Boucle d'or et les 33 variations (Goldilocks and the 33 variations)

Project history by Olivier Vallet, founder of the Rémouleurs Company

"This tale has been in my head for several years mainly due to its plot: a little girl that we don't know anything about, with no identifiable parents, age, role in life and no home, with hardly a nickname instead of a name arriving from nowhere and departing to the unknown without having done anything but trying to find her place. Here you are, a one-of-a-kind story.  A story that speaks well about our world where there are more and more people who are trying, just like Goldilocks, to find their place...

But I had not known what to do with it, constrained by the number of possible viewpoints on this enigmatic adventure, until the idea of working on the variations between ways of representation, playing styles and techniques while trusting the text to a member of the oulipian literary movement (Workshop of Potential Literature), Jacques Jouet. Being primarily a puppeteer and shadow artist, first I considered manipulating the images in plain view, using different techniques (shadows, catoptrics, magic lanterns), but I have been for a long time interested in working on the image and not only on projection techniques. When Véronique Bellegarde ordered a fog screen projection system for her show "l’Instrument à pression" (Pressure Instrument), it allowed me to inquire into fluid mechanics. Having produced the fog screen, I read the book "Ce que disent les fluides" (What fluids say) by Etienne Guyon  (Belin - Pour la science).  I was fascinated by his photo of a soap curtain, which convinced me about its breakthrough plastic and theatrical effect on stage. I started to work on producing one. The result reflected my ignorance in this field, so I contacted Etienne Guyon as well as Sylvain Lefavrais at the "Palais de la découverte" for some advice and I learned that a 18 metres high soap curtain had been created a few years before that.

Some time later, I received two E-mails the same day, both giving me the name of François Graner as the best person to advice me. Thanks to his valuable comments, I got back to work, finally obtaining some results and I became completely fascinated by this thin film, soft and ever-changing, continuously pierced by iridescence.  A first prototype, developed in the workshop of the Rémouleurs Company, despite its amateur appearance, with some added improvements due to my puppeteer background (multiplying liquid supply points enabling the formation of larger and more stable curtains) convinced François Graner about my determination to continue. I knew what I wanted to obtain: a stable soap film, with a maximum width to be used on stage and to be tinted so as to be non-transparent. We can therefore every now and then play with the transparency and iridescence of a fluid and fluctuating veil and have a screen that can be easily distorted by simply blowing on it, or by inserting a wet hand into it without breaking it, or a screen that you can suddenly make disappear by piercing it. This cannot be realized without scientists' assistance, without their knowledge, techniques and methodology. Artist/scientist collaboration proves its best in this project. Apart from this performance, there is the fact that the cinematography device elaborated in 1895 (an image projected perpendicularly on the screen, being a smooth, white, non-transparent and immovable surface from a source behind the audience and hidden from their eyes) has been wearing out. Since the film industry is in a digital based 3D fever, live theatre can also open new paths and seek more poetical systems.

Olivier Vallet