en fr

Matiere Noire is a Paris-based creative studio leading new approaches to spatial design. Built on a network of parallel disciplines, our operation cultivates ambivalence, using observational methods to ground its intuitive impulses. Matiere Noire is driven by an appetite for the undefined, the hypothetical, the intangible. Its process celebrates unexpected derivations, developing them into bespoke applications of cross-cultural collaboration.

20 rue Saint Sauveur 75002
+33 9 70 66 95 66
contact@matiere-noire.paris
recruitment@matiere-noire.paris

Spatial design
Light design
Scenography

Composer Pascal Dusapin and artist James Turrell's To Be Sung finds its first live incarnation with Le Balcon as its orchestra, in a piece complex enough that the conductor becomes the audience's only compass through it. Invited by Pharrell Williams' studio P.INC to give the performance its spatial and luminous form, Matiere Noire builds a scenography around water, translating sound into a language the eye can follow. A constructed fountain becomes the score's second instrument, its rhythm choreographed against Dusapin's synchronisations, desynchronisations and sudden ruptures - impacts of sound rendered as impacts of water and light. Abstract cues are drawn directly from the music's own movement, every shift in the score tied to a corresponding shift in light, so that watching the piece becomes another way of reading it.

Production:
Photograph: