A Sentimental Landscape
Shows
Choreographer and performer Alban Richard and composer and instrumentalist Florentin Ginot have embarked on a collaboration in the fullest sense of the word, co-authoring a piece that bring them together on stage. Borrowing its title from the novel A Sentimental Journey by writer Laurence Sterne, where “sentimental” means resistance to the supremacy of reason, A Sentimental Landscape plays on the loss of landmarks within a sound cartography. The duo’s research focuses on an intense musical composition, a polyphony of voices (spoken, blown) that activates and triggers movements, sounds, affects and emotions. In this shifting soundscape, double bass motifs, machine rhythms and loops leave no respite for the bodies of the performers. Prisoners of intertwined temporalities, the bodies endure Le dur désir de durer, as delineated by Paul Éluard: “Our bodies are against each other, we are down to earth. We are born from everywhere, we are without limits”. The piece creates and modulates an island of gestures, words and sounds, around which the audience takes its place. An autonomous island that can be set up in a theater, a museum, a gymnasium, an underground parking lot or in the heart of a hundred-year-old forest.
+ MoreCast
Composition, staging, performance
Florentin Ginot
Choreography, staging, performance
Alban Richard
Sound design
Martin Antiphon
Lights
Jérôme Houlès
Assistant
Max Fossati
Costumes
Clément Vachelard
Director of production
Mathieu Hilléreau — Les Indépendances
Music extract
Marin Marais, Prélude en Harpègement
Texts
Leave of Grass de Walt Whitman et Exterminator! de William S. Burroughs
Duration 40 minutes
Executive producer OASES
Produced by the Centre chorégraphique national de Caen en Normandie
Florentin Ginot is an associated composer at the CCN de Caen en Normandie in 2024 and 2025.
A Sentimental Landscape is created thanks to the “Associated Composer” program by the Ministry of Culture/DGCA and Sacem.
Where and when
Tour
April 2026
- 03
June 2026
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09
Sainte-Chapelle de Vincennes, avec l’Atelier de Paris / CDCN dans le cadre de JUNE EVENTS et le Centre des monuments nationaux dans le cadre de Vivant Monument 8:00 pm
History
May 2024
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17
ccn de Caen en Normandie 7:00 pm
May 2025
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22
PREMIERE — Chorège CDCN Falaise Normandie, Festival Danser partout 7:00 pm
Press
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Radio France le 30/06/2024
Re-listen to the interview of Laurent Vilarem with Florentin Ginot and Alban Richard.
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Un fauteuil pour l’orchestre le 13/06/2026
“An absolute fusion between an exterior space and its constituent elements (sound, architecture, audience) and a mental landscape (literature) — a fusion also between these two artists, that energy flowing between them without faltering, which makes this performance a formidable and rare artistic gesture, utterly fascinating.” — Denis Sanglard
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arts-chipels.fr le 12/06/2026
“Alban Richard’s sonic dance vibrates with the spellbinding double bass of Florentin Ginot; together they compose a polyphonic duo for body, voice and music that resonates with the audience. Fifty minutes of intense (e)motion in the chapel of the Château de Vincennes.” — Mireille Davidovici

