of a constructed continuity that subtly links me to the Générateur and to Anne Dreyfus, who runs this place, and her teams.

The Générateur is a space that people frequent and whose creative process can only be perceived through this very frequentation. I don't just mean that we come here to discover artistic proposals, or that it's a convivial place dedicated to contemporary art where it's good to meet and have a drink. You could look at it that way on the surface, and that would be good, because it is indeed the case. But personally, whether as a participant or as a spectator, this is not what I remember and what has marked me on each visit I have made to the place and its hosts since we met a little over twenty months ago.

The path that this 'relationship' takes with the Generator entity is for me quite different and absolutely particular, in that I have never felt it or seen it anywhere else.

Time flows here, for me, in a totally unique way.

I see and perceive different things each time depending on what happens in the course of the seasons, but they are all linked by a strong, implacable and unavoidable unity. Nevertheless, this powerful force is expressed with gentleness. It seems unalterable and does not need to shout to be heard. It lets it happen and finally everything happens.

I don't think I've escaped that magnetism in my performances here and that's good. I believe that somewhere along the line, everything that happens here "becomes" the Generator. The infinite permissiveness of the art, the spirit that resides there, allows those who accept to experience it to be gradually inhabited by a grandiose freedom that we had forgotten was there, deposited in a non-existent cloakroom or in a corner of the walls, during a previous visit or in an unknown common past with this building. A feeling similar in part to the one we experience when we find ourselves facing the sea or the mountains, whose image we had kept in our memory, disembodied by the distance, and which suddenly, by the imperious physical call of its presence, awakens in us the body that we thought was alive but which had been forgotten in the cottony lie of daily reality.

I sincerely believe, and this is far more effective than my words can suggest, that it is Anne who creates everything that passes through her place. One might think through these words - and she herself would obviously be affected by them - that I would like to imply that artists and their works would be crushed by an all-powerful interference that would mark them unequivocally, but anyone who knows anything about Anne Dreyfus and the Generator knows that the opposite is true. So much so that this openness to contemporary artistic creation, unparalleled to my knowledge in the wider Parisian landscape, does not even need to be ostensibly stated in order to create the conditions for life within its walls.

Many places have been able to produce a surrounding atmosphere; here there is something better: a sky above our heads.

And its overhang in no way weighs on those who live under its auspices. It is the time that is devoted to it that will enable the "inhabitant", even more than the visitor, to apprehend in depth the horizons and perspectives that such a planet offers. It is also the time that leads us to consider its very name of "Generator" beyond its first "electrical" and "energetic" acceptance that comes to mind, as having more to do with the Promethean notion of a rare capacity to bring about the emergence of life in our presence and almost without our knowledge.

"It's alive", Dr. Frankenstein seems to belch out under the baton of a lecturing Thomas Schlesser, on the verge of dying out in a final burst of voice.

Here are the 5 notes taken on my mobile phone, which were naturally inspired by standing among the other spectators in the midst of the sonic, physical and visual productions that were taking place at the Generator at that moment:

"At the Generator, we talk about everything, we experience everything. A glass of white wine here does not have the same effect as elsewhere.

"Because time here is permissive, because Anne watches over it, because the artists understand it on equal terms with the visitors.

"I don't know if there exists elsewhere the absence of judgement that offers an art that claims to exist the opportunity to be.

"You come out of it freer than you go in every time. A miracle."

"There is not only a bamboo sculpture interfering under an iridescent projection with a speaker on the verge of syncope, but there are three times this juxtaposition from a thousand different angles."