David, le requin et la source vieille de 700 millions d’années (David, the shark and the 700-million-year-old spring) is an original musical creation that combines a tale by Marguerite Duras and a visual and sound lecture on “biophony”, the study of the underwater sound world in the calanques of Marseille’s coastline. An actress-singer, three musicians from the Ensemble C Barré and a researcher from the PRISM Laboratory accompany the audience through various points of the site, as they follow the tale set to music by composer Jean-Christophe Marti. The acoustician then presents the results of his research into underwater acoustics. The result is an original journey of narration and sound, combining the fiction of a story with documentary information on the most up-to-date scientific research on the nearby Calanques National Park coastline.

The tale set to music and voice
This humorous and moving tale, set to music for a narrator-singer and three musicians (saxophone, percussion and cello), is taken from L’Été 80 by Marguerite Duras. It tells the story of a child, David, and a shark named Ratekétaboum, who takes him in after a shipwreck. David’s and the shark’s journeys take them across the oceans, swimming between islands, rubbing shoulders with other aquatic beings until they meet “the source”, a very old creature made entirely of water. This spring contains the memory of the oceans, emerges from the Atlantic Cistern and, on certain evenings, begins to dance. The spring, like the sea, is the very element of writing. It inspires the temporality of an eternal recommencement caught up in the continuous variation of sensations and colors, in keeping with a profoundly musical theme.

Writing and the theme of water
This tale opens up the poetic theme of water, particularly in the books of Marguerite Duras. Water is the fundamental element of Duras’s imagination. This goes back to her childhood in Indochina: the mouth of the immense Mekong River, the dangerous rivers where she bathed with her brothers, the Pacific Ocean… these watery landscapes are the matrix of her work. Her mother tried to contain the floods of the Pacific to protect the rice fields she cultivated, and the stories of these attempts are told in several books: Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, L’Eden Cinéma, Les Lieux de M. Duras, L’Amant de la Chine du Nord… The tale of David and the shark is perfectly accessible to children and to a family audience not necessarily accustomed to Duras’s universe.

Novelists cited by Duras (Hemingway, Conrad…) develop the theme of the sea and can broaden the references offered to the public, as well as travelogues including Indochine by Léon Werth, Sur le Mékong by Chantal Edel.