Week_End « Ça monstre ! » > First productions

First production /
Performance - Theatre
Pascale Henry / Cie Les Voisins du dessous
« C'est pour rire » ("Doing it for a laugh")
A “monstrous” selection

Pascale Henry, writer and director, believes in the power of words. Her phrasing probes, flips over, explores, and digs into the corners of humankind. Breathless or ornate, it goes straight for where it hurts, where it detects fakeness or hollowness. No drama with Henry, only well-balanced humour, subtlety, a bit of cruelty, and finally love, which would like to avoid overflows. "C’est pour rire" was inspired by a story about words, which are turned upside down to hit you in the face. A course in prison unveils that words are more safely guarded than people. These freakish, witty words are designed to savagely defend towers of hope for compliance. In fact, it is a theatre show both light and scathing.

Fri 9pm / Sat 7:30pm / Sun 5pm

Duration: 30 minutes approx.

Interview Sonore

Retrouvez prochainement la voix des artistes qui feront la saison des Subsistances.
Des interviews audios pour découvrir leur projet, leur recherche

Before directing and writing, Pascale Henry worked for several years as a theatre actor and participated to various musical projects. She founded Les Voisins du dessous in 1989, and gives it a singular direction with alternative texts medleys, adaptations, original plays and her own written work for theatre. This singular background was build with time, thanks to the faithful support of theatres, institutions and persons who liked her work, and was played abroad several times (“Un Riche trois pauvres” in Syria, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, “Les Tristes Champs d’asphodèles” in Spain, and “Inconnu à cette adresse” in Quebec). She is currently preparing for January 2008 an adaptation of a book by Lyonel Trouillot (an author from Haiti), called "Thérèse en mille morceaux".

“We are made of language.
And words put us under house arrest.
Why else, in the language of prison inmates, would mealtimes be called the time of the “gamelle” (dog bowl)? Why this word, usually used for dogs?
Somewhere in language lies our presence in the world.
There was the language of Hitler, and there is the language of poets.
In both, creatures have come to life.
In which language do we now evolve? In which grammar do we take form?
This will be the focus of my project.
The monstrosity of Hitler’s language did not appear to those who identified with it and found a reason for their existence in it. Apparent monstrosity usually keeps you away from others...
We can just make out, although we don’t want to believe - how could we believe it? - in a new monstrosity in the language, which touches us and secretly organises our relationships with others.
Of course, this monstrosity fails to be obvious to us: how could it be different when our reason for living is finding shelter within it?
Is it possible that monstrosity stands within the simple enslavement of the means and effects of language, at the service of a project that doesn’t involve humans anymore (not even a human being versus another) but that tries to eradicate them to better abuse them?
Evil. "
Pascale Henry

Scripted and Directed by: Pascale Henry
With Stéphane CZOPECK and Pascale HENRY
Assistant: Yann de GRAVAL
Lighting and Stage Manager: Léo VAN CUTSEM

Co-production & Residence: Les Subsistances / Lyon / France

Les Voisins du dessous is subsidised by the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication (DRAC Rhône-Alpes), Conseil général de l’Isère and Ville de Grenoble and supported by the Conseil régional Rhône-Alpes

› Les artistes en résidence en 2006 /2007