Three theatre pieces from the Festival Off Avignon 2023

A man risen from the ashes: Poussière 

Poussière (Dust), on the programme of the Théâtre du Train Bleu, one of Festival Off Avignon's prestigious venues, is a 40-minute puppet show directed by Sophie Mayeux, who is also the founder of the Compagnie Infra company. 

Performed in a 60-70-seat hall, Poussière takes place inside a transparent cylinder, a capsule, I assume made of plastic, about one metre in diameter and one and a half metres high, placed in the centre of the stage (set design: Ionah Mélin). In the prologue we witness the end of the world; it could be a nuclear war, a rebellion of nature or a volcanic eruption. Smoke, dust and ash envelop the cylinder; you can't see a thing. In the same way that Phia Ménard, whose work I love, controls the flow of air in her show L'après-midi d'un foehn, a choreography of smoke and dust is created by directing the flow of air inside the cylinder. Then the curtain goes down and when it rises again we see a post-apocalyptic landscape inside the transparent cylinder; a pile of sand with ruins and a dry tree. For the next half hour, we watch as a man (puppet design: Alma Rocella) emerges from the remains on the pile of sand, first with a sand-coloured head and then with other sand-coloured parts of his body.

© Aurélie Michou

Poussière tells in a simple way the story of a man trying to get back on his feet after a disaster. The puppeteers (Coline Ledoux and Tim Hammer), completely dressed in black, with only their hands through the holes at the back of the transparent cylinder, help the man to put his limbs back together, to stand up, to face his loneliness and to continue standing with hope. And this barren and lifeless geography begins to blossom with the man's hope...

In Poussière, Sophie Mayeux, who says in her introduction to the show that she was inspired by the petrified remains of human bodies from the eruption of the volcano in Pompeii, presents the audience with a simple but timeless story of striking beauty and poetry in a complicated setting that requires a masterful execution.

The glamour of discovery: Sous le plancher

Sous le plancher (Under the floorboard), the second show I saw in the intimate chamber theatre of the Théâtre du Train Bleu, is an example of object theatre. This 35-minute show by the children's and young people's theatre company Le bel après-minut premiered in March 2023 and was directed by Bénédicte Guichardon, who is also the company's founder.

The show begins with a musician (the inimitable Christine Moreau) sitting at a table at the side of the stage with all sorts of objects, instruments, microphones and sound controllers, imitating a radio broadcast. Moreau plays the radio station's jingle, makes a sound effect and then announces the programme to follow: a conversation with a guest expert on the workings of the brain, particularly boredom. Meanwhile, the male actor (Daniel Callabos), wandering among the large and small boxes scattered around the stage, takes on the role of a bored little boy. When the female actor (Laurette Tessier) soon enters the stage, the two of them open the boxes one by one with the excitement of discovery, relieving their boredom and surprising us with each new situation that emerges from the boxes, as if we were all turning the pages of a three-dimensional picture book together.

© Nicolas Guillemot

The fact that the content of the radio programme, which is specifically about the functioning of the brain, does not progress and that the situations that emerge from the boxes are not connected by a spinal narrative are the weaknesses of the show from a dramaturgical point of view, but it is impossible not to be captivated by the magic and poetry of the visual world created on stage with light, shadows, reflections, sounds, wind, smoke, water and objects (e.g. different types of lenses, glass test tubes). As fascinating as the visual world itself, made up of pieces like haiku, was, seeing how they were created on stage was also a fascinating part of the show.

The design of each box with its contents (Odile Stemmelin in collaboration with the director Bénédicte Guichardon), the colouring and crowding of the initially calm, serene but undefined space with objects and reflections (Odile Stemmelin's scenography is very successful and creative), and the depth of the initially uneventfully lit space (lighting design: Bryan Jean-Bapstiste) are other commendable features of the show.

A slap in the face to capitalism with its own weapon: Blockbuster 

Since its premiere in 2015, Collectif Mensuel's Blockbuster has been shown 260 times, mainly in Belgium but also in many French cities, and 18 times as part of the programme of La Manufacture in Avignon.

In Blockbuster, the Collectif Mensuel team has created a brand new film of about 70-75 minutes by editing 1400 shots from 160 Hollywood blockbusters. As you might expect, this film features all the big names in Hollywood, from Al Pacino to Harrison Ford, from Meryl Streep to Judi Dench, from Julia Roberts to Brad Pitt. Of course, the film has nothing to do with any of these films and has a screenplay freely inspired by Nicolas Ancion's novel Invisibles et remuants. 

Collectif Mensuel has created an anti-capitalist discourse out of the products of wild capitalism; a film that resists the neo-liberal order that oppresses the working class every day and declares war on the actors of this order: bosses, industrialists, politicians. It is a film that can be watched with great pleasure and laughter because, throughout the film, famous Hollywood actors speak lines that you cannot hear coming out of their mouths in any Hollywood film. How does this happen? While the film is playing on a big screen at the back of the stage, all the lines, sounds, music and effects in the film are produced by three actors and two musicians dubbing live at the front of the stage. The stage is full of objects and microphones used during the dubbing. 

Collectif Mensuel extends the collectivity by involving the audience in the dubbing. At the very beginning of the performance, the audience is asked to make three sounds: clapping, shouting and saying "Tous ensemble! (All together), which are recorded at that moment and played back on tape during the film.

© Dominique Houcmant 

The three actors and two musicians, Sandrine Bergot, Baptiste Isaia, Xavier Foucher, Quentin Halloy and Philippe Lecrenier, all members of the Collectif Mensuel and therefore co-directors of the show, perform an incredible feat on stage: they translate the fast-paced film into sound without losing a single detail. Watching the film in the background while following their performance in the foreground multiplies the pleasure of the show.

The last minutes of the story in the film bring the narrative surprisingly to the place where the show is taking place, and so Blockbuster does not fall into the trap of the function of numbing the audience/society by entertaining them with cinema, which is perhaps the most basic task that capitalism has imposed on the Hollywood blockbuster. It also criticises this situation.

It is not surprising that in our world, where the wind of brutal neoliberalism blows fiercely a show like Blockbuster comes from a Belgian theatre company, a neighbour of France, which has been oppressed and impoverished for years under the administrations of first Sarkozy and then Macron, but which continues to rebel against these policies with persistent protests!

[The original version of this article in Turkish was published in Tiyatro Tiyatro Dergisi on 22nd August 2023.

Please click for the link of the article.]