"EST" de E.Savitzkaya / Hélène Mathon

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"EST" by E.Savitzkaya

Hélène Mathon

Cie La Langue Ecarlate

Presentation

Interview

Background, Cast and Crew

Price, duration

Theatre / Concert - Acoustic Poetry

9, 10, 11 october 2009

Fri 9.15pm, sat 8.30pm, sun 5pm

HÉLÈNE MATHON / COMPAGNIE LA LANGUE ÉCARLATE

Are you? Are you mortal? How are you mortal? Are you forever mortal?

Est by Eugène Savitzkaya is a text made of 925 questions, a choir of interrogations which could be the basis of our world. For this text, Hélène Mathon and the team of company La Langue Écarlate have invented a scenario including four musicians, one actress and ten amateur actors of various origins and ages. They share with the audience the same space, where the usual barriers of representation are abolished, and where they develop every night a new and original soundtrack while asking each us to get involved. With their voices, their instruments and other sounds, they show how their perception of the world sways.

With great simplicity, they fuse fears, bodies and questions in order to encourage the spectator to come up with potential answers.

See synopsis (pdf in french/88kb)

In residence: 18 Sept - 11 Oct 2009

How would you define the text that you will be working on?

Hélène Mathon: It’s a series of 925 questions, a non-narrative if you like, where it is up to the listener to weave the questions together. What I like in this form is that we have a series which may have begun before the start of the show and which may carry on after the end. Also, Eugène Savitzkaya’s style is very melodic. It is a product of meaning as well as of sound, and it is precisely through sound that we want the audience to enter the text.

The show will also be a musical piece. How will that work?

The music is composed collectively by musicians and amateur actors with whom I work. We will pave the way for a structure which will remain on each occasion both fragile and new. The idea is that of a ‘cinema for the ears’, i.e. a sound path that accompanies and extends the words by appealing to the listener through his sensitivity.

You define the show as a performative, does that mean you are leaving theatre behind?

Yes, more and more. I feel like I am in a place that is less compartmentalised, less dependent on its heritage than theatre. Maybe this is a delusion, but I also feel freer, possibly because I agree to be more fragile. Performance art, whose character is to be constantly reinvented, allows me to expand the field of imagination and to get rid of standard codes of representation. I believe it just suits me better.

Voluntarily you are creating a very unstable, uncertain form...

Yes, it is a personal feeling with which I feel like working. I realise I have very few certainties on what would be worth telling nowadays, if anything. M main aim is to create the conditions for a state of ‘togetherness’, to facilitate moments of sharing, of personal experiences of a collective reality, when the audience is free to offer feedback. Concretely, this means that some people may leave, others may talk or fall asleep, I don’t know. It is a necessary risk because, deep down, life is risks.

These life risks, is it to ask collectively questions which have no answers?

Questions are collective, only answers are personal. Life risks are to recognise that questions are what constitute our existence. This can make your head spin, and if we cannot come up with an answer, we can however invent conditions in which to share this feeling.

What is the place of the spectators, physically at least?

The spectator can share the space with us, he comes and goes as he/she pleases, he may sit down, stand up, lie down; in brief, choose the most favourable position to listen or the position which best matches his state of mind. This is when he actually escapes his assigned role of ‘spectator’: it is human beings, individuals we are talking to. I believe that as you escape your assigned role, you start to find movement, i.e. the movement of thought foremost. I feel like this may allow individuals to find in this proposal something echoing their own concerns and their own experience of uncertainty and therefore elements allowing them to face them head-on. We wish to share the start of a journey where things can progress.