Tablado
Sound & Light - Artistic Issues
Tablado— a reference to the stage on which flamenco is danced—is the first chapter of a triptych/laboratory dedicated to musical theater. In this work, Januibe Tejera questions both writing and possible relationships among music and other elements on stage. One after another, each isolated element is questioned in order to devise a personal language for the field of musical theater and what it could represent.
Before examining the scenography and gesture, Tablado first questions the compositional integration of sound and light through an imaginary ball. While Tejera usually thinks about the light used on the stage once the score is already written, here, he attempts to think of it as he is writing, developing a unified language in which the musical and lighting discourses are joined, complement each other, and speak with a single voice. In short: how can light and music come to life from the same source, and evolve together, to express the same idea?
3 reasons to go to Bal Passé : Interview with Januibe Tejera
Sensors On Every Level à tous les étages - Technological Issues
From the beginning of the creative process to the performance, the relationships between sound and light are emphasized in Tablado: R-IoT sensors, based on fairly traditional technologies of accelerometers and gyroscopes, have been the basis on which IRCAM-STMS’s Interaction Sound Music Movement team has developed numerous tools.
Tejera has developed his own library for computer-assisted writing—based on the Bach library and other analyses of gesture perfected at IRCAM—and he begins by using sensors in the intimate act of composition. Used as simple “instruments” that provide a range of data, the sensors also generate musical material: pitch, frequency movments, rhythms… Like Liszt at the piano, Januibe Tejera improvises with the R-IoT.
As the main goal of Tablado is writing that includes lighting and sound, Tejera worked with the video artist Claudio Cavalari to create the lights. These lights are, throughout the performance, controlled in real-time by the electronic system that manages the sound. By fitting the conductor and percussionist with R-IoT sensors, Tejera and Cavalari have provided the means to fine-tune the synchronization of the sound and light effects. Knowing that, in terms of synchronization, the perception of a movement is much more convincing than its reality.
The sensors also played a role in the synchronization among the musicians on stage and the performance of the recorded electronic discourse: using the MotionFollower program developed at IRCAM applied to the conductor’s sensors, they can control the tempo of the electronics…
In addition to the sensors, Januibe Tejera was seduced by the research of another department at IRCAM: the Acoustic and Cognitive Spaces team that works on the creation of virtual acoustics. The principle is simple: how can we create the acoustics of a space (real or imaginary) in a different space (here, the concert hall)? For example, how can we recreate the reverberation of a church or theater, or the closeness of a small room in a large symphony hall?
Januibe Tejera would like to be able to change the acoustics of a room depending on the different types of lighting used during the work in order to create a disoriented feeling—not only luminous, but also acoustic—with acoustics that become larger or smaller in connection with the stage lighting.
Past projects with Ircam
2014 – Le Patois du Monarque, for soprano and electronics, 12 mn (Cursus 1)
Biography
