Patients from Saint Jean de Dieu hospital got to play music at Périscope.

In 2007, Le Périscope was born in Lyon: a project of a team mainly composed of professional musicians who decided to relocate a former craft premises located in the Perrache district, not far from the famous Brasserie Georges. Twelve years later, after the demolition of the Saint-Paul and Saint-Joseph prisons opposite it, this concert hall is now located in the heart of the peninsula, in a district undergoing rapid urban change.
Since the initiative of the project, the team has advocated the creation of “innovative” music, which is at the origin of jazz and improvised music, nowadays decompartmentalized between rock, noise, hip hop, electronic and experimental music. With nearly 200 openings a year, the Périscope’s programme offers evening concerts, events in the Café Culturel (conferences, screenings, poetic cabaret, meetings, workshops…), and other meetings aimed at young audiences during the day, as well as numerous artist residencies during the season.

The Périscope defends musical creation and conveys the values of mutualisation and co-construction of projects. In recent years, the question has arisen of new forms of action for a diversification of audiences based on the question: how to make as many people as possible discover and even initiate them into listening to and practicing this music of today? One of the answers we have given to this problem is that of bringing together people from various backgrounds around a singular artistic project without distinction of age, origins, professions, tastes and/or musical practices, life experiences. Moreover, thanks to the diversity of musical aesthetics that the project defends, we have developed different ways of encouraging listening but also of making people discover through the practice of music that it is an accessible artistic medium. In this sense, we strive to create spaces for interaction with audiences by facilitating access to concerts, by provoking encounters with artists and by proposing devices for amateur practice that contribute both to strengthening social ties and the emergence of new forms of artistic creation.
Our main action verb is to do… “to do for, to do with, to do together…”. This is also why, at Periscope, we defend forms of participative creation with amateurs.rice.s and projects that are rather long term. Participatory art places the participant as co-creator of a work alongside one or more guest artists. This form of closeness allows the participant to understand a creative process through observation and active engagement. It can also foster self-confidence and strengthen group cohesion by contributing, we hope, to a better living-together.

In 2015, wishing to open up prospects for exchanges with new partners, we initiated a first project with a medical-social establishment. The challenges of the meeting between musicians and young people within a Special Education and Home Care Service, defined during the exchanges with the team, have confirmed our willingness to invest ourselves in this field alongside professionals.

In 2016, the discovery of the Brut Pop project in the report “Raw music, handicap and counter-culture” made with patients from the Saint Jean de Dieu hospital challenged us by its originality and exemplary nature.
When Cécilia de Varine, in charge of cultural development at the Saint Jean de Dieu hospital asked us in 2018 to contribute to their project, it was therefore simply and with pleasure that we agreed to host one of the residences of David Lemoine and Antoine Capet at Périscope. This practical workshop “outside the walls” proposed by the hospital institution to patients and carers took place in the concert hall of the Périscope, a space dedicated to sound diffusion. This gave the participants the opportunity to work in the heart of the city, in an adapted and comfortable space, with professional means of amplification and listening in quadriphony and taking advantage of the darkness of the hall.

Taking advantage of the presence of the musicians, we also organised a day to present the Brut Pop system to patients and accompanying staff from various health establishments of the OVE foundation (Œuvre des villages d’Enfants), of which we are also a partner. Finally, in the evening, we offered health and cultural professionals a time to reflect on the issue of participatory musical creation in health establishments. Reflecting with other actors in the field allows us to take a step back and collectively imagine new forms of partnerships. And even if the reflection has only just begun due to a lack of you, we can still take a step back and collectively imagine new forms of partnership.And even if the reflection has only just begun due to lack of time, we managed to gather and bring together the sixty or so people present.

Through this project, we can retain that the joint mobilisation of health and cultural professionals who pool their resources with a coherent artistic team, allows us to build sensitive and inventive projects for the benefit of all. Patients, educators, carers, artists, cultural coordinators in health and/or cultural establishments have shown their satisfaction and interest in the Brut Pop project. We are delighted to have contributed to it, in our own way.