Plato’s Symposium is a dialogue written around 380 BC. Here, Socrates, invited to a feast, meets up with friends. Over the course of the evening, the guests decide to take turns speaking, answering the question Qu’est-ce que l’Amour ?” In this way, the artistic project consists of creating a chamber opera piece around the theme of “love,” using certain dialogues from the characters of the Symposium, conveyed mainly through live and recorded voice (spoken and sung).

This project is made by the following performers: dancer, soprano voice, tenor voice, clarinet, saxophone, tuba, percussion, accordion, and conductor. Moreover, each instrumentalist in turn plays a character from the Symposium, exploring this way the territory of the musician-actor pairing.

“Qu’est-ce que l’Amour ?” also calls for the use of electronic music and video, which will be essential parts of the operatic work’s unfolding. This project seeks to highlight the various connections between the characters and the artistic languages used, with video allowing movement from one to another, bringing out a dialectic between all the elements of the show. The video creates a thread linking all the disciplines through 3D animation and 360º video footage, which develops in different ways in each scene. At the same time, the 3D animations displayed on screen come to life on stage through 3D printouts of these same objects. In this way, a surrealist universe unique to this show is built.

Thus, music and video propose, in a certain way, the knot at the core of Platonic thought: duality. Consequently, the opera expresses a continuous relationship between the inside and the outside, accompanied by the entrances and exits of the characters from the stage, from the video, and between acoustic sound and electronic sound, creating a kind of Borromean knot between the actions carried out in the performance.