Two silhouettes in the dark, voices diffracted by a sound reverberation… A ghostly couple tears apart. These characters, their words sharper than daggers, are the protagonists of a play. What are their names ? Thierry Sabatier does not remember it, nor the title of the play. The intimate explosion it caused, on the other hand, is indelible. Did Thierry really attend this show? As the narrative of the performance gradually merges with elements of its own history, the question is swept away by the attraction of what is playing out in the present on the set.
In Versailles, a very attractive “Dandin”
Invisible Life, Directed by Lorraine de Sagazan and co-written with Guillaume Poix, juggles the real and the imaginary, at the same time as it filigree questions the layers that make up the fabric of a life. Their project was born during a workshop, carried out at the Comédie de Valence, with a group of visually impaired spectators around the notion of perception. Finally, one of them, Thierry, became the hero of the show and it is alone, first of all, that he presents himself to the public, calling him kindly: “And you, do you trust thatyou see ? He barely remembers his own features, which the mirrors haven’t reflected back to him for a long time.
Meanders of memory
He shares the stage with two professional actors, Chloé Olivères and Romain Cottard, who help him redraw the characters in the mystery play. It is one of the last that Thierry saw with his mother, before her death. He was in his twenties and she whispered trying to tell him what was happening on the boards. In his own role, white cane in hand, smiling towards the audience, Thierry confides in him while Chloe and Romain generously replay the scraps that have resurfaced from his memory.
→ LARGE FORMAT. The father, the mother, the servant… 400 years later, Molière’s family has not aged a bit.
The invisible life is a unique experience where the starting subject (the perception of reality by the visually impaired), the intimacy of a man with a heavy family past, the twists and turns of memory, the complexity of feelings but also behind the scenes of the process of creation. The whole, seemingly convoluted, a bit of a catch-all, reveals itself in depth of remarkable finesse. The verb as much as the silences and the gestures sculpt a space of great humanity. In his exposure, paradoxically very modest, Thierry handles both humor and emotion. When he describes his way of “looking” at faces, or closes his eyes when listening to his father’s sentences, the audience stops their breath, as if to hold back the richness of the moment.
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