L'Enfant inouï - The unheard Child

On the shelves of a library open to the imagination, the illustrated album by Oliver Jeffers: The extraordinary boy who devoured books. Henri devoured them for good, voraciously, making himself sick with stories and knowledge until he lost everything, before discovering, in reading, an effective and joyful remedy.

Sylvain Maurice seizes the book, as a gourmet more than a gourmand. He draws from it the libretto of a musical theater for young people. He imagines a video scenography like a blank page where all the words, the desires, the oddities of this unheard of and unheard of childhood craving are projected. It is the world of which all children who dream and are therefore not reasonable are curious, the world of those who will come to listen to this small opera with one voice, three instrumentalists and electronic device.

Dynamic, often mobile and sometimes mysterious, Laurent Cuniot’s music speaks directly to the sensitivity of young spectators. It opens back doors to sound elsewhere with which they are not familiar. Unheard of, again. How unheard of is the coloratura soprano voice of Raphaële Kennedy, at once very maternal and very juvenile, narrator and embodiment of the characters. She flies in the heart of this fantasy with the colors of a poetic, dreamlike, fantastic, funny and moving rainbow if one wants to listen to her.