ORLANDO – Performative installation

EPFL, Rolex Learning Center (outdoor)
Wednesday 30 and Thursday 31 May at 9:30 pm

New Paradigm Opera
Performative installation for seven movements, one voice and one horizon
Based on the epic novel for an androgynous figure by Virginia Woolf
Filmed in Berlin, Kinshasa, Marfa, London, Varanasi, Belo Horizonte-Lisboa, Chandolin

  • Production: BadNewsFromTheStars* – CH, Horace Lundd – FR
  • In collaboration with LAPIS/EPFL+ECAL lab
  • Coproduced by La Bâtie, Festival de Genève

Opera of a new genre, ORLANDO is an immersive and itinerant video installation, an experience associating conscious movement, photography, architecture and live musical performance.

Orlando - BadNewsFromTheStars - Julie Beauvais - photo Horace Lundd 2017

In September 2017 a workshop gathered at the EPFL+ECAL lab about twenty students, architects and researchers to imagine a light scenographic installation easily reconstructible in diverse locations for the ORLANDO project of Swiss artist and stage producer Julie  Beauvais. After an intense year of encounters and shootings, the project reaches EPFL a preview showing, on the coming May 30 and 31.

The choreographer Julie Beauvais chose Orlando by Virginia Woolf as the nucleus for this new hybride opera. She associates with Christophe Fellay for the music and sound score and, with Horace Lundd (director of photography), goes to meet, film and choreograph the precursors of this new paradigm in Berlin, Kinshasa, Marfa, London, Varanasi, Belo-Horizonte/Lisboa and Chandolin.

Julie Beauvais choreographs a movement of expansion with extreme slowness with seven precursors. These « Orlandos » of today embody the new post-binary paradigm in Berlin, Kinshasa, Marfa, London, Varanasi, Belo-Horizonte/Lisboa and Chandolin. Horace Lundd films ample, essential gestures at the blue hour, in a vast outdoor environment. EPFL architects elaborate a scenographic device enabling videos to be projected simultaneously, juxtaposed and connecting the seven horizons into one. ORLANDO, itinerant opera, travels lightly: it is reconstructible with local materials, whether indoors or outdoors. Christophe Fellay creates a audio+graphic score which may be interpreted by every musician, whichever the musical style.

Local musicians are interprets invited to a dialogue and to play in ORLANDO. This project gathers artists, scientists and audiences at the heart of current societal evolutions towards collaborative organisations, beyond stereotypes, prejudice and stigmatisations.

→ Julie Beauvais website