A musical project by BLUEMOTION and Fanny & Alexander in collaboration with Tempo Reale

Concept by Luigi De Angelis, Cristiano De Fabritiis, Giorgina Pi | Music concept by Luigi De Angelis, Cristiano De Fabritiis | Dramaturgy by Giorgina Pi | Direction by Luigi De Angelis, Giorgina Pi | Sound design by Damiano Meacci | Producers: Benedetta Boggio, Maria Donnoli, Marco Molduzzi | Artwork by Simone Tso | Field recording by Emanuela Martignetti | Production by E / Fanny & Alexander and Bluemotion in collaboration with Tempo Reale

With Cristiano De Fabritiis and Matteo Benocci, Rita Brancato, Davide Broggini, Ivo Cavallo, Lucrezia Di Fiandra, Rita Felicetti, Giulia Formica, Luca Gallio, Edoardo Grisogani, Pablo Tarli, Moustapha Mbaye, Giovanni Natalini, Pietro Vicentini, Riccardo Zelinotti | Special guest Vittoria Burattini | Voice by Ashai Lombardo Arop

Year : 2021

Service : Staged concert, Music concept

Grand Bois is an intersection, a place of convergence. Grand Bois rises with rhythms that come from afar, reaching the rooftops of houses, and carries in its caves the signs of ancient spirits.

Grand Bois is first and foremost a polyrhythmic musical composition, a ceremony of shared beats in a festive dimension. It is both plural and individual at the same time, open to encounters with other wisdoms, exchanges, and active participation.

The musicians play starting from an idea of trance and ego dissolution, not affirming themselves, but connecting with a common musical root: in surrender, as if “played” by other rhythms or musical figures. Like in a forest – where each tree is connected to the others through roots, fungi, and leaves, transmitting spores and mutual information – Grand Bois is an ecosystem in which the musicians are connected to each other through an in-ear system: from the headquarters, beats and rhythmic patterns are sent to various stations, with individual epiphanies of presences or musical characters coming from the great cemetery of music. A new polyrhythmic composition then emerges, and the listener can decide how to approach the single sound source, where to focus their perception, embarking on their journey through Grand Bois.

Grand Bois is therefore a carnival of rhythms, where individual musical masks can suddenly appear and influence the practice of a musician, guiding them toward a specific path, occupying their identity, connecting them with other practices and rhythms from the past.

Grand Bois aims for a musical tension, fever, contagion, and a collective dance.

Grand Bois derives from the Haitian tradition of voodoo ceremonies, born from the encounter between African culture, the religion of slaves arriving in America from Africa, and the animism of Native Americans held in Haitian prisons: a common root of anger and spirituality transformed into a belief overflowing with joy and theatrical energy. The power of voodoo’s musical dimension has influenced many new musical traditions and styles over the centuries and into our days: candomblé, blues, jazz, as well as rock or electronic trance scenes. What is clearly apparent in voodoo ceremonies is the power of music and rhythm, the strong connection with the idea of an archetypal heartbeat, the first true root of percussion.

Grand Bois seeks to intercept what remains today of these traditions, embodying their evocative power in our time and spreading it through the interstices of a collective event.

Tour Dates:

• Debut: July 9, 2021, 8:30 PM, Santarcangelo Festival [+ installation July 8-10 and July 16-18 @ Santabago]
• June 17-18, 2022, 7:00 PM, Oerol Festival, Terschelling (NL)
• July 15-16, 2022, 8:30 PM, Bosk – Welcome to the Village, Leeuwarden (NL)
• September 25, 2022, 6:30 PM – Bologna Estate – dumBO, Bologna

Santarcangelo Festival 2050 © Claudia Borgia, Lisa Capasso

Press Review

Laura Gemini, Flash from #Santarcangelo Festival 2050(2): Grand Bois by Bluemotion, Fanny & Alexander with Tempo Reale
Nicola Arrigoni, Santarcangelo: Changing to Stay True to Itself. The Festival Confirms Its Vocation to Make Experimentation a Tradition
Nicola Arrigoni, The Second Summer of Programming for the Half-Century of Santarcangelo Festival […], The Sound Map of Fanny & Alexander and Bluemotion

Flash from #Santarcangelo Festival 2050(2): Grand Bois by Bluemotion, Fanny & Alexander with Tempo Reale by Laura Gemini | The Creative Uncertainty | July 11, 2021

Among the offerings of the Santarcangelo 2050 Festival – which takes as its guiding principle the semantics of mutating hybridization, creating alliances and kinships between forms, bodies, and ideas – Grand Bois is the part that holds together and brings to light the deeper meaning of these connections.

Grand Bois is a musical project by Bluemotion and Fanny & Alexander in collaboration with Tempo Reale, a center for research, production, and music education founded in 1987 by Luciano Berio. It is also an installation project by Bluemotion and Fanny & Alexander in collaboration with Santabago.

Grand Bois takes shape as a polyrhythmic musical composition conceived as an ecosystem emerging from individual and collective experience, ritual, and spirituality, in accordance with the Haitian voodoo ceremonies it explicitly draws inspiration from.

An itinerant performance that starts in Piazza Ganganelli, where the audience gathers with the musicians, and moves across the terraces and rooftops of Santarcangelo, which become the stations for performers, recognizable and searchable on the map provided to participants through the artwork of Simone Tso, united from above by the chant-muezzin of Ashai Lombardo Arop.

Drummers and percussionists are connected to each other through an in-ear system, so that from the headquarters, the beats and rhythmic series produced by each musician are sent to various stations to bring to life the complex musical creature and allow the audience to focus on either the individual or collective dimension, building their own path of enjoyment, either alone or with others.

Particularly fascinating is how Grand Bois works by contagion – a concept Luigi De Angelis has developed during the pandemic – between the archaic dimension of ritual and the echo of contemporary trance, which uses technique as a matrix for forms that cross bodies and which found its ideal expression in rave culture. In Grand Bois, there’s a blend of all this. As we move through Santarcangelo and its villages (and discover a new Santarcangelo, unseen by those who don’t live there), we hear the spirit of the most beautiful nightclubs and the rhythms that have passed through them, while simultaneously allowing ourselves to surrender to a personal experience.

(Dedicated to my Nico, who has always loved drums).

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Santarcangelo: Changing to Stay True to Itself. The Festival Confirms Its Vocation to Make Experimentation a Tradition by Nicola Arrigoni | Sipario | July 24, 2021

Community and city as stage – Grand Bois by Bluemotion and Fanny & Alexander, a performance made in collaboration with Tempo Reale, opened the event with a kind of musical parade that traversed the town. Starting from Piazza Ganganelli, it moved toward the tower of Santarcangelo in a secular procession, with small musical moments marking the stations. In this sense – under the direction of Luigi De Angelis and Giorgina Pi – the music and percussion created a soundscape that crossed and caressed the entire town. It is within this performative need to make the map of art overlap with that of reality that Grand Bois recovers the tradition that for half a century has made Santarcangelo di Romagna the stage for comedians and artists, the setting for a theater that lives by the breath of the square, as Leo de Berardinis once liked. It’s nice to think that Grand Bois by Bluemotion and Fanny & Alexander recovers that tradition, through the language of music, with a polyrhythmic composition that the wandering audience freely builds.

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The Second Summer of Programming for the Half-Century of Santarcangelo Festival […], The Sound Map of Fanny & Alexander and Bluemotion by Nicola Arrigoni | Hystrio | December 2021

Grand Bois by Bluemotion and Fanny & Alexander is a kind of secular parade that tells the space through the sounds of drums, percussion, jazz melodies, and a sea of other sonic suggestions, a map to search for the places where the musical epiphanies occur, the freedom to move and construct one’s own text in an itinerary that can be followed either in a group or individually. The musicians start in Piazza Ganganelli and, together with the audience, find their places in the various “stations.” The direction by Luigi De Angelis and Giorgina Pi builds a sound map that aims to change the perception of spaces and the itinerant experience of the historic center of Santarcangelo, following the tradition of Italy’s longest-running theater research festival, where the connection between theater and space is driven by an instinctive vocation for both collective and individual participation. Grand Bois offers itself as a polyrhythmic itinerary, a ceremony of shared beats in a festive dimension, inspired by Central American traditions but also by the festival’s own history. From the parades of comedians at the festival’s origins to Grand Bois, the tradition of Santarcangelo dei Teatri is destined to renew itself while constantly reaffirming itself. Thus, the festival strongly reiterates that there is no theater, no festival event, without the transformation of spaces, without the involvement of the community. Grand Bois requires the wandering spectator’s readiness to be amazed and to pause in the sudden and unexpected sonic theaters that appear in the corners of the historic center, gathering delighted applause from those who have built their personal itinerary with curiosity.