Venice Film Festival 2025

The prestigious Ircam Audio Institute, connected to the Pompidou Centre in Paris France, have entered the Mostra de Venezia, part of Biennale de Venezia, or known widely as the Venice Film Festival 2025. They entered the immersive section, known as the Venice Immersive 2025. With 30 entrants from all over the world, there is very stiff competition. With their piece called L’Ombre, performed by a percussionist and several dancers, this is a unique adaption of the Shadow. The story is of a scientist who brings his shadow to life. It becomes autonomous and manages to pass itself off as a human being. The shadow overtakes its master, returns to try and enslave him, and when he resists, kills him.

It could have connotations of AI….

What makes this immersive performance stand out is the ingenious way the human and virtual dancers interact with each other, realising that the virtual dancers can defy gravity, but the real dancers use the gravity to incredible effect, dancing around the scaffold perimeter. The pure percussion throughout the performance (no words are uttered), with acoustic hand percussion intertwined with digital tuned percussion and other percussion instruments played on a 4 octave Xylosynth, by a human percussionist, laced together with Ircam’s audio technology, yielded a parallel medium to the human and virtual reality of the dancers. And finally the panoramic environment that you are placed in, with the audience around you, made you sometimes question who was human, but then the gasps as the scene took you above the clouds…..

It was quite extraordinary for us to see this performance at Ircam in Paris…. We hope you get to see a chance to see it……

Percussionist Florent Jodelet

Music Composer Edith Canat de Chizy

Click below for further details. It’s on until the 6^th September….

https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2025/venice-immersive-0

Left to Right: Koré Préaud, Serge Lemouton, Victor Bigand, Florent Jodelet and
Will Wernick

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