danzon_eng

©  Katherine Longly A bunch of haiku: Not I  In a medium-sized courtyard at 9.15 a.m. Birds chirping, their shadows passing momentarily across the surface of the sunlit wall. Square wooden platform in the centre, L-shaped with spectators on either side; front row on the floor, back row on chairs. On the diagonal of the platform, a woman in a kimono-inspired dress sits on her knees with her back to the audience.  A minimalist stage with various objects: a bowl of onions, a fish, a long thin board, a cast steel carpenter's press, a white cloth. During the performance, other objects are added to these: a sharp steel knife, a glass and a bottle of wine hidden in the cloth. A meditation accompanied by a vague, scratchy soundscape (atmospheric sound design: Jean-Philippe Gross) emanating from mini-speakers placed at various points on the stage throughout the show; delicate, hard, sharp, stormy, soft, smooth, straight, sinuous, seemingly serene on the surface but harbouring tens...

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 ...

© Christophe Raynaud de Lage I was delighted to see the Compagnie Plexus Polaire at the 2023 edition of the Festival Off Avignon, a company I had never seen before but which had been on my radar ever since I came across the images of their adaptation of Moby Dick on the internet. The company was at the festival not with Moby Dick , but with Dracula - Lucy's Dream , an adaptation of another classic novel, Bram Stoker's famous Dracula . Performances took place at La Patinoire, which La Manufacture had temporarily converted from a skating rink into a theatre space, from 7 to 24 July, every day except Wednesday at 9.50 am. As the title suggests, the protagonist of the show is the beautiful and sexy Lucy, one of the minor characters in the novel, Count Dracula's first victim in England. Lucy is the friend of Jonathan Harker's fiancée Mina and is a sleepwalker.  The show begins directly in Lucy's dream, which she has one night while sleepwalking. Lucy sees herself in her...

© Antero Hein While two performers define the boundaries of the living room of a house with tape on the floor of the bare stage space, another performer transforms himself into an old and fat protagonist in the middle of the defined space, wearing a padded costume and spray-whitening his hair. Meanwhile, the fourth performer, respecting the boundaries of the living room, places an upside-down U-shaped piece of furniture at the back of the room, which we soon realise that it will represent a fireplace, and places an illuminated box with the word 2005 on the side facing us. One of the performers trips the performer who transformed into the old man and knocks him down, and the story begins: In 2005, an old man is choking to death on the floor of his living room. What follows is a collage-like narrative, going back and forth years, decades, centuries, millions of years, billions of years from 2005, consisting of the stories of people, plants, beings who have lived or will live in this livi...