Song Offerings

By inviting three artists of image, space and body to join the musicians for a circular journey, TM+ invents a new form of augmented musical performance.

A dancer-choreographer, a director, a video artist – the three artists unfold, each in her own field, the program played by TM+ live and three times: a succession of universes, alternation of views, conjunction of sensibilities, in search of what is revealed at the heart of art by repeated listening and multiple angles.

When Maurice Ravel composed his Three Poems of Mallarmé, when Jonathan Harvey chose four of Rabindranath Tagore’s Song Offerings for his own lyrical offering, they were not setting poetry to music: they were working on the material, the mystery and the meaning at the same altitude as the poet; they were splitting the pod of language in order to carry the seed elsewhere – becoming flower, perfume, flesh.

The program is thus a poetic reality augmented in turn by the dance of a body, the incarnation of a voice, the lights of an imaginary space. The dizziness of Mallarmé’s language is answered by the strangeness of Tagore’s language, coming from afar. To the shimmering of Ravel’s music, its immediate seduction, its sudden sensuality, its playful twirling and its density, Harvey’s music appears as an intensification, an enrichment, an increase: of the movement, of the color, of the spectrum and of the sound strata, of the ways of saying and singing the emotions.

A century and a generation have passed: what do three of today’s artists intend to do with this inexhaustible music? And the listener with them, in this intimacy of works by recurrence, what will he hear that he had not heard before?

In the tradition of the “Voyages de l’écoute” (Journeys of Listening), which bring together works in continuity, and in the tradition of shows set in light, on stage, and in space, TM+ fulfills the listener’s insane desire with this formula: to benefit from both the unique and unheard-of concert and its repetition, neither quite the same nor quite another, in a renewed movement of discovery and taming.