What is at the source of this new production?
I wanted to examine the possibility of an insular universe and at the same time to continue my work on where lies intimacy. My current work is based on Perec’s Espèce d’espaces. Also, opera is very present. I started to list intimate geographies in order to create an object-based, song-based, sound-based opera.

Can you explain in more details this notion of opera?
I am standing in a moment of change, at a breaking point. Depuis hier, 4 habitants, which I performed at the Avignon Festival, was to a certain extent the end of a chapter. Nowadays, I see this « opera of objects » as a reinvention. To me, it is an opera beyond-the-music. I feel like refining my work on visual structures, I want to create a choir space, to use sound objects. I also feel like examining more closely our relationship with the music and maybe introduce some speech or maybe some singing.

What are these islands?
To me, the idea of the island is not linked to the sea but to the shore. It represents a self-sufficient space, cut off from the outside world, where people spend their whole life together under other people’s scrutiny. However, it is also a place where you may live in a community. This insular feeling seems very precise to me.

The notion of territory often appears in your shows...
A place to me is also an identity. I work a lot on an “elsewhere” that is impossible to localise. But this is not an evanescent place, rather it is a place which retains a strong sense of the ordinary. I still have a lot of difficulty talking openly about the ordinary world that made me. I cannot say « I », so I speak about an elsewhere. At the same time, my plays revolve around things that are mine, and that I cannot disown. When someone asks me, I always say my dad was a miner in the Moselle region. I believe my theatre is driven by a deep desire to keep track of things, which gets twisted. There is no place more insular than a mining town. There is a lot of isolation; you have a school for ordinary workers’ children and a different school for the foremen’s children. It’s a mind-numbing and reassuring autarchy. I find the same thing on islands. It stirs up a lot of emotions.

But this is not your life anymore...
Trying to recreate ordinary life is not nostalgia, it’s the opposite of parody. I show no irony, I remember seeing the stars on Tupperware lids as a truly beautiful thing. And this thing is still more precious to me today than new objects. My universe is a big jumble of things, like the precious rabbit skull that I found as a child and for which I imagined a life. It was primitive, ritualistic and ordinary, just as the theatre plays I now write.

The Turak is known for the research work it has done on the Object for 25 years. It was founded by Michel Laubu, and aims to incorporate puppetry, physical theatre and visual exploration. Turak’s artistic approach revolves around a game played with the used object, for all types of audiences. Projects created at Les Subsistances: Vieux spectacles sur l’établi, 17 bis rue du dortoir d’Îles (Les Intranquilles Festival 2005), L’heure où les pingouins vont boire and Stirptiz. Turak has performed Depuis hier, 4 habitants at the Avignon Festival (2006).

“The exact desire to have a “big intimate stage” is part of my preoccupations and leads me to examine the form this new show should take. The five manipulators/actors will play a group of characters who will be the great figures of this unusual, insular, custom-made mythology – a sort of pocket mythology, a ‘Swiss-army-knife’ mythology.” Michel Laubu.

Written, designed and directed by Michel Laubu.

With the help of Emili Hufnagel.
With Laurent Bastide, Carlo Bondi, Patrick Murys, Charly Frénéa, Emmeline Beaussier.
Music by Raphaël Vuillard and Brice Duval.
Lighting by Dominique Legland. Videos by Alexis Bergeron.
Props and set built by Charly Frénéa, Emmeline Beaussier, Géraldine Bonneton, Bill, Jean-Pierre Belin, Jean-Marie Baudean.
Costumes by Emili Hufnagel, Mathilde Gallay Keller, Nathalie Trouve.

Produced by Turak Théâtre.

Coproduced by Les Subsistances / Lyon / France, le TNT - Théâtre National de Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées, Château Rouge à Annemasse, Les Scènes du Jura, Agora - Scène Nationale d'Evry et de l'Essonne.
With the help and support of Allan – Scène Nationale de Montbéliard. Turak Théâtre is subsidised by the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication and DRAC Rhône-Alpes and is funded by Ville de Lyon. Turak also regularly receives the support of the AFAA for its foreign projects.