“Playing sounds in the light as one might paint on a canvas with their hands....”

LiSiLoG / Christophe Lebreton,

design of the interactive device and Jean Geoffroy, educational design

Light Music by Thierry de Mey, a work based on the movement of a performer in a wall of light, produced by Grame (Centre National de Création Musicale de Lyon), Charlerois Danse (Brussels) and the GMEM (Marseille), was created in 2004. Since then, Christophe Lebreton, designer of the device, and Jean Geoffroy, creator of the piece, have continued to develop the tool that made this work possible.

Both from the point of view of the design of computer and scenographic lutherie, and from the point of view of interpretation, Light Music has become a reference piece. In 2010, a film directed by Thierry de Mey capstoned these years of research, offering a final version of Light Music.

From these years of work and research, the Light Wall System was born, produced by Christophe Lebreton and Jean Geoffroy. A new interface allows for a scenographic composition, crossing different artistic expressions with movement: visual arts, sound design, music, dance. It is a multidisciplinary creation platform based on the potentialities of the gesture, and this makes it a creative and educational tool that is scalable.

Thanks to the Light Wall System, it is possible to create new scenic situations in which the performer, musician, dancer, actor or circus performer places him or herself in the middle of luminous spaces, creating an instrument scene, and allowing the artist to develop a new relationship to sound and space. The Light Waal System creates a new relationship to the stage in a disrupted creative process via instrumental scenography. It serves as a flexible interface evolving throughout the creative process and allows, among other things, the integration of one's own sounds, the ability to record live, to modulate sounds, and to change the acoustic / electronic balance. Thus this unique sound and scenic tool provides the artist with an experimental and exploratory space within which to work.

This interface aims to center a pedagogy of creation, so that young children and students, through this tool, can find their artistic voices using as a benchmark their innate sense of the relationship between movements of the body and sounds. By extension, they will become aware of their relationship to space and the stage, as well as the sensitive border between sound-producing gestures and choreographic gestures.

This tool is also designed with teachers and pedagogues in mind (both of general and specialized education). Using it, they are able to create, with or without the accompaniment of external speakers, situations for students to experiment with based on different relationships between gesture and sound.

Since 2017, numerous workshops and residences have been organized around the Light Wall System all over the world. Residences have been given to student musicians, dancers , actors, composers, choreographers, directors, visual artists and scenographers.