Le Projet Ulysse is a 54-minute work for voices and sound that Christian Calon wrote and composed between 1996 and 2001 in his Montréal studio, with some processing done at the GRM in Paris. It transposes the poem attributed to Homer into the present, following the reading of James Joyce, in 21 short sections that run from Les Hommes to Les retrouvailles. Homer is the storyteller, Athena the media voice, and the listener a potential Telemachus.
Calon organizes the material around a set of paths: language, writing and memory, migration and the stranger, matter, space, God, love and time. The texts were written in French, except Penelope’s, written in English and reworked in improvisation with Shelley Hirsch, who also provides the voice materials; the guitar materials are played by René Lussier. Voices were recorded at DeutschlandRadio Berlin, Radio-Canada, La Criée in Marseille and PRIM in Montréal, with readers including Gabriel Gascon and Wajdi Mouawad. Among the sources Calon names are Dante, Friedrich Hölderlin, Fritz Lang, Michel Serres and Jean-Luc Godard.
A German and English radio version premiered on Deutschlandradio Berlin in December 1998, followed in 1999 by a version spatialized on 89 loudspeakers at the Zeiss Großplanetarium in Berlin. The French and English version was produced by Radio-Canada, where Mario Gauthier, author of the booklet text, was executive producer, and broadcast in 2001; a stage version followed at the Elektra festival in 2002. The project received the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award in 1996 and the Grand Prix Marulic of Croatian radio in 1999.
Born in Marseille in 1950, Calon is a freelance artist based in Montréal whose work centres on listening and spatiality, with a strong interest in narrative and radio as ars acustica. He also plays in the improvisation collective Theresa Transistor.
DVD-Video in OGplus, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 11107, 2011.
