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2001: RENDEZ-VOUS IN SPACE

Date: Monday January 1st 2001
Location: Ginowan Seaside Park, Okinawa, Japan
Visitors: 20,000
Cost of project: £3,000,000 approx.
Ticket cost: Free, although tickets were issued
Length of concert: approx. 45 minutes

In order to commemorate the fact that it was now the year 2001, and to tie in with the film "2001: A Space Odyssey", Jean Michel Jarre collaborated with Arthur C Clarke to conceive a concert based around the theme and ideas of the film and book written by the famous author.

In order to perceive this idea, Jean Michel Jarre decided to create a group called "The ViZitors" - with the group comprising of people he has worked with before, including Tetsuya "TK" Komuro and Francis Rimbert.

The concert was designed by long-term collaborator Mark Fisher, who has designed every Jarre concert since The China Concerts during 1981. The original design concept of the concert looked fascinating, originally being intended to be a large-scale concert on par with previous outdoor concerts by Jean Michel Jarre. This was not to be the case though, and although still looking very good, turned out to be more or less a showcase for Jean Michel and TK's "new" music and The ViZitors. Whether this was down to not very much funding or the lack of time in which to conceive such a large-scale project still remains to be confirmed. The concert was also split into 2 distinct parts, with ACT 2 being the Okinawa concert.

During the time prior to the concert, Jean Michel flew over to Arthur Clarke's home in Sri Lanka to film him, which was later to be used as the introductions to each of the songs during the concert. The "script" consisted of various subjects, such as the social lives of aliens, loneliness in space, sexual acts in the weightlessness of space, among other things.

The event didn't even amass hardly any public and press acknowledgment either, with only a 2 minute slot on Euronews and a 2-page article in the French magazine VSD, although the entire event was broadcasted live on Japanese TV. The UK newspaper, The Sunday Times did manage to feature an article a day prior to the concert on Sunday December 31st 2000, and can be found here. Also, originally the whole event was going to be broadcast live over the Internet, but in the end, all that was broadcasted was ACT 3, and that was it.

So unfortunately, due to the lack of response on behalf of the press and the general public, the ViZitors project has now been put on ice (there was also originally going to be an album too with 3 extra tracks). Luckily though, in order for the whole design idea of the images and projections used during the concert to NOT fall into obscurity, they were reused during the Akropolis concerts in Athens in June 2001. And the same also goes for the technology that was used for the projections, which were 4-piece front-projection cameras (VERY expensive equipment) which were conceived also by Mark Fisher, and work very well.

With special thanks to Mark Fisher himself, we here at Jarre UK can now also bring you some EXCLUSIVE official photographs and concept illustrations from the Okinawa concert (photographs are extremely rare for this concert because of the lack of press coverage).

You can visit The Mark Fisher Studio Website by clicking here.

Original Concept Design (c) 2002 Julien Prat (with kind permission) - http://julien.prat.free.fr

Final Stage Design (c) 2002 Julien Prat (with kind permission) - http://julien.prat.free.fr

1: Jean Michel Jarre - Keyboards, Accordian, Laser Harp, Theremin
2: Tetsuya 'TK' Komuro - Onstage Mixing
3: Francis Rimbert - Keyboards and programming
4: Session Bass Player and Drummer (names unknown)

Concept Illustrations:

The Rehearsals / Stage Preparation:
(note: it was very rainy the day before the concert!)

The Concert:

All Photographs and concept illustrations (c) 2001 Mark Fisher (with kind permission)

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