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C'est tant de réflexion | "Scrap" | David Noir | Photo © Karine Lhémon | Le Générateur

It's so much reflection

...these times of reflection

For me, the notion of show is from another time. As a spectator, I no longer find it interesting to come and watch the product being regurgitated by an individual whose material I should in turn receive (often too little), when my imagination leads me at the same time to visualize so much more, so much stronger and so much further.

Of course, one can nevertheless distinguish at least two kinds of live performances in a single affair claiming to be one: the overall one, supposed to be the big form, and the many others that are nested like nesting shows and that constitute the individual performances of the performers within it. For the latter, I still have some affection.

There is almost always something to be salvaged from an isolated performance, even among its clumsiness. It is the living human part. The part that escapes, sometimes unbeknownst to those who produce it, the bad taste of the finished object, limited by the creator's desire to "do well".

For this little light to come into the heart of the darkness of the too much and the morbid inclination towards finitude, that something can escape from the conscious and furiously busy part of the performer. Fortunately, this happens more often than it seems. In my opinion, there are potentially thousands of small forms that ignore each other, ranging from simple gestures to more extensive behaviour, among stage artists, to put it broadly, who work in the most mediocre productions. They then become sometimes more singular than works too blindly put forward for their so-called current relevance. What we are witnessing is the spectacle of the impulses of a temperament that resists, and this, at times, despite its host whose conscious aspirations would like it to be more in tune with the project it humbly claims to defend. For the spirit of a show, if it has one, always generates a moral. I do not claim here that it is systematically an act of creation to fight against it, but observation and analysis, including listening to commentators, professional critics or amateur spectators, are simply enough to highlight the level of misery of the challenges that are thrown at society by the performing arts.

For my part, with the arrogant childlike pretentiousness that has never left me, just like in life, I simply want something else. So, right now, I'm doing SCRAP.

It's so much thinking.
C'est tant de réflexions | " Scrap " | Montage © David Noir d'après photo © Karine Lhémon

For the moment, if I don't do it, I'm thinking about it anyway. I don't know what it's going to be and I don't want to know as long as possible. Working on a show is like preparing a time to come. The process is similar to a film location. Everything will exist at the moment of the shooting. It is there, in my opinion, that one will have to carefully fork and take the tangent, when the desire to please, or rather the fear of displeasing, will manifest itself at its strongest. This is not the time to flinch. For, even if everyone aspires in some way to attend the impossibleConvention is often the most powerful and you will not be forgiven for creating frustration. But forgiveness doesn't matter, even if it's not my business to displease, contrary to what has sometimes been said about my projects. I have better things to do along the way.

I wish that, like a space probe, it would take me to a place where I know nothing of the world. Where I know nothing about myself. I am not, however, planning a crash. I want to be the soul of the TARDIS, for those to whom Dr Who would say something. There is a lot to learn today from TV series, especially of the "science fiction" type, for the designers of live shows; if only through their format, infinitely extended and with no other goal, like organic life, than to develop in order to survive. Their episodes, under the guise of elaborate scenarios, have often used the prerogative of the cinema to retain only the illusion of a story. A series is in itself an adventure, which goes beyond the archaic boundaries of the simple film. The form of cinema that seemed, for a few decades, to be that of the 7th The art form, in my opinion, has been running out of steam for quite some time. No more than other products with definite contours, films do not manage to open the tin can that encloses them. Only true artists have been able to transcend the object and transform it into a poetic act. Most of the other makers have only found and followed the path of narration, making the "concrete" script the dreadful Grail sought by many of these filmgoers, full of admiration for fathers and gangsters, all fascinated as they still are by the aura of the "concrete" script. male or, on the contrary, by the delicate insipidity of human feelings claiming this time to find their inspiration on the side of our feminine part and valued in this case by another fringe of yes-men leaning towards the boring couple and the family mission. Once again, I see two main categories emerging, leaving aside a third, the only one that really works in the artistic field. To put it simply, I would say that the current production offers us either "big balls" or "eunuch" films. This reflects the bifurcated and simplifying tendency of our world, clearly portraying the place where the "general" public likes to frolic and satisfy itself: manly strength and childhood reduced to nothing.

For SCRAP, which I do not intend to succeed but to reach, I am really trying to render the surprising and facetious connections that are the mark of the human mind when it allows itself not to have to say, nor to proclaim anything.

In no way a reverie, it is a destination

A less narrow world where meaning disintegrates to reveal a map crossed by unfinished roads with no coherence between them. For nothing pleases me as much as zigzagging to get to my destination. This path is none other than the definition of my own person; the result of a random amalgam as I believe that each one of us is the faithfully matured fruit. I'm not the pinball from the 80's hit parade that seemed to end very badly, because it's my head that's doing me the best and not my life which, in itself, is not characterized by anything notable. I don't expect anything in particular from it, except to be life itself with its afflictions and its joys. Ordinary, even sparse, life is necessary for me to travel further and better. It is on stage that the dynamic that stimulates my neurons and my actions unfolds. Not because of a taste for a festive show, but because I feel I am on an isolated path in the midst of others, whose twists and turns I can never see better than in the presence of an audience. I need to share this vision so that it becomes clearer. The influence with which it acts then, dispenses a very particular luminosity, which one can observe only in these conditions and which comes to diffract against the bodies which it meets, like the backwash smashes the waves of the ocean against the rocks. Gathering scattered pieces, SCRAP will be, I aspire to it, a small meteor shower. I hope for at least some momentary turbulence, if only for my own evolution on the borders of an envelope I know only too well or perhaps not at all yet.   

(To be continued...)

That's a lot of thinking.
C'est tant de réflexion | " Scrap " | David Noir | Photo © Karine Lhémon | Le Générateur

Scrap is about the excitement of growing up, not the frenzy of consuming.
Scrap is about the growth of the desire to expand, not the outpouring of enjoyment.

David Noir

David Noir, performer, actor, author, director, singer, visual artist, video maker, sound designer, teacher... carries his polymorphous nudity and his costumed childhood under the eyes and ears of anyone who wants to see and hear.

This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. Jean-Louis

    Like last spring's Parques d'attraction, SCRAP weaves its web. The players watch for the construction among the apparent tangle of threads thrown into the mist. They are already straining their eyes to imagine the composition they could hold in this promising creationist abundance. I am like others fascinated by this Idea that we see bubbling up before our eyes, and frustrated not to be able to distinguish more. That is also what I like about it.

    1. David Noir

      I am very sorry to have added to the frustration, Jean-Louis, by answering so late. Thank you for this thoughtful and attentive message which helps to push me towards a research, for me also so complex to distinguish in its sinuous and chaotic course. This in no way excuses my rudeness, but it does explain in part my current difficulty in finding adequate answers. Little by little, fortunately for me, the veil is being lifted, but I am not yet in full clarity. I doubt that the project will give me the pleasure of achieving this in one go, and this is probably also what attracts me to its reasons. Yours sincerely.

  2. Martin S

    Here's the little year-end story:
    One morning, on the road to Foz Côa, I woke up with a post-dream idea: "My life, our lives are the paths in that gaping space between Karl Marx's Capital on the outside and David Noir's Fates of Attraction inside us. "
    My waking dream state caused me to laugh at the idea. My conscience was astonished by what it understood as a replacement of Freud by Noir, but which I quickly understood as the praise of the means of expression that allowed the Ss - in the Generator - an experience of both the dicible and the unspeakable, of the thinkable and the unthinkable of our internal theatres. Nothing to do with the pages of articulated writing of the Gesammelte Werke und Schriften.
    Happy new year again ...

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