The eye, from the young company Vénus à vélo, deploys concerns that could not be more current. The era, rich in various disconnections, effectively explores our relationship to the body: the very one that we sometimes use in our desire to create a bond.
A naked body appears on a pedestal as the curtain rises. Chiselled by the flashes, it appears fragmented like Three Studies of Figures at the Foot of a Crucifixionby Bacon: disjointed, almost twisted and screaming body parts which, casually, already pose the whole subject of this play for two actresses.
For now, it remains to get into the story. Sophia (Maureen Roberge), a disturbingly naked model, awaits the painter; Camille (Marie-Ève Lussier Gariépy), daughter of the artist, brings the news: the session will be cancelled. Instead, a ballet begins where the two women attract and repel each other, their disagreements imprecisely mixing art and private life. Is the first, as a model, not necessarily used as an object? But doesn’t the second, from the top of her doctoral studies in art history, impose a knowledge without nuances… and suspect?
Frank and assumed, Sophia will come up against a cerebral and interior Camille, the increasingly frontal oppositions leaving us on the side of the Behind closed doors of Sartre.
Some writing effects will turn out to be more visible — like a dramatic need to stretch the springs, to underline the antagonisms. In the enveloping decor of Marilou Bois and Marianne Lebel, a setting of paintings and warm wood, the rich material of the piece reveals itself little by little, as we go beyond its mechanics to enter into the flesh.
body fight
The eye, then, multiplies the echoes with many topical questions, which several women have been talking about for a while, and which one would have to be from another planet to ignore. Let’s risk it roughly: what room is there left for the body, in an era that has made it so much the object of bargaining?
The exchanges of young women will invite the figures of rape and consent – expressions brandished sometimes, it is in the air, like imposed figures: a sesame capable of opening souls and hearts of good will. The question, above all, is whether the theatre, with its own tools, is capable of creating spaces for real exploration.
However, the treatment of Rosalie Cournoyer, in the text and in the staging, here shares the sensitivity of her previous Fever. Certain more didactic explanations, perhaps, on anorexia and its causes, in particular, will be based for us less perfectly in the dynamics of the narrative. (Simple positional effect? Our plus one, falling on the other side of the cultural montage of genres, will have received things quite differently.)
Such passages nevertheless leave intact the coherent gesture that tracks down the ambiguities of the body. Thus Camille’s uncontrolled outbursts, while difficult knots arise affecting her relationship to the image. “Before being ashamed, I was fine,” Sophia will also say after the story of a sad moment of intimacy. Through the antagonisms of their positions, above all, the two women will create real pathways.
The writing will then recall other young writers who, recently, have been able to deploy a theater in touch with life — Nadia Girard Eddahia (Disgrace) or Laura Amar (Factory), Marie-Pier Lagacé (The one we point the finger at) or Carolanne Foucher (Handle with Care): pieces that have managed to bring a discreet but certain sensitivity to the stage.
The eye, as the oppositions become clearer and the angles on the two actresses multiply, tightens around a clear horizon. At a time when the flesh sometimes seems as confused as the relationship to others, the play brings to life a strangely inhabited body on stage, something like a boundary body: a body which, if it is the one we touch and we look, nevertheless remains the one we live in.
The vanishing line of the painting appears to us here: the attempt to sketch an inhabitable space, to draw the contours of a body which, on the fringes of what we have made of the world, would also be the place of a reappropriation.