UNTITLED (2014)
Conceived and performed by: Xavier Le Roy
Technical director: Bruno Moinard
Mannequins by: Coco Petitpierre
Rehearsal assistant: Scarlet Yu
Organization: Vincent Cavaroc and Fanny Herserant - Illusion & Macadam
Production: Le Kwatt
Coproduction: Théâtre de la Cité Internationale - Paris, Festival d'Automne à Paris 2014, PACT Zollverein - Essen, Kaaitheater - Brussels, Festival Theaterformen Hanovre.
Le Kwatt is supported by the Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles d'Ile-de-France
Sometimes sitting in a theatre watching a performance I say to myself, “What an odd set up this is, people sitting in the dark watching others doing things in the light.” Feeling the importance of this moment when human beings are brought together to form a community often follows this thought. This sense of attending an event together for an hour or more is becoming rare and precious in our time. At these occasions I have often the impression that I have to relearn being together from and for this situation. But at the same time, the terms of that situation seem to insist on the solitude of people caught in the trap of individualism. The dividing lines between the public and the actors, fiction and reality, truths and beliefs, life and death, object and subject, forgetting and remembering seem to want to be repeated and to confirm the divisions. The three pieces of this evening try to displace these lines so that the sense of being stuck is transformed into the possibility of moving. For this purpose, in each piece a factor needed for habits to function is removed to produce three situations in which the habitual relationship and exchanges of this gathering (spectators and actors) are no longer self-evident and must therefore be re-negotiated. Each of the pieces hinge on the loss, disappearance, or death of an essential protagonist. The words and actions composing the works are motivated by the need to reconstruct with the remaining elements rather than to set out and find or replace what’s missing. The actors and the public are then engaged in mourning and conversations whose transformations try to turn melancholy, loss, or death into driving forces. These movements yield fictions where amnesiacs mix with corpses to produce uncanny and unsettling situations.