The first week of ManiFeste continues its exploration of multidisciplinary relationships between music and other art forms. After literature (Joyeux animaux de la misère), film (Sunrise), and video (Fundamental Forces), the composer Georges Aperghis imagined an exceptional meeting of the contemporary repertoire for solo viola with the theatre of Beckett.

With a full house, the performance at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers began in total darkness, slowly revealing a powerful image: emerging slowly from the obscurity, four feet begin to dance a strange resounding ballet of rubbing and sliding heels. Completely hypnotizing, this choreography lets the audience gradually discover the silhouettes of the evening’s masters of ceremony: the actress Valérie Dréville and the viola player Geneviève Strosser.

Un temps bis vacillates between long readings of Beckett and works for solo viola with a particularly diverse range of means and imagination. It must be said right away: the Beckett excerpts are extremely difficult to understand. Using false repetitions, Beckett operates here like a serial composer, often obliterating meaning with the best of intentions. Using a limited reservoir of words, the Irish playwright proliferates sentences of a singular coherence—noun phrases, phrases made up primarily of infinitives without personal pronouns or conjugated verbs—as if the audience were listening to a mother tongue that had become a foreign language. Valérie Dréville is not at fault: on the contrary, in these penetrating soliloquies she affirms the strong temperament of a musician, breathing emotion, hope, and resignation with admirable self-sacrifice into the text.

The stroke of genius in Aperghis’ production resides in this subtle method of revealing the musical dimension of speech (didn’t he do the same thing in his own Récitations?), and conversely, making Geneviève Strosser’s viola a performer in its own right. The interludes between the theatrical and instrumental pieces were among the most successful of the performance, and the interaction between the actress and Geneviève Strosser’s vibrant viola established a dialogue of two voices, often quite original, that seems to come right out of a voice-over from Godard film. Musically, the first instrumental piece on the program bears the indelible mark of Helmut Lachenmann’s musical theatre (George Aperghis is the director of other composer’s music here), with his noise effects around the instrument’s space, from the scroll to the chin rest. The second piece by Donatoni (Ali) provides the strongest moment of this performance with an amazing coherence: darkness invades the stage and the two immobile artists move back and forth in overpowering visual flashes with a dizzying depth of field.

Another excerpt by Beckett (Bing) and a robust lyric and organic piece by Georges Aperghis (Uhrwerk) conclude the performance, creating an effect of exhaustion for the audience and for the performers, to the point of questioning the possibility of expressing oneself musically or theatrically. In reality, while Beckett questions our automatic reflexes, Un temps bis does not end with a Nihilistic observation of existence. On the contrary, Aperghis offers the possibility of an alternative to these natural cycles, that of the Space apart on stage and of interpretive performance. Through their commitment and belief in the inexpressible, Valérie Dréville and Geneviève Strosser offer a magnificently moving performance.