1997 · Toi cour, moi jardin · Rebotier · Vigner (EN)

"Sixteenth of June, in a theatre. The stage is filled by an immense tongue. I feel it as if it filled my mouth. The theatre is my mouth. The curtain forms the teeth, the drapery hanging from above the palate, the uvula dangling at the back, the drapes on the sides the tails of Harlequin’s coat; the apron. I start imagining characters that represent phonetic elements: labials, buccals, ‘m’, ‘b’ and ‘p’ on the apron ; ‘t’ and ‘d’, on the proscenium, as well as some old-time r’s rolled in the ancient mode, with the tip of the tongue placed against the sockets of the teeth; nasals high up in the flies; an ‘l’, hunch-backed, liquid sound dropping inside and out; at the back, ‘k’ and ‘g’ as well as our modern ‘r’, guttural and distant as it forces the air against the soft palate. Taking words for what they are: characters." [1]

"I have always taken great interest in the sound of words, the musicality of phrases - even the cry: The piercing cry uttered by Ernesto in LA PLUIE D'ÉTÉ, the death cry of Martine Chevalier or BAJAZET’s long cry of love; the actors in BRANCUSI CONTRE ETATS-UNIS sought the musical score behind the rhetoric and the language of the law. In Jacques Rebotier I found a man for whom this aspect is a prime concern. He uses the fabric of everyday words, he probes the most insignificant moments of everyday life. It is fun to listen to the language and to discover something new in every little phrase as though one heard it for the first time."
ÉRIC VIGNER

"poetry ≠ poiein, make
             = cause to make
cause to make (poiein-poiein); and make x make = make2
make + make = make less
≥ do nothing
and do nothing."
"Create, fail by a hair’s breadth."
"poetry = language that speaks of its own accord
= language that turns about itself
= language of everyone." [1]

"Music is said to be language. Yes. But untranslatable language, a message devoid of meaning. Since Hanslick, we have understood by what means
music gives meaning to itself. "
By comparison: the language of science tends to speak with one voice -
a one-way street - it one-sensifies.
The language of poetry caresses each word in the sense
of a cross-roads of meanings - it plurivocates.
It e(qui)vocates.
What does music do then?
Infinivocate? Nullivocate?
It vocates." [1]

"Black hole.
Not music as such, but the outlines it sketches in space
and beyond its outlines in space.
Negative music, hollow music.
Music that would be, in the domain of the ear, what it isn’t by itself – a sort of music inside-out, of its own hallmark.
As Rodin said, I remove all that is redundant.." [1]

"This feeling on the part of Valère in the course of the rehearsals, that the play had already been acted, that one was now approaching it
from the back forward. 
No doubt this is because rehearsing is repetitive, and repeating,
in every-day life, means doing again what has been done -
while in the artificial time of theatre repeating is re-doing
what has not yet taken place.
(Which also explains the half-depression that prevails when all is over, when time gets onto its own feet again, as though nothing at all had happened.)" [1]