Encounters / Reading
Carte Blanche to Christiane Veschambre
Saturday, May 25, 2019
7:00 pm
“ J’allais de Planche en Planche/ Lente et prudente marche/ Tout autour de ma Tête, les Étoiles/ comme à mes pieds, la Mer. // Sans savoir si le prochain pas / Ne serait pas le dernier – / Cela me donnait cette Allure périlleuse/ Qu’on nomme Expérience ”
Emily Dickinson
Reading: Christiane Veschambre, Lara Bruhl
Music (Cordophone): Sophie Agnel
Duration: 1 hour
Production: Lara Company / A production office
Rate: 15€.
Reduced rate: 10 € (jobseekers, students, under 30 years old)
It is with great joy that I inaugurate the Encounters / Readings cycle at Le Milieu by welcoming the poetess Christiane Veschambre.
I met her with Robert and Joséphine, then some time later at the Maison de la Poésie, in writing, in a workshop we worked with high school students.
Winged, earthy and vivacious Christiane; she embarked these young people in the world of poetry, confident… they were writing.
Christiane Veschambre’s writing traces the gap of a bitter and porous silent language. The furrow of a song to be reinvented.
The evening will unfold in two parts: a time for reading passages from Écrire / un caractère, her latest work, a reading in three voices: mine, that of Christiane Veschambre, and that of the musician Sophie Agnel, a free musical counterpoint to the world of words. This will be followed by a time of discussion with the public.
Lara Bruhl
Christiane Veschambre has published nearly twenty books since Le lais de la traverse, published in 1979 by éditions des femmes. Among these, Les mots pauvres (reprinted 5 times), Robert & Joséphine (Cheyne éditeur), La maison de terre, La griffe et les rubans (Le préau des collines).
Her last books – Basse langue, Écrire / un caractère and Dit la femme dit l’enfant – were published by Isabelle Sauvage.
Several have been the subject of theatrical settings.
In 2018, based on excerpts from Robert & Joséphine and interviews with the author and two other women, filmmaker Emmanuel Falguières directed Nulle part avant, which won a Special Mention at the Festival Écrans documentaires.
Proses or poems, her books are not inscribed in a genre existing prior to their birth, but they construct every time their own form, born of a meditated emotion, to use Bataille’s expression about the inner experience. This meditation is the very work of writing, working with the language to the closest of what, born of the inner reality, sets the writer in motion.
Écrire / un caractère speaks of this life in common with writing, with Écrire, becoming a figure,
more exactly a character.
“After a few years of research, Sophie Agnel’s piano has steadied itself on a thread of infinite fragility. As proof, she spends most of her concerts standing, bent over the bowels of her instrument like a tightrope walker, fiddling with the strings so that it spits out every last drop of sound. One must certainly lose some preconceived notions about what it is to “play the piano” and accept that the keyboard is only an emergent part of it. It’s not all that hard and once this little effort is accomplished, the world that opens up is astonishing. The rubbing of strings, the resonances, the brushing of dampers, evoke a musical landscape where time follows a very singular course and where space is filled with incredible sounds. She has also designed an experimental electro-acoustic instrument, the “nOpianO /cordophone”, thus opening up new acoustic horizons”
