How are the TNS students doing? From one public outing to another, we begin to know the names and faces of the group 47, which is preparing to leave the nest this year. The program presented at the end of March, just for the arrival of spring, gives us the opportunity to hear from sixteen of them. This quasi-impromptu puts side by side the restitution of work with a mask guided by Marc Proulx and a carte blanche on the initiative of five students of the promotion, all sections mixed.
Behind a semi-opaque curtain, students can be seen performing acrobatic jumps and lifts. ” I try to make them do dangerous things », explains the one who gave his first internship in the Strasbourg institution in 1992, detailing a teaching concerned with the body and its presence on the set. When they cross the threshold of this great veil, the five actors (Yanis Bouferrache, Felipe Fonseca Nobre, Vincent Pacaud, Naïsha Randrianasolo, Thomas Stachorsky) are made up with half-masks and each in turn draw figures that are both comic and pathetic, whose appearances draw on the principles of Noh. At the edge of a semi-circular stage, the professor assumes the role of a hourwith his face uncovered, who is visited by his shitethese ghostly apparitions specific to the genre.
There’s an old man who says he paid for every wall of the theater out of his own pocket, a clumsy and embarrassed child, two old fallen stars in need of attention. Masks fall in public view. The teacher guides the students aloud, maintains improvised exchanges. And tries to manage the meeting between each actor and his ” piece of wood as he calls them. ” There are two dimensions of the mask: what is seen from the outside, and what is experienced inside. It’s the second aspect that interests me., he explains. In this case, some characters emerge, others do not. The exercise authorizes these failures, and in the interval which separates the test from its accomplishment lies the interest of the experience: we see a pedagogy in the making. The teacher, for his part, defends a method that works on the depth of the psyche of the students and seeks to tap into the intimate, which, he specifies, ” is not personal “. Each encounter with the mask must be experienced as the first and the actor must, in the time given to him, go as far as possible. ” When the actor does not go completely, most often he is right, concludes the teacher. It’s just that he’s not ready. You have to respect that. »
Cutting up men
The danger was central to the carte blanche initiated by a group of five students, who all decided to tackle the deliberately theatrical figure of Valerie Solanas. Both because an attempted murder is at the center of this one’s story, and because the material it left behind begs to be matched by some level of theatrical elation. In 1967, the very irritated free electron began to slip under the New York coats a self-published pamphlet, the SCUM obviously, which has become a cult totem in the pantheon of radical feminism. In a fiery literary gesture between provocative propaganda and science fiction, by posing men as a biological error, Solanas details his project for a radical short-circuiting of the society of which they are supporters. The manifesto of Society for cutting up men is a call to murder and the sketch of a world undone by capitalist power structures. A year later, the author achieves her second great feat of arms by firing three bullets into the stomach ofAndy Warholtraumatizing the artist for the rest of his life.
Opening with a loop of a few ads from a not-so-distant era, where the macho imagination of the agencies is so strong that almost surreal visions end up emanating from it, the show puts five young women on the set, not just the actresses . This is the first bias of Beretta 68written collectively from the play Valérie Jean Solanas will become President of America of Sara Stridsberg and a host of other references: composing a group where the precise role of each is not specified since everything, one imagines, was built without assigned roles. So Manon Poirierstudent of the management-creation department, does she play a grotesque prosecutor in front of the actresses jade emmanuel et Manon Xardel, who play Solanas and Warhol respectively. The rest of the distribution (Loïse Beauseigneur, Lea Bonhomme, Jeanne Daniel-Nguyen, Valentine But, Charlotte Moussie) finds its place as well. In the middle of a composite plateau lined with washing machines no longer serving as a platform, and on which a scaffold, in the courtyard, evokes the urban structures of New York surmounted by their displays, this improvised collective within the TNS intertwines the biographical narrative with short scenes of collective reflection, and reactivates the questions posed by said Society for cutting up men by summoning, for example, the memory of Jacqueline Sauvage.
The problem that arises today around sunnyfierce opponent of politeness, is that of the forced dulling of one’s thought by dint of exegeses, rehashing and diversions (we think back to the periodically brilliant American Horror Storya potential indicator of the absorption of marginal cultures into the mainstream, where a Lena Dunham decked out in a wig reenacted the attempted assassination of Warhol). And this proposal which intends to confront the political use of violence, a little too polite, struggles to meet this challenge and reconnect fully with the radicalism of the initial material. We will nevertheless salute the composition of a rather egalitarian set beyond the specialties of each, which composes a choral and feminist parenthesis that is altogether invigorating. Next step: the entire class meets in May for The aesthetics of resistance of Peter Weissin a staging that promises to be ample, signed Sylvain Creuzevault.
Samuel Gleyze-Esteban – Special Envoy to Strasbourg
Intuition, friction, papillon, restitution of a game workshop directed by Marc Proulx
TNS – Studio Jean-Pierre Vincent
18 Rue Jacques Kable
67000 Strasbourg
Acting: Yanis Bouferrache, Felipe Fonseca Nobre, Vincent Pacaud, Naïsha Randrianasolo, Thomas Stachorsky
Scenography and costumes: Sarah Barzic
Sound: Simon Anquetil
Light and general management: Arthur Mandô
Stage management assistant: Loïc Waridel
Support in thought: Gabriel Dahmani, Jonathan Bénéteau De La Prairie, Hameza El Omari
Beretta 68collective creation
TNS – Jeanne Laurent Hall
1 Avenue de la Marseillaise
67000 Strasbourg
Carte blanche initiated by Loïse Beauseigneur, Léa Bonhomme, Jeanne Daniel-Nguyen, Jade Emmanuel, Valentine Lê, Charlotte Moussié, Manon Poirier and Manon Xardel, student actresses, stage managers, set designers and costume designers from Groupe 47