It has neither tail nor head! Neither beginning nor end and the two characters have the appearance which ripples! Panic on board, here are the territories of the absurd dawning in the distance, with its soft and distressing, funny and violent reliefs. When we remember this surreal journey to the sound of the theremin, one of the oldest electronic musical instruments, dreamlike flashes persist. Attention the visions which will follow ofSo the fight, show directed and performed by Lionel Dray, actor for Sylvain Creuzevault and Jeanne Candel, and actress and musician Clémence Jeanguillaume, are approximate. They have the evanescence of dreams and the logic of the exquisite corpse. Here is a man in a gray suit and the floury face of a sad clown who repairs the world from father to son. And here’s a woman called “Madam Oh-là,” with fried egg eyes, who thinks she’s the queen of mice. Their patched clothes and dusty faces recall those of small officials in Gogol’s pranks, who travel the world with despair and poetry. On several occasions, they kiss full on the lips and each time, Clémence Jeanguillaume finds himself with half of his head full of flour. Love: that feeling where faces are dripping onto those of others.
“I’m afraid of losing my face”, one thinks moreover hear them say. With the incredible panoply of masks they dress up, a Greek statue, a bizarre hairy and earthy monster, cartoon characters that they mime behind a few lines of makeup drawn on a window, they are far from following the marked out canvas of psychological works. Illogicality upon illogicality creates a feeling of vertigo. The existential void combines with the aberrations of their imagination. These clowns imbued with Kafka string together their sketches made up of non-events, ordinary details and endless parentheses. We could believe them above ground or out of time. In all humility, the duo just take six steps back from society, talk about death, fragmented identity and an irreparable world. How to bring a coherent discourse on things when you do not already really understand its existence?
We then float with them, in a tiled room which has only one wall, a right angle in suspension, an anteroom of the unconscious, a proletarian version of that of 2001, a space odyssey with floor lamp and earthenware plates. In this indecipherable universe, only literary and cinematographic references serve as a rudder: the K by Dino Buzzati, the blue face of Pierrot le fou, Buster Keaton, paintings by Salvador Dalí… Those who have had the chance to see the Sundays of Monsieur Dézert, Lionel Dray’s first creation who unfortunately no longer turns, will recognize his clown, imitator of Jean-Luc Godard or of a psychopomp with a hyena’s head. It’s like finding a comic book character on new adventures. In this unpublished volume, he is next to a White Lady with a bloody dress and, like any self-respecting specter, only a strong and imprecise memory remains. In short: mysterious.