Olivier Cadiot & Ludovic Lagarde

Fleeing the middle ground, Ludovic Lagarde is an artist of contrasts: his theatre shimmers, his voices burst, like colours, laughter or violence. To moderation or the half-tint, he prefers excesses, even if it means being familiar with the baroque and confronting artifice. He started with Beckett (Three Little Dramas), Brecht (The Caucasian Chalk Circle) Bond (Olly's Prison), then met Olivier Cadiot, from whom he commissioned Sisters and Brothers in 1993. The modus operandi of their collaboration was established with The Colonel of the Zouaves, in 1998, when the writer's novels became genuine plays in the director's hands: the latter adapted, staged, plunged in his own way into the text material, to offer his favourite actor, Laurent Poitrenaux, registers of voices, visions, reminiscences and ceremonies, as brilliant as they are profound and joyous. Next followed Definitive and Durable Return of the Loved One, then Fairy Queen, premiered in 2004 at the Festival d'Avignon, at the same time as Yes Is for a Very Young Man, a play by Gertrude Stein that Olivier Cadiot translated into French. Concurrently, Ludovic Lagarde, trainer and discoverer of actors, kept up his pedagogical activity. Director of the Comédie de Reims since January 2009, he has also worked with the musical director Christophe Rousset to stage French baroque operas, with Pascal Dusapin for the revival of his Romeo & Juliet at the Opéra Comique, with Wolfgang Mitterer for the creation of his Massacre and he just premiered Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights in March 2010, a rock opera after Gertrude Stein. At Avignon, Ludovic Lagarde also directed in 2005 readings with young actors of Belgian texts, staged Richard III by the Flemish Peter Verhelst at the Cloître des Carmes in 2007 and staged the final-year show of the ERAC (Regional Actors School of Cannes) in 2008 in the framework of Drama Schools at the Festival.

ADB, April 2010