The first act—The Heroic Life of B.S.:  As A Tribute… 2013—plays with innovative 20th century forms in a tentacular installation presented at the FRAC des Pays de la Loire, which acted as a backdrop for the first opus of the opera.  The fictional character B.S., who is deeply interested in and fascinated by these emblematic forms, plunges into the crazy endeavour to successfully create an operative synthesis of them.  Like a slightly oddball Facteur Cheval—a postman who built an ‘ideal palace’-- in the land of design, B. S. espouses, for better or for worse, the recipes of figures such as Marcel Bauer, Mies van der Rohe, Eileen Gray, the Eameses, and Enzo Mari, and sprinkles his dishes with typical ingredients of the 20th century, from the Formica work surface to the tubular chaise longue by way of the plastic market crate.

 

In act two—The Heroic Life of B.S.:  The Dilemma of the Egg, 2014—B.S. receives the mad order to re-design a chicken’s egg in such a way as to optimize its packaging and its transport.  He thus finds himself having to contradict the laws of nature by trying to perfect an ideal shape.  The sequence of scenes, somewhere between postwar industrial advertisements, TV magazines containing scientific information for one and all and the Adventures of Tintin, illustrates the many different attempts to achieve an impossible outcome. 

 

But it is in the final act—The Heroic Life of B.S.:  The Sirens of Corinth, 2014—that the hitherto implied challenge of this project is explicitly revealed.  Having once and for all shed his modern certainties about the use and origin of forms, B. S., who has become mystical, embarks on an initiatory journey in Greece in order to understand the conditions whereby a primary manufactured form—the column—appears and is conceptualized.  In this arid region of stone and dust, how has it been possible to conceptualize such a pure form?  Wandering in these desertscapes, madness and mysticism get the better of him.  He totally abandons the technical tools and the engineering rigour of the industrial production of forms, and henceforth works alone with what he finds on the spot.  Then he plunges desperately into the experience of sculpture, thinking that this context will be favourable to him and that the transcendental and universal truth of all form will appear to him. 

 

The Heroic Life of B. S.—An Opera in Three Acts upsets the status of the elements which form it, pieces with videos which are extremely produced and referenced in their production down to the very principle of the opera, whereby we understand that the simple classical form here becomes a playground.  Hoël Duret.