«France is also located on two seas, but on both it is only partially maritime. It rests more on the European continent than on the Atlantic or Mediterranean coasts. And it is more on the Atlantic than on the Mediterranean. (...) The flags with the fleur-de-lis waved on the masts in Toulon and Marseille, repeatedly threatening neighboring powers – but never enough to make France the maritime power of the Mediterranean.»
Predrag Matvejevic, Breviario Mediterraneo
The performance Les Corbeaux in which the two Hungarians, Josef Nadj and Akosh Szelevényi (saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist), participate equally, arises first of all from a meticulous investigation into the relationship, neither mimetic nor didactic but conjunctive and perhaps even equally generative, between sound and stage presence. Starting from some initial extralinguistic writings on glass, perhaps the flight lines of crows, as a memory of a series of drawings on the theme composed back in 2008 — because painting is always at the base of Nadj’s visual inspiration — in a predominantly percussive sound environment, the bond between the sensory planes of the performance initially seems to dialogue. The occasion returned by the title concerns the observation of crows at the precise moment of transition when, from flight, the animal slowly settles on the ground. A seemingly insignificant instant. Yet it implies a universe of transitional moments, of writings and signs that reveal, to those who know how to wait and observe, the vital mechanics of an unrepeatable balance: the dream of permanence overwhelmed by the nightmare of impermanence. When then, from a metal cone, a rain of sand descends and, with tubes in hand, they pass through the fall making the flow resonate, and both gather some from the pile on the ground to compose a symphony of tubular sounds: here, performer and musician truly seem to coincide. The dialogue transforms into participation: the time of the action is the generation of music, exactly at the moment when the sound is produced in presence. Even Nadj’s solo movement, full of contortions and falls to the ground from his shoulders, recalls a poetry of the encounter with the musical other, which in the animal is not negotiated by any culture. Thus, the vertical painting of a finger/beak, or of the entire body emerging from a barrel dripping paint onto a horizontal white plane (like a uniform, anonymous man, without organs, without humanity, perhaps in the stark and sober rigor of a Giacometti statue), does not just paint but seems rather to dissolve, with nervous and illogical gestures, on a soundscape that is also aggressive and rhythmically autonomous: what remains are the traces, the signs of a black passage, and the uncertain light of a bulb that sinks into a tube.
Originally from Kanjiza, a small Serbian town near the Hungarian border, Josef Nadj has been interested in the plastic arts and the practice of martial arts since childhood. From 1977, in Budapest, he began studying movement arts, and in 1980, in Paris, he attended mime courses with Etienne Decroux and Marcel Marceau; he also took classical and contemporary dance lessons. Active between France and Hungary, in 1986 he founded his company, Le Théâtre Jel, and in 1987, his first creation, Canard Pékinois; then, since 1995, he has directed the CCN d’Orléans. Nadj has created a fantastic universe in which the imaginary is imbued with the culture of Central Europe and his native village, elaborating an extremely physical, often acrobatic, gesturality in the service of highly poetic narratives, emblematic of the most mysterious, burlesque, and enigmatic part of European memory and identity.
Akosh Szelevényi, Hungarian composer, saxophonist, and multi-instrumentalist, moved to Paris in the 1980s and came into contact with artists such as Archie Shepp, Steve Lacy, and Dewey Redman, who deeply influenced him. He has composed and produced numerous albums with Universal, including Imafa, Kebelen, Nap mint nap, Aki, and collaborated on the production of many performances. Les Corbeaux is the sixth collaboration with Josef Nadj, with whom he began working in 2003.
www.josefnadj.com
