Le Salon Automate
Le Salon Automate is a play where modern robotics meets existential drama in a skillful demonstration of art and technology. Taking place in a surrealist literary salon, it is a burlesque confrontation, a hellish huis clos between a flesh-and-blood actress, Nathalie Claude, and her three distinguished guests, three automatons of human size.
This solo required many years of preparation, and extensive research to finally see the day. Nathalie Claude created, wrote, directed and performed it. It was a close collaboration with Raymond Marius Boucher (designer of the automatons, set and accessories) Simon Laroche, (designer of robotics and electronics), and Isabelle Lussier (sound designer and composer).The challenge was to create these beings of wood and metal, respecting the esthetic of the first automatons presented in 19th century salons. As well as making them good and reliable actors, but here, using the technology that “Coppélius” did not have; giving them life through a modern robotic design.
The result was shockingly full of… humanity !
In The Salon Automaton we discover a woman, The Hostess (Nathalie Claude) lonely and nostalgic for a certain time, who recreated for her own entertainment a literary salon.Her guests: The Dandy Poet, The Drinking Patroness, and The Cabaret Artist; human-size robots, physically articulated and with speech, and fascinating by their perfect mechanisms, copying the illusion of life. In their company, she does her utmost to revive the art of the conversation, cultivated in these mythical meetings of artists and intellectuals of the 16th century to the middle of the 20th. Although they respect the golden rules of the salons: active listening, coherence, brevity, tact and a sense of repartee, the automatons pre-programmed by their nature, always keep it to a singular line of thought. In this context, who will triumph? A burlesque confrontation from all eternity.
A solo where Nathalie Claude is not alone on stage, but surrounded by actor-machines. A piece that speaks eloquently of the very modern evil: human solitude.
Web site and full credits here



