Maguelone Vidal

Maguelone Vidal’s singular creative practice explores the poetic and sensorial relations between the body and sound. A composer, theatre director, musician and performance artist, she creates inclusive sound, stage and performance mechanisms which offer audiences a synaesthesial experience of music. Maguelone Vidal studied medicine and learned classical piano, later turning her attention to the saxophone. She developed a passion for contemporary creation and has performed on stage in France and Europe alongside Joëlle Léandre, Bruno Chevillon, Pascal Contet, Didier Petit, Catherine Jauniaux and Christian Zanesi, among many others.

For more than ten years, Maguelone Vidal has directed and composed hybrid, transdisciplinary, poly-sensorial live performances, in France and internationally. La Tentation des Pieuvres, a piece for one cook, four musicians and a hundred guests, was first staged at Centre Dramatique National in Reims, and later presented at Philharmonie de Paris, Centre Dramatique National in Montreuil, Arsenal in Metz, and many other French and international theatres and festivals. Constantly seeking to open up new social and political spaces, Maguelone Vidal’s creations celebrate a form of contemporary communion between arts and individuals.

Familiar or unknown, we connect with language through its sounds; we relate to others through the musicality of our original languages. Maguelone Vidal tests, analyses and explores this principle, alone and with Japanese sound artists and musicians. Her project revolves around encounters with others, the objective being to meet, and listen to, people from different social and professional backgrounds, of different ages and origins, speaking different languages, with different accents, newcomers or longstanding residents of Kyoto, to then transform the prosody of their stories into musical compositions. This research is the start of a hybrid and participative creative project which fuses music, performance, theatre and scenography.

Portrait : © Marc Ginot
Photos : Qui m’appelle © Marc Ginot
Le Cœur du Son © Marc Ginot
Lalalair © Yanick Dumas