Theatre 2009 Premiere by Wajdi Mouawad Stage director Wajdi Mouawad Montréal / Beyrouth / Chambéry
Skies
fourth part of the quartet
"Le Sang des promesses" (the Blood of Promises).
Talking
about the world, unwinding it, unfolding it still and always, like a
fresco. Anchoring yourself once again in history and in stories, in the
collective and the personal, to create a theatre of here and now. If
the final movement of Wajdi Mouawad’s Avignon quartet is part of this
continuity, it rings nonetheless like a counterpoint to the three
preceding works, to really make people hear that the world can also get
lost in looking for too much meaning, in wanting at any cost to recover
memory, in constantly running after the infinite. Whether it concerns
content or form, it is a new search that the author and director
begins, shutting up his characters in a unique, closed, stifling
setting where the world’s noises only enter through an
ultra-sophisticated wiretapping system that a major power has made
available to them to attempt to prevent a gigantic terrorist attack. A
genuine Tower of Babel where all languages mix, this high-security
place becomes the prison of these “listeners” who can only communicate
with their families through a video-conference system. In a new
scenography that will involve the audience, it is an equally new
writing that Wajdi Mouawad will propose. A polyphonic writing that will
be as much heard as seen since the texts, images and sounds blend into
each other to create a poetry of daily life, unlike Littoral, Scorched and Forests,
which made the relationship between the writing and the actor the
essential foundation of the performance. We are therefore invited to
undergo a theatrical experience at the very heart of a terrifying
enigma, at the very heart of this ultra-contemporary world that can
cause us distress and that the bracing theatre of Wajdi Mouawad,
located as close as possible to reality and as far as possible from
realism, makes fascinating. JFP
Wajdi Mouawad was 20 years old when he wrote his first play, Willy Protagoras, Shut up in the Lavatory.
20 years old, but a life already crossed by tragedies, displacements
and successive exiles. The Lebanese civil war that made him leave his
homeland for France at the age of 10; the repeated exile, then France
refusing to give him his residence papers after his having spent five
years in Paris, forcing him to leave again, this time for Canada. It
was therefore in Quebec that he continued his studies and obtained his
diploma from the École nationale de Théâtre de Montréal. Out of this
fragmented and, as he says, “unconsoled” childhood, this adolescence
marked by the death of a mother who was still young, the loss of an
abandoned native language and the acquisition of a necessarily foreign
one, out of all that and many other things besides, he created the
material for his writings. Sensitive to everything that surrounds him,
always on the alert, influenced by the cinema, literature as well as
painting, he has created a body of work composed of highly emotional
stories.
Stories that attempt to make the invisible visible, that
inextricably blend the intimate, the private, the social and the
psychic to talk about this pain that unites all men, this suffering
that lies at the very heart of the theatre, the one the Greeks invented
and that Wajdi Mouawad seems to perpetuate. At the junction of an
East where tales and stories are part and parcel of the daily life of
the collective culture and a Mediterranean West where legends have
become living and effective myths, he devours and reinvents these
influences. He imagines synopses that he offers to his actors, writing
the dialogues during rehearsals, taking into account proposals from
everyone who works with him. His burning narrations are therefore borne
by engaged actors who are able to free all the poetry in these
painstakingly chosen words, bearers of a heady madness, cleverly
constructed to create a blended tongue. But it is also by
confronting himself, as a director, to his masterly elders that Wajdi
Mouawad makes his way as a man of the theatre. Shakespeare (Macbeth), Cervantes (Don Quixote), Sophocles (The Trojans), Frank Wedekind (Lulu), Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author), Chekhov (Three Sisters), but also a few of his contemporaries, Louise Bombardier (My Mother Dog), Ahmed Ghazali (The Sheep and the Whale), Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting) and Edna Mazia (You Will Not Rape),
have been performed under his direction, by the companies he ran in
Quebec (Théâtre Ô Parleur then Théâtre de Quat’sous), before he set up
an original collaboration between his new Quebec company, Abé Carré Cé
Carré, and his French company, Au Carré de l’Hypoténuse. Preferring the
idea of a “mind director” to that of a stage director, he carries out with all his collaborators a work whose proclaimed aim is to
“contaminate the spectator.” In 2008, he took over from Denis Marleau
at the head of the Théâtre français du Centre national des Arts
d’Ottawa and titled his first editorial as director “We are in a war”
and the one for the next season “We are in need”. After having presented Littoral at the Festival in 1999, then Alone in 2008, he has come back to the Festival d’Avignon as associate artist to present the quartet The Blood of Promises, whose first three parts (Littoral, Scorched and Forests) will be performed on the same night in the Cour d’honneur of the Popes’ Palace, and the fourth, Skies, his new show, at the Châteaublanc-Parc des expositions during the second part of the Festival. JFP
Châteaublanc - Parc des expositions
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22h from 18/07 to 19/07 22h from 21/07 to 24/07 22h the 26/07 17h from 27/07 to 29/07
More about the show Light meals and beverages available at the site The seats, incorporated into the décor, are not very comfortable
Text and direction Wajdi Mouawad Dramaturgy Charlotte Farcet Direction assistance Alain Roy Artistic advice François Ismert Artistic superviser Pierre Ziadé Scenography Emmanuel Clolus Music Michel F Côté Lighting Philippe Berthomé Sound Michel Maurer Costumes Isabelle Larivière Video realisation Dominique Daviet Video creation Adrien Mondot
With John Arnold, Georges Bigot, Valérie Blanchon, Olivier Constant, Stanislas Nordey and on the video Gabriel Arcand, Victor Desjardins production Anne Lorraine Vigouroux (France) Maryse Beauchesne (Quebec)
Text published by éditions Actes Sud-Papiers (mid-July)
Production Au Carré de l’Hypoténuse and Abé Carré Cé Carré Executive production Espace Malraux, Scène nationale de Chambéry et de la Savoie as Wajdi Mouawad is its associate artist Coproduction Théâtre français/Centre national des Arts d’Ottawa, le Grand T Scène conventionnée de Loire-Atlantique, Célestins Théâtre de Lyon, Théâtre National de Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées, MC2 Grenoble, la Comédie de Clermont-Ferrand. Support Ministère des Relations internationales du Québec, Service de Coopération et d’Action culturelle du Consulat général de France à Québec, Région Rhône-Alpes and Hexagone Scène nationale de Meylan
More about the show
