A Sentimental Landscape
OASES
Choreographer and performer Alban Richard and composer and instrumentalist Florentin Ginot have embarked on a collaboration in the fullest sense of the word, co-authoring a piece that bring them together on stage. Borrowing its title from the novel A Sentimental Journey by writer Laurence Sterne, where “sentimental” means resistance to the supremacy of reason, A Sentimental Landscape plays on the loss of landmarks within a sound cartography. The duo’s research focuses on an intense musical composition, a polyphony of voices (spoken, blown) that activates and triggers movements, sounds, affects and emotions. In this shifting soundscape, double bass motifs, machine rhythms and loops leave no respite for the bodies of the performers. Prisoners of intertwined temporalities, the bodies endure Le dur désir de durer, as delineated by Paul Éluard: “Our bodies are against each other, we are down to earth. We are born from everywhere, we are without limits”. The piece creates and modulates an island of gestures, words and sounds, around which the audience takes its place. An autonomous island that can be set up in a theater, a museum, a gymnasium, an underground parking lot or in the heart of a hundred-year-old forest.
A Sentimental Landscape
Alban Richard and Florentin Ginot
Composition, scenography, performance Florentin Ginot
Choreography, scenography, performance Alban Richard
Sound design Martin Antiphon
Lighting design Jérôme Houlès
Project assistant Max Fossati
Musical excerpt Marin Marais, Prélude en Harpègement
Text material excerpted from Walt Whitman’s Leave of Grass and William S. Burroughs’ Exterminator!
Duration 40 minutes
Executive producer: OASES
Production: centre chorégraphique national de Caen en Normandie
Florentin Ginot is associate composer at the centre chorégraphique national de Caen in Normandie in 2024 and 2025. A Sentimental Landscape was created thanks to the “Associate Composer” program of the French Ministry of Culture/DGCA and Sacem.
OASES is supported by the French Ministry of Culture – Direction générale de la création artistique.
