Apaches!

​

Apaches?

​

Who are these Apaches we see on stage?

​

Their genealogy traces back to Ravel and the circle of artists, friends, and music lovers gathered around him on the eve of the First World War. A boisterous inner circle whose members, one day leaving a café, were called "apaches!" - hooligans, troublemakers.

​

This band of musicians, poets, and conductors met each week at one another's homes to share their work. An artistic celebration of intertwined visions, where the layering of genres stood in for structure. Delage, Viñes, Fargue, Klingsor, Inghelbrecht... all different, yet all Apaches, united and then scattered into the night of war.

 

A century later, man has walked on the Moon, musical amplification exists, and the spirit of the Apaches is reborn. In Paris, in their old neighborhood of Belleville? No, across France. Under the impulse of conductor Julien Masmondet, this new movement, both a tribute and an extension, sets out to present multidisciplinary performances with an ad hoc troupe of its own.

​

Depending on the format, in the pit or on stage, up to thirty musicians - seasoned in contemporary repertoire, chamber players, all soloists - combine the flexibility of youth with the experience of maturity. And behind the scores, the Apaches of the 21st century have brought in collaborations from both established composers and young talents representing a wide range of aesthetics.

​

The resurrection took place at the Athénée in 2018, where these new Apaches presented a new production of Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti paired with an opera composed for the occasion by Pascal Zavaro, Manga Café. Two years later, still within Louis Jouvet's former temple, still on the bridge connecting music to the other arts, the launch of the new ensemble was sealed with a manifesto concert celebrating the Apaches' repertoire, both past and present.

​

Since then, their productions have explored, between the staves, what makes our society resonate. There's Ça vous dérange? ("Does that bother you?"), in which the ensemble, drawing on the 2021 law protecting the sensory heritage of the French countryside, gives composers free rein for an immersive walking performance accompanied by a sound-based debate. There's the ambitious Street Art, where today's music engages in dialogue with a free-runner and an acrobatic dancer performing to scores by Steve Reich and three associate composers. There's the Rave-L Party, an immersive evening devised for Maurice Ravel's birthday, which gradually transforms the concert hall into a vast industrial space and then into an electro club. There's also Rideau! (2026 creation), a piece built around Erik Satie and John Cage that takes the audience from a bustling sound-and-image bazaar to the silence of 4'33"; and Indefinito (2026 creation), a show created especially for the Louvre Museum around desire and sensuality, in dialogue with the Michelangelo & Rodin exhibition.

 

And for the future, there's the boundless range of possibilities across every strand of live performance, technological or handmade, amplified or not, whether it draws on theater, music, voice, dance, or literature.

​

The Apaches, then. Where the commitment is to bring every kind of art together on the same stage.

- Guillaume Tion