3/4 [ EXPLORATIONS ]
A versatile artist who willingly admits to being bulimic about creation and repertoire, the soprano Melody Louledjian has never reduced her stage to that of opera, where she has been playing the most beautiful roles for the past ten years. Her aesthetic fields rustle with all her passions and today welcome a dream that has been in gestation for a long time: that of a Total Art Performance bringing together voice, dance, painting, percussion and video, which she conducts from one end to the other as author, composer, performer and video artist. As a creator.
Even as a child, with the piano as her accomplice, Melody Louledjian loved to explore. Without a map or compass, following a free improvisation that opened up sound paths marked by the gush of beauty, the efficiency of the gesture, the abandonment to the unexpected. She has kept the memory of sensations that today impregnate her singing practice and the passions that nourish it.
If opera has been her predilection - "for this slice of life", she says - it is because it is the most complete art, offering her all together travel, languages, comedy as well as drama, meetings and even dance sometimes, which she loves as much as singing.
Was this enough to satisfy her? To a certain extent only, because Melody Louledjian finds her balance in the plurality : lyrical repertoire (role of Norina in Donizetti's Don Pasquale at the Freiburg Opera in December 2021), yes, but also contemporary music (Three Tales by Gérard Pesson in November 2021 at the Rouen Opera, solo soprano in Requiem XIX by Laurent Couson conducted by Marc Minkowski at the Bordeaux Opera ), free improvisation, French song from the 1930s (a record under the name of Melody Lou in 2017), painting, jazz, dance, video ... This versatility is reflected in the performance she is giving today, which she would like to give in museums, theaters, festivals, galleries or more unusual places, and to broadcast to show the extent of her possibilities, and even inspire directors.
Dance and improvisation had already teased her during her studies at the Conservatoire Supérieur de Lyon (CNSMD), offering her the opportunity to infiltrate contemporary music, creation and experimentation.
"I have always been obsessed with beauty, and it can be found elsewhere than in what we are taught" explains Melody Louledjian.
This is how she concretizes a unique and daring project, a double work of art that is both performance and video, from which resonate the organicity and intelligence of the body, the trust given to chance and the authenticity of the process
"Everything starts from a spark, in the center of the body, in the viscera, the center of the breath and of the vital energy," confides the soprano. "From this spark springs the movement, from which the sound, the painting and the dance flow."
Melody Louledjian is creative here on all levels. From the text:
"I composed a reservoir of language elements, onomatopoeias, ryhtmic fragments, words from French or English that I worked like cells, in the manner of Arperghis. My body and my mind then randomly pick from this alphabet book to extrapolate it.
Sound then, since from this performance of about an hour captured by Christophe Dal Sasso, she piles up, moves, composes, with the help of a sound software, a soundtrack. The music superimposed on the performance, also reworked until the lights are saturated, thus leading from reality to dream. Finally, the video, which she signed with the video artist Tristan Scharwitzel.
If other artists such as Jackson Pollock, John Cage or Morton Feldman have already worked separately on these creative processes, Melody Louledjian merges dance, song and painting into a single work. Her approach blossoms in the very process of creation, but also allows her, a posteriori, to create a bridge between free improvisation and opera repertoire. For her when she prepares her roles, but also for the students to whom she teaches punctually, at the request for example of the Haute École de musique de Genève.
" When I improvise, my singing is totally free, without the weight of heritage or mythical interpretations, or even scores," she explains. "I am the creator of my own framework, without judgment, without tensions, without limits. How do you find this vocal, mental and technical freedom in the classical repertoire? That's the whole fascinating path I've been exploring for years and that I'm keen to pass on through the experience and memory of movement."
Full Version
Performer + 2 sound engineers (one to work on the sound in real time, the other for the broadcast).
Duration between 20 min and 1h30
Acoustic Version
Performer alone.
Duration : between 20 min and 45 min
Technical details
Floor and wall space: between 10m2 and 40m2 (on each surface)
Access to electric current (Full version)
Budget
