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UNE NUIT SANS OPERA 3 AIX-EN-PROVENCE UNE NUIT SANS OPERA AIX-EN-PROVENCE GANG OF SIX GANG OF SIX JACK CASE JOSEPH JACK GIDDINGS CASE JACK HARDY JOSEPH GIDDINGS JOSHUA JACKMOLNAR HARDY JOSEPH PENN JOSHUA MOLNAR SHAUN RYDER JOSEPH PENN SHAUN RYDER
Jack Case, Joe Giddings,
Jack Hardy, Josh Molnar, Joe Penn and Shaun Ryder are Gang of Six, a group of Architecture students who live together in Oxford. As a collective a ping-pong table was made from MDF drawing boards and model plinths in our first year studio. Coming out of second year we felt it was time to recreate this collective productiveness
Gang Of Six was formed. of times past.
We were invited to Aix-enProvence to design and build a bar for Une Nuit Sans Opera 3, our first project. Studio Ping Pong is the name given to meetings and discussions, ping pong at the studio, and the nature of the design process. Ideas and designs evolve in a fashion not dissimilar to the game of table tennis, accumulating speed and spin as they rally from player to player. Upon arriving in Aix-enProvence a ping pong table was designed and built by JH and SR. This table went on to be re-appropriated as an exhibition table on the night of the event.
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Contents 5 . . . . .
UNE NUIT SANS OPERA
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BASTIDE JAS DE BUFFON
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GANG OF SIX BRIEF
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BELLTOWER - TOTEM DESIGN BUILD PROCESS #1 PROCESS #2
23 . . . . . . . . BAR DESIGN BUILD PROCESS #3 29 . . . . . . .
THE EVENT
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PROFILES
FUTURE THOUGHTS
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Aix-en-provence hosts an
opera festival every summer, the Festival International d’Art Lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence. The festival runs for two weeks in July, showing opera and orchestral, chamber, vocal and solo instrumental music.1 Une Nuit Sans Opera was created by Association Sohba2. Taking place on two consecutive nights, the event, its name meaning “A night without opera”, combine the operatic arts of; Music, Dance, Architecture and Art. UNSO, though, is produced as an alternative to the traditions of opera in Aix, its aim to bring opera to a younger and more varied audience. This year architects were invited to propose a sceneography in relation to the story of La Traviata3. Through the installations artists, musicians and dancers are commissioned to produce a spectacle with the essence of La Traviata, taking any theme or detail from the story. The night was held at la Bastide du Jas de Bouffan, a former residence of Paul Cezanne.4
1 www.Festival-Aix.com 2 www.sohba.fr 3 www.opera-guide.ch 4 www.cezanne-en-provence.com 5 www.studiocolumba.com
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Free and aimless I must flutter From pleasure to pleasure, dances through a cloud. ACT 3 Alfredo proposes a toast to Skimming the Carnival music kicks off love, Violetta retorts that another party. Two dancers surface love must fade and it is best dual for the love of Violetta, Of life’s primrose to enjoy the pleasures of the dancing over her virginal fleeting moment. path. body. Alfredo circles the Scenography by Croxson Wates. white pyramid and throws As each day Music from Robert Jukic and friends. his debts at it. Her body is dawns, tainted. As each day dies, Scenography by Thomas Reynaud and Cedric Libert Gaily I turn to the ACT 2 Congolese Dancers, Djodjo Kazadi Violetta gives Alfredo a new delights and Serge Kakudji flower and tells him to return Art by Loic Secheresse That make my it when its life is gone and spirit soar.“ its colour is no more. The audience experiences La Camellia. Installation by Anna Kubelik ACT 4 “Temporary Violetta and Alfredo spend spatial their last moments together. Violetta is dying, she experiments of La 5 tumbles to the ground in her Traviata” INTERVAL weakness, stumbles around
the room with dizzyness. She rises again, and falls, and eventually collapses for the last time, motionless.
ACT 1
The curtain falls and you enter the garden of pleasures. A party is taking place. The music is continuous and light
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Scenography by Isabell Gonzaga and Andreas Helgesson. Music and Dance by Alice Billaux and Gregory Feutre
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We were invited to participate in
Une Nuit Sans Opera by designing and building a bar for the event, held over two nights at La Bastide Du Jas De Bouffan; a dwelling and subject of post-impressionist Paul Cezanne. Une Nuit Sans Opera was to transform the grounds into a garden of pleasures, exploring sensory experimental representations of Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’ "to reveal the spatial extents of the many hidden typological garden conditions found in Cezanne’s scenic landscape". Our brief was to create the anti-room space between acts; with a bar allowing up to 8 staff to work behind, serving an audience of 100-200 before and after the spectacle, and during the interval. The transitory element of the night was something we wanted to experiment with. The notion of creating a nodal point was strong in the gang,
integrate the choreography of the event with the architecture of our intervention. and we sought to
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Whilst still in Oxford, the
Our design broke down into a number of events venue was still in components. The totem; question, as such initial ideas centred around a dif- a dynamic bar; a number of stations where the ferent site gravity. bar would ‘dock’ in its stationary mode; and bunting to create flying perspectives that allowed each element to allude to another. Through a bar would move modelling, we dreamt between acts around a of bars that folded, festival centre-point - a pivoted, rotated and monument, a totem, an fanned out. The logistical object. movement of the bar would choreographise exploration of the grounds, to and from acts. Spaces actified by the bars arrival would also be deadened on its depature, signalling a procession to the enlivened stage of the next act.
The concept was one of movement;
The totem evolved into an object that was more than just a symbol or a sign. It would ring as a consequence of its direct attachement to a bar in transit.
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Our Palette of materials
was a pile of debris used in UNSO 1 & 2. Hay bales, short logs, plastic strapping, pots of paint, scaffolding planks, blocks of wax, a large rusty steel box, rough cut cedar wood and a vast quantity of other timbers in various sizes, including four 5m wooden floor beams. In material terms, salvage, glean, find and clean inspired our early design proposals and group ethos for the project
we added no paint, no varnish, and made little change to the found dimensions.
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The reclaimed timber was warped, knotched and aged, and we chose to integrate these qualities into the design, with as little treatment to the contrary as possible;
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Construction Process #1 Bunching wood detail Bell Cot Two Person
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2 x 1000mm Blue String 8 x 1150mm Timber 16 x 1300mm Timber 8 x 1600mm Timber 64 x 3� Screws 60 mins material prep 5 mins for assembly of one bunch 8 Bunches
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Construction Process #2 Bracing and water sealing the Base of the bell tower Two Person
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1 x Silicon Gun 3 x Silicon Tubes 2 x Plastic Sheeting 32 x Bracing Timbers 240 mins material prep 120 mins Silicon Application 300 mins Plastic and Bracing assembly
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As it was designed with
movement in mind, the bar was composed of components that could be quickly and easily assembled and re-assembled by two people. This fits with the ideology of Une Nuit Sans Opera, which is a temporary, fleeting event.Post-event the bar is not destroyed.
It is simply a line that can be given a new time and place. This fact is integral to the design.
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Ac t2
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The Fina lA ct
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Jack Case
Joe Giddings
Jack Hardy
Josh Molnar
Joe Penn
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Shaun Ryder
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This zine was created by Gang of Six.
Une Nuit Sans Opera 3, Aix-En-Provence,
was Gang of Six’s first project. Studio Ping Pong 001 is our first publication. We are planning future projects together, alongside and beyond our 3rd year at Oxford School of Architecture. Studio Ping Pong is a platform for thoughts and projects, collective and individual. We are planning a project based around ideas of the English Urban Garden. To us; a testing space, a workshop, a storage space, a bike park, a space for brick-barbecues and for eating, a launderette and a herb garden. Now we aim to create events through fabric changes, organisational overhauls, selective weeding and small installations such as seats, follies, sculptures, trollies, screens, speakers and more.
Through spatial re-appropriation the back yard becomes a place of hyper-ludicity. It’s poignancy lies in its undeniable universality: what we have in a rented residence in Oxford is shared by half the UK. There is poetry to be found in such a prosaic scene.
Gang of Six are about doing - drawing,
making, gleaning, cooking, inventively sourcing, and endlessly questioning eachother about all of them. If you are interested in hiring Gang of Six, want helping hands on a project, would like to appear in a future edition of Studio Ping Pong or simply want to discuss/conspire/ collaborate get in contact on: gangofsix.co.uk collective@gangofsix.co.uk
WITH THANKS TO ANNA DUPONT EMMANUEL DUPONT CAMILLE DUPONT COLIN PRIEST FLORIAN DUPONT LEONOR CARILLO CECILE DE KERVASDOUE MARTINA LAJTNER MARCEL CROXSON JACK WATES ANNA KUBELIK CEDRIC LIBERT ISABELL GONZAGA ANDREAS HELGESSON ADRIEN DUPONT AND EVERYONE ELSE AT UNE NUIT SANS OPERA, ASSOCIATION SOHBA & THE DUPONT FAMILY FOR THEIR INCREDIBLE GENEROSITY. FINALLY, EVERYONE WHO CAME TO UNE NUIT SANS OPERA 2011
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