#AvignonFestival2017 Souvenirs of 71st Edition
SANTA ESTASI - ATRIDI : OTTO RITRATTI DI FAMIGLIA (2/2) ORESTE, LES EUMÉNIDES, IPHIGÉNIE EN TAURIDE, CHRYSOTHÉMIS
Direction : Antonio Latella
The story of the Atreides is the story of a line cursed by the original sin of a father—Tantalus, mortal son of Zeus—who decided to feed his son to the gods.
Personally condemned to eternal torture, he saw his descendants irreversibly punished as well.
For four generations, and until the judgement of Orestes, took place a succession of murders, parricides, infanticides, rapes, and incestuous relationships... And every name in that violence-ridden family—Iphigenia, Helen, Agamemnon, Electra, etc.—has become, thanks to the genius of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides, a tragic, mythical, and classic hero.
Antonio Latella's incredible project was to offer eight of those stories to seven young writers so that they could revisit them for a new generation of actors to perform.
THE IMPERFECT
Text and direction Olivier Balazuc
Victor is 7 going on 8, an only child who lives in the perfect world of the indivisible trinity “daddymommyvictor.” But one day, he stops playing along and dares to say “I.”
With that one word, the child embraces the possibility of language and learns about dissociation, and the audience watches as he goes through a new stage in his life.
From one age to another, from one group to another, from an emotional way of seeing the world to a rational one and back again.
IBSEN HUIS
Text and direction : Simon Stone Dramaturgy et translation : Peter van Kraaij
The characters who come on stage all share a silhouette.
Are they cousins, sisters, daughters and sons of a unique character imagined by Henrik Ibsen? What does the mother-house imagined by Simon Stone reveal?
From a central place, a nourishing centre that presides over the immensity of the stage of the courtyard of the lycée Saint-Joseph, the Australian director has decided to propose a flat-pack architecture modelled on a genealogy: each chapter in the life of this family is a room, he house peels and opens like a fruit, the audience move from one work to the next.
By re-exploring the dramaturgic continuity, he returns, with this Ibsen huis, to the central questions of a family going through a crisis, to the wounds that haven't healed.
Bedroom, kitchen, or attic carry within themselves traumas and struggles, but also happy memories.
WHERE ARE THE OGRES?
Text and direction Pierre-Yves Chapalain
Present day, in a major city.
A woman lives alone with her daughter Hannah, who's refused to come out of her room for a while. Haunted by strange desires that make her uncomfortable and drive her away from others, the only person she can trust is one she's never met, but who understands her like a sister: Angelica.
They spend entire days and night talking on the Internet. And during Angelica's unpredictable and sometimes seemingly-endless naps, Hannah sits there, staring at her screen, terrified her friend has forgotten her.
Hannah's mother asks a doctor friend of hers for advice: how can she be sure that Hannah isn't talking to an artificial intelligence? Her daughter needs to do things, go out, have some fun...
The owner of a nearby restaurant has invited a circus to perform, a perfect opportunity for Hannah to show she can be social... especially as the daughter of the owner is none other than Angelica, as she is about to discover.
ANTIGONE
Text Sophocles Direction Satoshi Miyagi
Eteocles and Polynices, sons of Oedipus and Jocasta, fought and died by each other's sword. Thebes, which Eteocles defended against his brother's assaults, is ruled by Creon, Jocasta's brother.
As soon as the brothers are dead, the tyrant enacts a law to differentiate between the “good” brother and the “bad” one: citizens are strictly forbidden to bury Polynices according to the customary rites.
Sophocles, who paid more attention to his characters' psychology than any of the other Greek poets whose work survived Antiquity, tells the story of the Eteocles and Polynices's sister, Antigone, and of her determination to honour both her brothers, as is her duty.
Betrothed to Creon's son Haimon, she challenges the injustice of men to obey the laws of the gods and follow her heart, which doesn't distinguish between her kin.
She will bury her brother, even if she then has to die.
CHILDHOOD AT WORK
Direction : Robin Renucci and Nicolas Stavy
What is it that's at work during childhood? Aren't daydreaming and meandering inactivity the first stages of inventiveness?
Using the early works of four great authors, Robin Renucci alternates between different literary forms and explores the origins of what makes an artistic vocation.
Henri Michaux follows the journey of the soul when it breaks away from a still body to swim away into the unknown.
As a child, Marcel Proust despairs of being kissed goodnight by his mother, only to realise later that what brought him the most pleasure was the waiting.
Arthur Rimbaud, so very young, explains in verse how one's first poems are born at the same time as one's first romantic feelings. Romain Gary, whose mother sees him only as a potential destiny, feels overwhelmed, but also filled with love and ambition.
SOPRO
Text and direction : Tiago Rodrigues
When the theatre is nothing but ruins, when nothing remains of the walls, the desks, the wings, the machines, the sets, someone will still remain: the lungs of the place but also of the dramatic gesture itself, the prompter.
The voices, sounds, and music that usually take centre stage now take a step back and the breathing of the theatre itself, this thing no one hears, is for once at the forefront.
The guardian of memory and continuity is a woman has spent her whole life in this building where every day people have gathered and played. Tonight, she tells her stories, true or false, all the product of the theatre.
THE PARISIANS
Text and direction : Olivier Py
Aurélien is handsome, young, smart, arrogant, and fascinating.
As a writer and director, he wants to conquer the world through theatre, starting with Paris.
Moving from cocktail party to brothel, he intrigues everyone.
A host of characters with influence in the world of culture and no regard for actual art flock to his side...
Tormented by their insatiable need for power, they succumb to the fads that govern the city of lights.
Beyond this microcosm that believes it can be Everything in plain sight, another much more disreputable milieu attracts Aurélien.
There, he meets people and names who quickly come to fill his orgiastic nights, dreaming of reinventing society through love and sex: Iris, Serena, Kamel, Gilda...
In this carnival, a metaphor for the collapse of politics, only Lucas, a dark and tormented poet who could be his complete opposite, seems to share his desire for absolutes.
DIE KABALE DER SCHEINHEILIGEN DAS LEBEN DES HERRN DE MOLIÈRE
Texts: Mikhaïl Boulgakov, Pierre Corneille, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Molière, Jean Racine Translation : Thomas Reschke Direction : Frank Castorf
In order to shine a light on and playfully question the relationship between the artist and political power, Frank Castorf calls on two figures. Two? Four? Many more than that.
First: Mikhail Bulgakov, writer whose books weren't published, director whose plays weren't performed.
Then: Molière, author, actor, and company director recognised and pampered by the court, until his downfall.
Then their judges: Stalin for the former, Louis XIV for the latter.
Multifaceted figures, they are also actual people that Molière and Bulgakov know personally. The Frenchman responds to a commission from the king with The Impromptu at Versailles.
The Russian uses it as a reference to create, three hundred years later, The Cabal of Hypocrites and The Life of Monsieur de Molière.
But the famous German director wouldn't content himself with Bulgakov's texts alone.
He opens Die Kabale der Scheinheiligen to other greats, from Racine to Fassbinder, and enriches it with dialogues created during rehearsals...
SAIGON
Direction : Caroline Guiela Nguyen
Like the actors that portray them, the characters of SAIGON are French, Vietnamese, or French of Vietnamese descent.
Whatever their age, they share landscapes, faces, songs, and a language that, for some of them, no longer exist but in their memories.
The play takes place in a location subject to the same nostalgia: a restaurant stuck in a space-time somewhere between the France of today and the Saigon of the '50s, where the characters have become used to bumping into one another, meeting for lunch, singing, drinking, dancing, loving, and trying to celebrate life in spite of everything.
The result of a long work of immersion in both France and Vietnam, this polyphonic story invents the voices of men and women marked by history and geography.
They all carry within themselves the marks left by the changes of our world.
THE DRY AND THE WET
Text : Jonathan Littell
Direction : Guy Cassiers
Writing The Dry and the Wet, based on the memoir by Waffen-SS Léon Degrelle, leader of the Walloon Legion, Johnathan Littell aimed to decipher, even dissect, the language of fascism.
In line with The Kindly Ones, Littell's first novel based on his research, this new play allows Guy Cassiers to explore the figure of the “monster” Degrelle and examine the very material of the language of Nazism, which managed to seduce crowds, annihilate identities, and infected those who listened to it.
Starting with a statement that also serves as context, “we all have within us a monster, who may or may not awaken,” the director approaches the movement from dry to wet, from good to evil.
On the stage: an austere conference, complete with stand and screen, where an actor takes on the role of a pedantic historian certain of his quasi-scientific rigour.
But analysing the work of the Belgian Nazi isn't so easy...
The exploration of this sinuous language built to persuade contaminates the man, but also his audience, us.
MEMORIES OF SARAJEVO
Design and direction : Julie Bertin and Jade Herbulot // Le Birgit Ensemble
The siege of Sarajevo began in 1992, two months after the signature of the Maastricht Treaty, which turned the European Community into the European Union.
This pact, this transformation and its consequences would affect absolutely everyone.
A response to the decisions and indecisions of the European institutions, to a history that most don't know very well, Memories of Sarajevo is a historical epic which gives voice to the besieged.
In that city lying at the bottom of a basin where the hills make for an ideal sniper perch, directors Julie Bertin and Jade Herbulot visited libraries and archives and listened to countless witness accounts, in order to try to answer this question: “How to embrace this piece of history that isn't really ours by turning it into a story we could tell?” On the stage, the façade of a building, its inhabitants in the street below.
Above them, European and international leaders meet, unable to find a solution to the crisis.
The Birgit Ensemble is from this generation born in the European Union who feels that the anger and frustration caused by the Union's tentativeness must be channeled to think up new forms of political, but also artistic, organisation.
Memories of Sarajevo and In the ruins of Athens are the last two parts of the tetralogy Europe, My Love.
IN THE RUINS OF ATHENS
Design and direction : Julie Bertin and Jade Herbulot // Le Birgit Ensemble
Two levels of speech and a multiplicity of viewpoints.
On a stage made to resemble a Corinthian temple, In the ruins of Athens plays with the situation in Greece and establishes right away the fake and the illusion as alternatives to reality.
Buried under what we might call the rubbles of the talks with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, a handful of Athenian citizens lock themselves up in a reality TV studio, hoping to come out as winners of the programme and thus see their personal debt forgiven.
Halfway between satire and ancient tragedy, those characters, who bear the names of tragic heroes, question politics and economics, but also their own lineage and the universal need for catharsis and thirst for blood.
The claustrophobic “Parthenon Story” is shot offstage and broadcast live on screens while historical events are recreated by the European institutions.
PRINCESS MALEINE
Text : Maurice Maeterlinck Design and direction : Pascal Kirsch
“And they lived happily ever after.”
What if Maeterlinck followed that happy, open-ended conclusion by showing us all the anxiety that underlies it? Putting a twist on a fairy tale by the brothers Grimm to focus on what happens after the end, he has the lovers find each other again early in Princess Maleine.
Their union brings about worry, illness, storms, and poison.
Princess Maleine, determined to wed Prince Hjalmar in spite of the world's opposition, endures imprisonment, starvation, and the loss of her parents, all without batting an eye.
But her getting her wish only triggers a time of terror. And like an opposite pole, Queen Anne, passionate and lustful, plays with forces that are as dangerous as they are unavoidable.
Love is the engine that drives all of them to lose themselves, and it is what Pascal Kirsch chooses to focus on in this story influenced by magical realism.
He gives a portrait of this family and its contradictions based on its doubts and hesitations that echo in the outside world.
Here are people made young again by anger, who kill what they love to preserve it, and who laugh at their own impotence.
RAMONA
Text, direction, puppets and stage design : Rezo Gabriadze
Inspiration can be a mischievous thing, especially when it is triggered by a quote by Rudyard Kipling stating that “a locomotive is, next to a marine engine, the most sensitive thing man ever made.”
Coming across this sentence among his many memories, Rezo Gabriadze decided one day to return to two of his childhood friends: the locomotive and the circus tent.
Both are relics of a disappearing world, living within his memory like autonomous organisms.
In Ramona, the director and puppeteer once again calls on all his artistry to reveal the animation that resides in things and to give voice to the delicate feelings they experience.
In a train station somewhere in the USSR, Ramona, an optimistic locomotive, curious and quick, falls in love with a solid steel engine, Ermon.
ROBERTO ZUCCO / PROLOGUE, ABOUT THEATRE
Direction : Yann-Joël Collin
“I've looked for you, Roberto, I've looked for you, I've betrayed you, I've cried for you, cried to the point that I've become a tiny island in the middle of the sea, about to drown under the last waves.
I've suffered so much that my pain could fill the chasms of the earth and make the volcanoes spill over,” says the Girl to Roberto Zucco, a character based on an actual serial killer, exalted by Bernard-Marie Koltès's words.
A murderer without a motive, he decimated his own family, killed innocent citizens, and executed policemen.
On his quest to find himself, he meets a rebellious young girl with no identity, who falls in love with him: the Girl.
Her rage will lead her to lose herself for him in a place with the fateful name of Little Chicago. Around them, society growls and rumbles, even though it has shown itself to be incapable of containing the violence it creates.
How could it condemn what it has given birth to, adrift mothers and melancholic detectives, virginal big sisters or pimps for brothers?
So Zucco destroys, without any further excuse.
For this story inspired by a much too real tragedy, for those incomprehensible actions and through this character who commits more and more crimes, Yann-Joël Collin wanted every one of the students of the Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique to become a part of this monster.
On the stage, they'll present this desperate attempt at identification, which shines a light on what makes the human.
SADNESS AND JOY IN THE LIFE OF GIRAFFES
Text : Tiago Rodrigues Translation and direction : Thomas Quillardet
It all begins with the discovery made by Giraffe, a little girl nicknamed thus by her recently-deceased mother.
She's all of 9 years old, but that doesn't prevent her from unearthing this chaotically logical reasoning: “the man who is her father” is an out-of-work artist, he can't seem to “earn money,” which in turn prevents him from getting cable, “which isn't a luxury since you get access to things like Discovery Channel.”
And so Giraffe leaves, along with her teddy bear Judy Garland, on a quest to find money to pay for the subscription.
Her encounters in the streets of Lisbon help her understand that adults cannot solve all her problems, especially those that turn out to be more serious than a lack of money.
To follow the odyssey of this little girl, with her love for definitions and her wealth of questions, Thomas Quillardet draws the fluctuating map of her world and of the way she pictures it. Four actors drive this fairy tale without a moral, calling on numerous locations and characters to lead the child on the path to growing up.
Unsure whether the world is too small for her or if she's too big for it, Giraffe will ignore questions of scale to blaze her own trail: that of a peaceful vitality, of a restored confidence where sadness and joy come together to serve as the foundation of life...
DE MEIDEN
Text : Jean Genet / Translation : Marcel Otten Direction : Katie Mitchell
Katie Mitchell gives Jean Genet's reflections a European scope by moving his famous postwar maids from Madame's Parisian apartment to the centre of today's Amsterdam, where they become Polish.
When their mistress is away, Solange and Claire still play her role, one after the other, imitating her voice and mannerisms, mistreating her and each other...
But if Madame wears the clothes and attributes of a powerful boss, there is a clear inversion — in Katie Mitchell's reading, the play becomes more a reflection about patriarchal exploitation than about the domination of some women over others.
The deadly fate of the Papin sisters, which inspired Jean Genet's play, now echoes the situation of thousands of women, underpaid economic migrants who lead clandestine lives, crushed by those they have no choice but to depend on.
After getting rid of Monsieur by having him thrown into prison, the two maids plot to make Madame, his transvestite partner, disappear as well.
IMPROMPTU 1663
Direction : Clément Hervieu-Léger
Impromptu 1663, or, Molière and the uproar over The School for Wives, is first and foremost a date that could have remained forgotten in the history of theatre and political satire.
Molière, attacked from all sides after presenting The School for Wives, went on the offensive by teaching his opponents a real lesson in two steps.
He responded by writing and directing Critique of the School for Wives, followed by The Impromptu at Versailles.
When the theatre battles the world of theatre using theatre... It's a simple enough trick: in The Impromptu, Molière stages the rehearsal of a play before its performance in front of the King.
Molière plays his own role, surrounded by his whole troupe.
In Critique of the School for Wives, however, he dramatises the end of the performance and the argument between members of the audience enthralled or revolted by the play they just saw... Two more stunts to add to those the playwright keeps coming up with to respond to his contemporaries' attacks and reflect their own jealousy and malice back at them.
CLAIRE, ANTON, AND THEM
Direction : François Cervantes
A snowy morning, a war-torn landscape, the parquet of a ballroom... Bedrooms, hallways, streets, gardens, trains... Heavy coats, light dresses, aprons... Frenchmen, Spaniards, Moroccans, Algerians, Syrians, Hungarians...
Endless lists of men and women, of places and situations that François Cervantes asked the fourteen young actors of the Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique to make, based on their personal history. Thanks to a specific work on body memory, each of them summoned the people who made their lives, blood relations and poetic families alike.
All come back from their century, be it the 16th or the 20th... and the stage is their multitude.
“The job of the actor is to offer hospitality,” the director likes to say, defending the necessity and the responsibility of his trade: to always give stories the place that is rightfully theirs, to fulfill that urgent need we have to talk to one another.
BESTIE DI SCENA
Direction, design, stage design : Emma Dante
For a long time now Emma Dante's language has been made up of dialects, gestures, and accents.
It is a southern language, trivial and popular, which the Sicilian director ennobled with metaphors and pushed to its limits within surrealist situations.
Words, bodies, and rhythms which highlight, not without imagination, the brutality of the human comedy and which stand up to remind us of the social and political engagement of a community, whether a family or the community of the theatre.
With Bestie di scena, Emma Dante continues her quest for honesty.
No text, no set, no costumes, no music. But actors.
Actors left to their own devices, actors up to the challenge.
From backstage, objects, clothes, words come flying at them in unexpected ways.
Forced to survive just as the group falls apart, they start transforming over and over again: into animals, children, idiots...
For Emma Dante, who creates here a true poetic art in her quest for “the juice of drunkenness and torment,” actors are on the frontline of this attempt to break down the conventions of theatre. We are all those “imbeciles, without structure and without mask, facing the tragedies of the modern world.”
THE DAUGHTER OF MARS
Direction : Jean-François Matignon
“So many things stir in the hearts of women that are never meant to see the light of day!”
On the stage, the Amazon Penthesilea appears. She tells a story that took place long ago, the story of the siege of Troy.
There she fought Achilles, who died out of love for her, when the goal of the war was only to take prisoners so that children could be born.
Penthesilea and Achilles are dead now. It is there, near the bodies of the two lovers, that she comes back from after the disaster to tell its story.
She tells of the history of her people from their origins, of the law of the Amazons, of the last words of her mother Otrera, of her meeting Achilles, a blinding encounter on the battlefield, and of the upheaval it caused and how it led her to neglect her duty.
Penthesilea remembers the “shockwave,” the bodies struggling in lust, the scorched earth, a vibrant zone of stridency and screeches.
Till the end, thanks to the power of words, she will replay this deadly love, under the watchful eye of her confidante and lifelong friend Prothoe.
The words of Heinrich von Kleist, translated into French by Julien Gracq, give us to hear the desperate song of a woman torn between the culture that made her who she is and the white hot burn of the first man she ever met.
HAMLET
Text William Shakespeare, Olivier Py Theatrical creation workshops led by Olivier Py, Enzo Verdet
On 8 July 2016, the inmates of the prison of Avignon-Le Pontet perform Hamlet in the prison's gymnasium.
Months earlier, they registered for a dramatic creation workshop led by Olivier Py, unsure whether this adventure would survive the everyday reality of prison, but on this day they're asked to take a curtain call.
The audience, made up of prisoners, staff, and politicians, are moved by their tight version of Shakespeare's masterpiece.
Rallying around the cry of “Free Hamlet!”, some aren't afraid to express their desire to see this adventure continue beyond the walls of the prison, next summer, during the Festival d'Avignon itself.
All want a wider audience to share this intense version, rewritten “without blind spots” by the director, performed by ten men dressed just liked them and who bravely open up on a bare stage.
“It would be amazing,” says the actor playing Claudius.
A year later, their dream is within reach: the inmates on leave taking part in this human and artistic adventure will perform at the Maison Jean Vilar, on their very own stage.
An unprecedented situation?
“When I hear the trumpets of the Festival d'Avignon in prison, it's also unprecedented. Yet I feel like I'm at the very heart of our project of popular theatre: creating bonds,” says Olivier Py.
JULIET BEGINS
Text Grégoire Aubin Direction Marceau Deschamps-Ségura et Grégoire Aubin
“If our objective is a society that allows happiness, it won't be possible if we don't fight against (...) all oppressions, which begins by knowing them, proving they exist, denouncing them, presenting them on the stage, and taking them apart, piece by piece.” – Juliet.
In a city haunted by social inequalities, the King's death triggers a war for succession, a tearing apart of the kingdom, the overexposure of larger-than-life characters...
Hamlet, the disinherited son, rebels when Juliet, a young factory worker, loses Romeo, the love of her life. Wounded by systemic oppression, she demands justice...
With its Shakespearean bestiary and its stories of reconstruction, Juliet, the Beginning revolves around the question of the access to power for women and minorities.
Written by Grégoire Aubin, a young author as comfortable with method acting as with cinematic editing, and co-directed by Marceau Deschamps-Ségura, who trained as an actor at the Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique, this epic play was presented to the latter's entire class at the Conservatoire.
( 1 )Playing photos and comments from the Avignon Festival Archive.
( 2 ) For further information, please visit website : http://www.festival-avignon.com/fr/archives