The production is made possible by a grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) [www.SNF.org]to enhance the Greek National Opera's artistic outreach
Based on the musical work by Marc Monnet, Arno Fabre's irresistible phantasmagoria with the childlike and improbable title Bibilolo arrives at the GNO Alternative Stage at SNFCC on 5, 6, 7 November 2021. It is an opera without singers and a ballet without dancers - but with plastic animals, electric trains, remote-controlled bulldozers, exterminator robots, smoke machines, pulleys, electric motors, cables and long cast shadows. A dreamlike poem, offering a seductively ludic, demystified introduction to the kaleidoscopic soundscape of contemporary music.
Bibilolo, a co-production of the GNO Alternative Stage with C15D, Printemps des Arts de Monte-Carlo (Monaco), GRAME - Centre national de création musicale (France), Cerise Music, is a sui generis work for all audiences who wish to let themselves enter an imaginary landscape without frontiers, graceful, euphoric and even tragic at the same time!
Bibilolo; it's as if somebody had overturned the toy boxes in the middle of the stage, hung Aunt Germaine's chandelier between the grandfather clock and the piano, lit candles in the decorated cave and dismantled the boat to invite the storm ... An acidic, poetic and dreamlike show, resolutely atypical, halfway between contemporary opera, machinic performance and object theatre.
Despite its subtitle, this is not really an opera, there is no libretto, no story, no singers. It is not a ballet either, there are no dancers, despite a millimetric choreography of manipulator-machinists performed on music. It's not a concert, yet there are three virtuoso pianists playing contemporary music. It is not circus, although the musical compositions are named after clowns and it looks like a number show. It's not really a puppet show, although there is at least one, maybe two, and lots of threads. It's not a kid's room, but it might look like it. It's not a dream, but it's the closest thing to it.
The composer Marc Monnet, who wrote the original version of Bibilolo based on a collection of more than 400 old-fashioned electronic sounds created with a Yamaha TG77 synthesizer from the '90s, writes about his award-winning work: This piece, I made it with great freedom, I really wanted to have fun, that is to say not to forbid myself anything.... It is a dense, inexhaustible and chimerical composition, whose sounds evoke an overpopulated world of feverish, incessant activity where humour stands next to terror, like in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.
Well-known for his sonic installations, the artist Arno Fabre signs here his first stage direction with an unclassifiable spectacle. Arno Fabre imagined a dreamlike and absurd set, a kind of huge child's bedroom expedient to free-associative transformations, exhilarating as well as nightmarish; a space where, in his own words, stuffed animals are being cut up, dolls made up and combed (when not tortured and dissected), fans play volleyball, Meccano toys are splendid birds and 'Duracell' bunnies reach the end of the world and jump collectively to their death, while still impassively beating their little snare drums...
