« Cannibales »

“My style is very visual and feeds on visual arts. For several years now, the people I work with and I have tried, each in their own medium, to produce a visual universe as exacting as it is accessible. Each and every time, we invent a new way to work together. Far from director’s despotism or absurd collectivism, we implement a theatre drawing on multiple skills, where the lighting becomes an integral part of the way the play unfolds, where the text is at the heart of the stage rather than being at its centre, and where the director is involved in the show rather than hijacking it. We refuse plain narratives, illusions and lies that traditionally exist in theatre and its characters, but we choose to use instead fragmented texts, visual poetry, speech and sincerity.” David Bobee


Cannibales, for me, is the third chapter of an adventure that started five years ago with David Bobee and Compagnie Rictus. We often say that our theatre is “political”. This is in part due to the content of our shows and the message they carry, but also to our peculiar ways of working. I never write very far from the stage itself. Even before I start writing, I’ve often thought already of a system, a scenography, topics that we’d like to work on, etc. Consequently, I write at the very heart of the theatre machine, while working with lighting and sound engineers, actors, and the director, in order to be contaminated by them, and to be in direct contact with the living, the present. While I am writing, I rewrite things constantly, I adjust parts, I adapt others, I delete and put back things according to what other people tell me. This habit fits perfectly in my project: at the risk of becoming irrelevant or perishable, my writing has to be absolutely true to the here and now. It also seems to me that these collective proceedings allow us to truly call this theatre “political”. I once said that David, and probably the actors themselves, “wrote” through me, just as I may be writing through them...” Ronan Chéneau.

“I would like to see something finally happen, anything, as long as it stops... If the world is on the road to ruin, then so be it, que sera sera. Anything but this, please could something, anything, happen... Something worrying, magnificent. Something horrible. And I would be elsewhere, anywhere else but here. Anywhere. But not in this world here, not in this universe. Here, now, stuck here, in this white, putrefied, middle-class culture. It’s unbearable. It makes me want to scream. It’s unbearable, this way of living by accumulating, protecting oneself, giving ourselves importance by owning, accumulating and handling everything carefully. All this hypocrisy, all these dishonest compromises, and this way of thinking this is totally normal, that we don’t have a choice it’s normal and it’s the way things are. It’s sickening. All this shit, every day, the need to buy, get, furnish, embellish, decorate. This “natural” state of affairs... They tell me everybody has to go through it, it’s a normal stage, that it’s nice to be cosy sometimes, to go home and see that everything is all clean and practical and tidy, not to mention visually pleasing. A lost ideal, a lost humanity. Cheaply exchanged for this crock, for all these knick-knacks, these pretences, this fake luxuries...”

As a Performing Arts student at the University of Caen, David Bobee presented his first show as part of the University theatre festival, Je ta(b)îme. He then created several performances and presented Jean- Pierre Siméon’s Stabat Mater at the venue Puzzle in Caen. Following studies at the CDN school in Caen, he became Eric Lacascade’s assistant on two Chekhov productions, The Seagull and Platonov. As early as 2001, he wrote, in partnership with Ronan Chéneau, Res/persona, Fées and Cannibales, a trilogy of three independent plays.
David Bobee and Ronan Chéneau are two of those artists who shake up the codes of contemporary theatre and mix with great inventiveness the written word and various different art forms (video, new technologies, circus, dance, visual arts). Together, they have developed their work on the position of individuals in the world, and the quest for social identity... They renewed the concept of a political theatre. In September 2007, they presented Petit Frère at Les Subsistances.