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Aperghis Georges

Georges Aperghis (b. 1945) has worked for over 30 years on the invention of musical theater that he defines as “an invasion of the theatrical temple by the abstract power of musical organization”. Never a libretto set to music, but a polyphonic coding of actions, images, music, bits of speech and song, pushed to a high level of profusion. Opening several drawers, the shock of multiple, stubborn, insistent fragments that sculpt the mental space with tiny nips from scissors.

There is a sort of primitivism in Georges Aperghis’ work, an impression of the first time: a language that invents itself, reinvents itself, that stutters and develops through trial and error, an expressivity that alternates between languid and frantic. It is often comical and fierce.

“Aperghis has certainly found the freedom to walk on a tight wire, to risk falling. But the difference with some others is that he knows that when the acrobat falls, he doesn’t fall into nothingness, he falls on to other wires and then he can jump up even higher! Danger can be negotiated, we can play with it, place it on the horizon, make it a vanishing point. With Aperghis, it is always there, it ceaselessly re-emerges at every opportunity, every time that elements of irruption are introduced, not to create ruptures with the chain of formal complexity, but to bring about other means of expression”

Excerpt from L’hétérogénèse, une conversation entre Félix Guattari et Georges Aperghis re-transcribed by Antoine Gindt (1991).

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Thinking Things

Premiere by the composer Georges Aperghis and the video maker Pierre Nouvel
Thinking Things : matière à penser sur les objets pensants Voilà sept ans que Georges Aperghis ne s’était plus frotté au théâtre musical, dont i…