I LOVE YOU

I HATE YOU

CONCEPT

Love and hate. Apparently two opposing poles, two conflicting emotions. Or perhaps more likely a binary construction, a simplification of real feelings? The performance «I love you/I hate you» starts from this duality in order to understand it, question it and blur it. Based on Gilles Deleuze's concepts of difference and repetition and Judith Butler's theory of performativity - a priori contradictory - the Duet 2.26 performance goes from love, which cannot be understood without difference, to hate, which cannot be understood without repetition. This show is conceived in the form of a double spiral of repetitions in which the loops of each spiral are increasingly closer together; in which it is clear from the very first moment that exact repetition - or, to put it more precisely, replication - is not possible no matter how much effort is put into it. Similarly to the borders between love and hate, the borders between original and copy are blurred at the moment of performance. Beyond understanding repetition as a replica of a pre-existing and immovable original, it has to be understood as a motor of creation through difference, however small it may be. The performance has an interdisciplinary approach, combining music, theatre, lighting and video, and allows the concepts of repetition and difference to be explored from different perspectives, thus representing a complex and fragmentary reality. The fragments, which can be understood as altered repetitions that form a mosaic, are connected to each other through video projections that refer to the concepts of repetition and difference.

PROGRAM

If difference is inalienable to repetition, love understood as an absolute concordance of emotions and thoughts is an ideal; an ideal that is truncated in the first work of the concert, in which the two flute players play exactly the same melody: Circumambulation by Yan Maresz, originally for solo flute. This work, which is based on the duality between rhythm and melody and its polyphonic integration in a single instrument, is adapted for two flutes in a counter-intuitive way: this duality is not devided between the two performers, but is practised simultaneously by both in an exercise of double integration. Nevertheless, despite the pretentious unicity of the two interpreters through the most exact repetition possible, the difference, although almost imperceptible, is always present.

The repetition's own alliteration and the obsession it entails is the main theme of the following work, Loops III by Philippe Hurel: "In fact, each transformation of the small 'motifs' that are exhibited inevitably leads to a loop that has already been heard, and the listener is gradually absorbed in a kind of teranyne from which he tries to escape with difficulty.... Although music seems to be in constant evolution, the stages through which it passes are always the same, and this is the fundamental paradox on which the piece is based". In this case, the motto "difference and repetition" is treated from two different perspectives: from the loops that always return to the same place and serve as "the basis of all transformation in time" and from the instrumentation, which is intended "to make two identical instruments sound like a single one". The moments when the two flutes are separated can be understood as erroneous repetitions in a Butlerian sense as a sign of individuality and a motor of subversion of a norm constructed through the stylised repetition of acts, although they always end up returning to a common point.

The repetition of the quote from Jan Švankmajer's surrealist decalogue is played out ironically in Situation 7: Imagination by François Sarhan. The musical micro-theatre piece does not so much address the meaning of the quotation as the absurd repetition of it and the demonstration of cultural capital devoid of meaning. Nevertheless, the reference to imagination in a context of repetition is interesting insofar as imagination and repetition are linked: it is through imagination that the difference of repetition can be sustained. In this sense, Sarhan's work, which quotes the phrase "Imagination is subversive because it proclaims the possible against reality", beyond criticism, is an invitation to reflect on the role of repetition in this imagination, as well as a manifestation in favour of imagination as a subversive weapon and as an engine of change.

The game of contraries is a constant in the history of music. The techniques of contemporary music make it possible to take this game to the extreme, in which opposites are ever more closely linked. The oppositions from which Yoshihisa Taïra's Synchronie is constructed (staccato/legato, tension/distension, synchronism/non-synchronism), however, far from being natural and ontological, are constructions that arise from the effect of repetition, from a primordial difference caused by repetition. It is, in fact, in repetition that the differences become perceptible. The synchrony of the two flutists, conceived as repetition, serves as a counterpoint but also as a basis for the binary oppositions; a blank filling that highlights the coloured traces of the difference.

After Taïra's effort to thematise the opposites, even though their character is constructed through repetition, the opposites go back to Georges Aperghis' Retrouvailles like two friends who know each other, recognise each other and repeat themselves. They communicate through "syllables and phonemes that are completely intelligible to them but not to the public". The differences, although they are different, are identified through memory and imagination in a common origin, in a primordial repetition that, being repetition, is different. "This short performance is a construction of situations that seem real but that lose their reality through the treatment of sight and gestures". It is also a song to friendship, to the similarities that are inherent to difference, to love.

Coeur à coeur. Corps à corps. These two expressions in French refer to love and struggle respectively; two apparently opposing concepts that are alternately combined and mixed in Philippe Racine's work Coeur à Corps. This work reminds us that in every love there is a struggle and in every struggle there is love, in the same way that in every repetition there is a difference and every difference arises from repetition. The opposites are not only presented separately in this work, but there is a fluctuation between them and they complement each other in such a way that we realise that they do not exist, that they are a construction, a dream of the imagination and the memory. Opposites are not a negation of each other, but are constructed through repetition, already different in their origin.

I love you. I hate you. These two phrases are repeated in the discussion between the two performers of Vinko Globokar's play dos à dos. A heated musical discussion full of hatred, reinforced by the sudden movements and the lighting, but which, within the hatred, also includes love. A love that springs from hate or a hate that springs from love. Even at the moment when the two spirals that make up this concert are farther apart, the loops turn at the same frequency. If the first work of the performance represented the difference inherent in repetition - even if it is almost exact -, the difference in love, this work represents the repetitive origin of the difference - even if it is totally united -, the love in the difference.

BIOGRAPHIES