A LECTURE : WHERE ARE THE MONSTERS ?
By and with: Xavier Le Roy
Production: Association Le Kwatt
As answer to the invitation by Ekatarina Trachsel and Gerald Siegmund to take part in the conference: "The Monstrous and the Theater – Stagings of Monstrous Bodies and Orders”, a lecture had been composed based on reflections on how we might experience monsters in our everyday lives, in dialogue with the reactivation of excerpts from previous works, thooughts and anecdotes in search of monsters or other creatures created for the occasion.
As artificial creatures in the realm of art, are monsters built to frighten, or constructed from fears? Can we trace how monsters confront our fears? How do monsters embody the unknown? How do they represent things we fear or cannot control? What do monsters do for us, emotionally and/or intellectually?
Maybe monsters escaped the fantasy world, the books, the movies, the stages. They once were the camouflage of our fears and they might have moved on to live in blurred spaces to become the camouflage of our daily life.
This lecture transformed into a performance: "A Lecture: Where are the monsters? » and became an excursion through the situation created for the occasion reflecting our actual world where monsters might be among us searching who can talk about what in which conditions. It looks for monsters and make necessary monsters to create a situation that is not anymore a lecture but maybe an environement within which we are invited to reevaluate our gaze on the other, our relationship to the strange, between the unacceptable and the acceptable, between the desirable and undesirable.
And if we accept that monsters can help us to ask the question about what is acceptable or desirable in human beings as well as in social contract they might help us to create a wished set of relationships between beings that we look for to overcome the fear of a collapse surrounding us?