Ensemble Vide

Ensemble Vide is an interdisciplinary research and production platform focusing on music, image and performance. Through concerts, performances, installations, and conferences, the ensemble initiates reflection on music today and aims to support projects with new pieces. Strongly concerned about an open and active approach of contemporary musical culture, Ensemble Vide creates a theoretical and practical space for thought and realizations. Founded and directed jointly by musicians, composers, stage directors, visual artists, and researchers, the platform wishes to be a place for transversal experimentation with the reading and listening of our world. This social commitment aims to foster encounters and confrontations, as much with the artistic content itself as with the relationship to the public, spectators, and listeners. Various means ensure the existence of such a platform. Ensemble Vide questions and works on the space, the content, and the form of each particular project.

The events are thus staged in special places, remote from the usual concert hall, in theaters, public spaces, schools, or prisons. Original scenographies often occur, while the distribution of the audience is reinvented. Ensemble Vide regularly includes unusual audiences in the conception and production processes, such as children or teenagers, thus adding a pedagogical value to its work. The contents may focus on or cover different sources: contemporary music, experimental music and research, but also sound installations, texts, lectures, and early or traditional classical music. Taking this “material” as a starting point, the members reflect upon and build up the general outline of a project. Ensemble Vide seeks the emergence of a web of connections – as a preliminary to meaning – and challenges the interaction with the spectators. From July 2013, Denis Schuler is the artistic director of the Ensemble Vide.