It was an appropriate title. …au delà du hasard arrived from beyond the chance of a theatrical occasion, flotsam and jetsam fixed from the wreckage of a collaboration with the stage director Jacques Polieri.

What Polieri envisioned was ‘kaleidoscopic theatre’, to quote the title of his 1955–6 manifesto: ‘My plan is to realize a spectacle in which I will effectively take as my point of departure the design element, around which will be built the music, the dance, the action, the singing and even the text. … One of the essential principles of this kaleidoscopic theatre—a principle of life—is movement. All elements of the spectacle are mobile.’

In the spring of 1956 Polieri met Hodeir, whom he made his musical adviser. The following August he was at the Unité d'Habitation Le Corbusier in Marseilles for the avant-garde festival, exploring ‘confrontations among the different disciplines of modern art (architecture—sculpture—painting—music—dance—theatre—cinema)’. Hodeir's two concerts—one of jazz, the other the programme that included your electronic study—were part of that effort, and though Hodeir soon broke with Polieri over the non-payment of musicians' fees, he had by then put you and the director in contact with each other.

Polieri, an architect of theatres as well as a director, was not averse to thinking in terms of quasi-musical structure. In January 1957 he drafted Gamme en 7 (‘Scale in 7’), a piece for seven performers considered as adjacent notes, each having some alliance with those neighbouring: dancer—mime—actor—singer—actor—mime—dancer.