Over the last twenty years, Stéphane Payen has developped a personnal vocabulary influenced by Western composers of the twentieth century, Carnatic music and musics in wich the concept of collective is essential, such as Senegalese Sabar, the music of the Aka or Ba-Benzele pygmie. Today concepts such as clave, odd meters, polyrhythms, multiple tempos and metric modulations are widely known.
The aim of the workshop (with the 5 musiciens of The Workshop) is to explore how these tools could be used to develop a collective process of improvisation, where the soloist is not the only point of attention. Instead of studying a specific musical vocabulary (or copying an aesthetic) the workshop will focus on integrating these ideas into the grammar of the music, and understanding how over the course of the centuries, groups of pulations have developed popular repertories that are still alive and continue to renew themselves.
