"Babel", the new program from the Chœur d'Hommes de la Villette

Babel

The program is made up exclusively of religious songs (from the three religions of the book), because Babel is first and foremost Bâb-Illah, i.e. “God’s Gate”, and thus a very special relationship with the sacred: that of a desired and projected bridge between Earth and Heaven.
Then, these sacred songs, of ancient or modern composition, are all performed in their original languages of composition, different from one another. The choristers sing in Latin, Greek, English, Ukrainian, Russian, Persian, Arabic, Aramaic, Bosnian, Croatian, Zulu, Swahili, Estonian… because Babel is obviously about a particular relationship with language, and perhaps even the question of the difference between language and language.
Last but not least, Babel is also about the will to build, the idea that the project makes the common, that building something is about creating society, about including individuals in a collective space.
This set of songs is accompanied by a corpus of texts (all read in French) around these three lines of research, drawn from different styles and eras: passages from the Pentateuch, science fiction novels, contemporary poetry, short stories, scientific essays, historical documents, which are also, around this Babelian theme, different languages appropriating the same myth.
From these songs and texts, responding to each other in counterpoint and forming a dialogue between the music of notes and the arrangement of words, an idea emerges: perhaps the simplest music there is, that of song, which needs nothing more than a mouth to speak it and an ear to hear it, is the true Adamic language, that of the origins, the Language common to what forms this small space that we share and that we call Humanity.
  

The Chœur d’Hommes de La Villette is an a cappella male choir founded in 2014 at ENSA Paris-la Villette.

Under the direction of Loïk Blanvillain, it is made up of some forty singers, mostly professionals in the fields of architecture and space. This specificity leads them to discover new performance venues and sometimes to imagine spatialized concerts, conceiving performances according to the places that host them, using the position of the choristers and the type of song performed to give a different view of the place, to reveal it, in the photographic sense of the term.