JUGGLING THE REAL & THE VIRTUAL
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'Cinematique', part of La Fete, is a journey to a magical universe
The French Embassy informs us that the fastest-selling tickets at La Fete this year are for Adrien M and Claire B’s “Cinematique”. That’s no surprise given the miracles at work in the advance publicity photos and video trailer.
We’ve had glimpses of cascading letters, luminous meteor showers, Escher-like dreamscapes, and floors disintegrating into three dimensions.
Satchie Noro, trained in classical dance, and Adrien Mondot, a self-taught juggler, appear to push the boundaries of space and gravity as the travel through a mystical world created by cutting-edge technology.
They struggle free from continually moving walkways, jump over deep black abysses, and tread lightly across watery floors. The French newspaper Liberation called this show “a poetical odyssey which progressively shifts from reality to virtual worlds”.
Mondot is the digital wizard in the duo. “I worked as a computer engineer for two years while practising my juggling,” he tells us.
“It was a bit like yin and yang – two opposite sides of my life – but in 2004 I started to mix real juggling and virtual juggling, in a performance called ‘Convergence 1.0’.” The production earned him a Jeunes Talents Cirque Europe award and toured the world through 2009.
“That was the beginning of the company,” Mondot says. “I started to think about what ‘movement’ means and how it can be a vector of emotion, not only with juggling, but also with today’s tools, like computer-generated graphics.”
In 2006 he developed the eMotion (electronic motion) computer program to capture live motion, process it and redirect it back onto the stage with stunning results. In 2008 he started the Labo processes, which he refers to as “artistic research into numeric creativity”.
“Cinematique”, Mondot says, is “all about movement, and how the virtual and real motion of objects can build emotions. I believe that numerical creation is a new language, and we search and experiment with this new grammar in the same way Georges Meli
