Luci Loci Lanu

a musical comedy consisting of five videos (“Clavier,” “Sento,” “Marcheurs,” “Untitled,” and “Oiseau”) and performances (Movements 1, 2, and 3)

In Jean-Baptiste Bruant’s work, one approach to performance involves filming actions whose sound and images are then reworked. But these videos are also projected within an environment where a new performance takes place.

The viewer-listener finds themselves enveloped in a stretched-out space between performative images that follow one another in fragmented parts of the space using various projection formats, alternating or coexisting simultaneously with the actual presence of the artist’s body engaged in minimal acts of manipulation. The performative space is also created using various sound sources: sounds specific to each video; sounds produced by Maria Spangaro using a violin or digitized sounds; and live microphone and video recordings of physical manipulations performed by Jean-Baptiste Bruant.

It becomes impossible here to describe the linearity of the performance, just as it is impossible for the audience member to see the entire performance. The term “captation” is preferable because it perfectly conveys the positions adopted by the audience member, who is invited to sit, lie down, or move around in order to perceive fragments of a performance that has now become multifaceted. I can only list, in no particular order, a few scattered details that remain in my memory: the image of a Japanese woman reading aloud a text written in French, but whose accent renders the narrative incomprehensible, giving way instead to a voice of bewitching and surprising musicality; the artist striking the floor with a soft, malleable material; the powerfully silent image showing close-ups of a pianist’s hands playing a musical score on the toes of people lined up in a row ;  the fleeting image of men in the bath engaged in the repetitive act of lifting a bath towel; the artist wearing rings with surprisingly long metal extensions topped with little cotton clouds; the subtle sounds of birds and rumbling stomachs; the image of figures walking in a swimming pool and humming an endless refrain…

Paradoxically, the multiplicity of visual and auditory elements in the performance pushes the viewer into the background, revealing the stripped-down essence of the performer’s and the viewer’s actions. The sequence, overlap, and alternation of bodily, auditory, and visual elements create an expansion of space-time that transports each person to unexpected corners of perception and vision. The presence of the body’s power disappears, simply to make the human subject open to a voice that is no longer a seizure of power through speech, to a body that is no longer an organized anatomy, to an image that is no longer structured or framed to speak in the other’s place. Lightening the load. Movements. Folds. Unfoldings. Performance in Jean-Baptiste Bruant’s work thus stems from an absolute rejection of authoritarian control over oneself and others. And yet it is precisely there, in this surrender of the self, that the essential performative act takes place: living it within oneself and living it with others.

Larys Frogier, « Touche de la bouche », Jean-Baptiste Bruant, édition HYX, Orléan, 2003