“One, two, three: is the microphone on?” Is the microphone on? » The phrase is repeated over and over. On set, it’s wigs, fuchsia pink jumpers and Prince of Wales trousers, people looking a little lost. But where are we then? In a show from the British group Forced Entertainment who, for forty years, has been dismantling the mechanisms of the theater in order to reassemble them so that they can still be useful in making the wheels of the spectacle society grind.
And squeak, squeak, in this newly titled creation Signal to noiseof dizzying virtuosity. On the film set, six people are busy preparing a television show, a concert or a play. They move furniture and green plants, change at full speed picking from the racks full of clothes that surround the stage, try to adjust their microphone. And, from the very beginning, the machine goes crazy: the situations, which have no interest, are revealed barely outlined, the voices heard go around in a loop, without knowing who is speaking: “Is the microphone on?” Is the microphone on? »
Lip sync
It is a vertigo that Tim Etchells, the brilliant director of the company, is orchestrating: the vertigo of a humanity that no longer knows who it is, that no longer knows what reality is, and even if this reality still matters, in the face of the irreversible growth of artificial intelligence. Creatures that move around the set and change identities at full speed, with crazy costumes and mismatched wigs, make absurd remarks and talk in strange ways.
And for good reason: Tim Etchells chose to base his entire show on the principle of lip-synching. That is, the performers mime pre-recorded texts of computer-generated voices and in which bits of idiotic jokes, weather reports, considerations about global financial developments or disasters are mixed without present and future ecological problems. I talk, I talk, in a polyphony that quickly becomes cacophony, repeating words that have no meaning and no effect. Before, suddenly, they see an existential abyss open before them: “Is that my voice?” Are these my words? My face? my eyes? »
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