The Clamor of the World
ManiFeste 2023, the Spring Festival in Paris, is permeated by the world's clamor. Is the concert hall a new public square? Luciano Berio foresaw this possibility in his Laborintus II, which could "be performed in schools, theaters, on television, in the open air, or in any other place where an audience can be gathered." The clamor of the world is the orchestra and the electronics of Cortèges by Sasha J. Blondeau joined by the solitary voice of François Chaignaud. The clamor of the world is the unheard-of urban violence of Amériques and the immemorial cataclysms of Arcana by Edgard Varèse. The clamor of the world is ultimately the power of memory, the dephasing of times and eras, the presence of ghosts to which digital engineering seeks to give life and voice.
This new edition of ManiFeste has chosen Janus as its emblem, a Roman figure looking both backwards and forwards, a god of beginnings and ends. A maze-like memory for Berio/Dante/Sanguinetti, the living memory of the Grand Siècle for the Janus program initiated with the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, the hall of mirrors of Renaissance polyphony in Bernhard Lang's The Mirror Stage, or the Varese break with his continent of origin that haunts him. Collective memory for the Nigerian choreographer Qudus Onikeku or memory of a gigantic corpus explored today by the power of artificial intelligence. "Time is out of joint", Hamlet proclaimed after his encounter with his father's ghost. ManiFeste 2023 in turn invites tenacious ghosts, the living archive, and creative amnesia.
Frank Madlener, IRCAM director