“Ode to the Moon”: when the landscape becomes a stage

On August 2, 2025, after a year-long hiatus, the Lake Festival returns to the shores of Albigny Bay. For this event, deeply rooted in Annecy’s history, ARTEVENTIA envisions “Ode to the Moon”, a 70-minute creation designed not just to be watched from the banks, but to inhabit an entire landscape.

The lake, the mountains, the depth of the bay, the reflections, and the sky all become elements to compose with.

This is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating peculiarities of the Lake Festival: here, the stage has neither curtain nor true limit. It stretches for several hundred meters and requires simultaneously considering the foreground, the water’s surface, the horizon, and the height. The show, therefore, cannot simply be placed in front of the landscape; it must compose with it.

“Annecy immediately imposes a form of humility,” explains Édouard Grégoire, ARTEVENTIA’s artistic director. “We arrive in an already existing and exceptional setting. The challenge is not to try to mask or dominate it, but to understand how the show can reveal it differently for seventy minutes.”

Six Acts to Tell a Night’s Tale

Ode to the Moon unfolds in six acts and relies on a musical score conceived as the guiding thread of the evening. Each sequence possesses its own rhythm, colors, and visual vocabulary, but the whole must maintain sufficient continuity to accompany the audience for over an hour.

Such a long duration profoundly changes the way a show is designed. Power cannot be permanent. One must know when to slow down, allow an image time to exist, and create anticipation before regaining momentum. Some tableaux invest the entire width of the lake, while others, conversely, choose to narrow the focus.

“Over seventy minutes, the real challenge is rhythm. If you constantly try to impress, the audience eventually stops feeling anything. There must be breathing spaces, breaks, moments where you accept doing less so that what comes next regains its full force.”

Music then becomes much more than a synchronization support. It structures the dramaturgy, allows transitions from one universe to another, and gives the different disciplines a common language.

A Composition on the Scale of the Lake

To give substance to this fresco, the technical setup takes on unusual proportions. Nearly 90 barges and platforms are distributed across the lake, forming a facade approximately 900 meters wide. The creation represents nearly 10,500 firing commands, with some 2 tons of pyrotechnic material, while about twenty pyrotechnicians participate in the installation and operation of the show.

But the numbers are only the invisible framework of the project.

On the lake, over a hundred positions allow for working with width, diagonals, depths, and response effects between different points of the bay. A sequence can thus progressively traverse the landscape, emerge simultaneously in several places, or construct an architecture ample enough to stand against the surrounding reliefs.

“When you have such a wide facade, the temptation would be to constantly try to fill everything. Yet, it is often the movements, the shifts from one point to another, or the contrasts between emptiness and full width that provide the most relief.”

This spatial writing becomes a true scenography.

Pyrotechnics are no longer conceived solely in terms of height. They also work with low lines, perspectives, and reflections. Light extends certain sequences into darkness. Lasers structure space differently, while aquatic effects create a direct link between the lake’s surface and the images developing above.

Making Disciplines Dialogue

It is in this encounter that Ode to the Moon truly takes on its multidisciplinary dimension.

The creation combines pyrotechnics, light shows, lasers, aquatic effects, rhythmic performances, and musical composition in a continuous narrative.

The objective is no longer to successively present the different available technologies, but precisely to prevent the audience from perceiving them as separate blocks.

A sequence can begin in the water, be extended by light, then unfold in the sky. A pyrotechnic movement can respond to a musical evolution before disappearing to leave space for a much more stripped-down image.

“What interests me is the moment when you no longer say: now here are the lasers, now here are the pyrotechnics, now here is the water. If these boundaries remain visible, it means we have not yet fully created a common language.”

This quest becomes one of the major focuses of the ARTEVENTIA Creative Bureau: to conceive the show before the tools, then choose the disciplines capable of serving the intention.

Fifteen days for a few dozen minutes

Behind the images of August 2 also lies considerable logistics.

The installation of the system requires approximately fifteen days of setup, during which teams progressively occupy the lake. Barges, platforms, firing systems, communication networks, lighting, aquatic effects, and technical equipment must be positioned, secured, tested, and integrated into a general organization involving numerous stakeholders.

This long preparation contrasts with the very nature of the show: 70 minutes, then everything disappears.

This is perhaps one of the most singular paradoxes of these grand creations. Weeks of work are necessary to produce an experience that, by definition, will never be reproduced in exactly the same way.

“That’s also what makes this profession beautiful. We build so much for a very short moment. All this work must then become invisible. When the show begins, the audience should no longer see the days of setup, the cables, the constraints, or the systems. They should only be able to enter the story.”

A Return Becomes a Starting Point

For ARTEVENTIA, Ode to the Moon marks an important milestone.

This first creation for the return of the Lake Festival lays the groundwork for a relationship that will continue the following year with “The Soul of the World”, a new 70-minute creation that is even more broadly multidisciplinary.

But in 2025, everything already begins with the same intuition: to consider Annecy not as the backdrop for a show, but as its raw material.

The lake becomes a stage.

The mountains become depth.

Reflections become a second image.

And light, water, music, and pyrotechnics progressively cease to be independent disciplines to compose a single fresco.

More than 150,000 spectators then discover this creation from the shores of Albigny Bay.

For 70 minutes, Ode to the Moon does not simply seek to illuminate Annecy.

It seeks to look differently at a landscape everyone thought they already knew.

Photo Credits: Frédéric Lepla – Arthur Lepla – Nicolas Guilitte