Beacons

Yvon Bonenfant is a vocal artist and interdisciplinary performance maker with a unique musical imagination. Always using the voice and singing as his starting point, Bonenfant has created or collaborated on live performance, installation, video art and videodance projects, underpinned by his cutting-edge approach to the potential for live performance to engage and transform the body. Beacons extends Bonenfant's intensity and technique into a world of presence and absence, of calling and wanting, and of the purity of the experience of light in darkness. Exploring a simple concept, ubiquitous in our modern environment: the flashing beacon light, Beacons is both a concert and a piece of refined video Theater. The project brings together the sensual, passionate and yet restrained and spacious video work of the UK's David Shearing with Bonenfant's own otherworldly extended voice techique and his all-voice musical compositions.

Performing sometimes solo and unamplified, sometimes live with amplification, and at others accompanied by choirs of carefully composed vocal environments, Bonenfant's voice - sounding both male and female, with the tonal range of the 'cello - takes the audience on a journey through a broad spectrum of sensation and emotion. With sounds ranging from the angelic to the hyperemotional, this voice is unforgettable. The world of Beacons explores the most fundamental of human experiences and invites the audience into a multisensory world of contemplation, reflection and passion. Voices: Yvon Bonenfant Video footage: David Shearing, Ludivine Allegue, and Yvon Bonenfant Video editing: David Shearing Composition and artistic direction: Yvon Bonenfant Compositional assistance and recording: Francis Silkstone