Marcel Bataillard.
Born in 1967, he lives and works in Nice and Arles.
A multidisciplinary contemporary artist, his work explores the relationships between history and stories, memory, identity, and representation. Drawn to confronting text, image, and sound, he finds the source of his works in myths and the collective imagination, and even in “clichés” or archetypes, as well as in the repertoire when it comes to music.
He has taken part in several collective and musical ventures, notably collaborating with the Pietragalla Company in 2011–2012 on La nuit des poètes, based on texts by Aragon. In 2022, he worked with the Compagnie Humaine on the performance Les Glaneurs de rêves, based on Patti Smith’s short story, for which he created videos and co-signed the scenography with Eric Oberdorff.
He regularly composes musical pieces and practices improvised music. He has performed alongside Alex Benvenuto, DJ Pepe, Thomas Guillemaud, Christophe Meulien, Jean-Marc Montera, Barre Phillips, Ismaël Robert, Henri Roger, Guy Reyes, and Joelle Vinciarelli. With Frédérik Brandi and Kristof Everart, he organized the Festival Manké in Nice and Arles from 2000 to 2018, a festival devoted to performance and experimental music.
Henri Roger.
Born on July 20, 1951, in Ismailia, Egypt, Henri Roger is a French pianist now living in Monaco. A self-taught musician, he began playing piano at the age of 15, developing an approach rooted in listening, perception, imagination, improvisation, and creation.
Drawn from the outset to a wide range of musical worlds—blues, rock, pop, and jazz—he began his professional career in Paris in the early 1970s. Since then, his artistic path has followed a singular and deeply personal course : full of detours, contrasts, and reinventions, yet always guided by the same essential impulse—freedom of creation, and a constant movement beyond styles, fashions, and categories.
Over the years, he has performed throughout France and on major Paris stages including the Olympia, Bobino, the Cirque d’Hiver, Place de la Bastille, and the Fête de l’Humanité. He has played with the band Taï Phong, the trio V.O alongside Gilles Pétrotey and Claude Perrin, and singers Mama Bea Tekielski and Catherine Ribeiro, notably on the live duo album L’amour aux nus. He also contributed to several albums by Luc Marianni.
In 1975, he recorded his first solo album, Images, for the Pôle Records label. From the 1990s onward, his work moved increasingly toward improvised music and contemporary forms, driven by an ever-renewed search for new musical phrases, new encounters, and new ways of sharing sound spontaneously with others. This opened the way to numerous concerts and recordings with musicians including Paul Rogers, Jean-Louis Méchali, Barre Phillips, Bruno Tocanne, Emilie Lesbros, Eric-Maria Couturier, François Cotinaud, Emmanuelle Somer, Benjamin Duboc, Didier Lasserre, Noël Akchoté, Augustin Brousseloux, Jean-Marc Foussat, Jean-Baptiste Boussougou, and Marcel Bataillard.
For many years, one sentence by Henri Michaux has accompanied him as a kind of inner compass :
“Go far enough within yourself that your style can no longer keep up with you.”