La Réminiscence

Commissioned by the saxophonist Adèle Vernet, La Réminiscence is a piece of ten to fourteen minutes for tenor saxophone, dancer, live electronics and live video, in five scenes and a coda: Suspension · First Recognition · Distortion · Acceleration · Release · Passing On.

Everything in it is built on breath. The saxophonist’s breathing — captured by a clip microphone on the instrument and by contact microphones on fabric and floor — is mirrored back into the room by the electronics: echoed, reversed, gently detuned, widened from a narrow mono point to a full four-channel bloom and collapsed again, so that the player seems to be accompanied by an earlier version of herself. The dancer moves inside that mirrored breathing, sometimes a half-phrase behind, sometimes anticipating it; her footfalls on the floor are picked up and returned as resonance. In the fourth scene a heartbeat surfaces in the subwoofer and accelerates from 72 to 108 beats per minute over ninety seconds before it is released. A live camera projects the two bodies, and the body dissolves back into the video’s grain — each gesture a reminiscence of the one before it.

The title is the French word for a memory that returns without being summoned. The piece is about that kind of remembering — not recollection but recurrence, the body repeating something the mind has filed away. It was premiered on 11 June 2026 in Salle 30 of the Conservatoire de Strasbourg by Adèle Vernet and the dancer and choreographer Flora Georges, with scenography by the composer.