Until March 25, the company Système Kangourou presents Ghosts, his latest creation at the Aux Écuries theatre. Performed by seven artists from 12 to 75 years old, this work without words immerses us in a soft and vaporous universe, where the past, the present and the future come together during a suspended time. But beware, this can also turn into weariness.
No, the ghosts in the show are far from scary. On the contrary, they deliver only tenderness, memories and incorporated traces of the past. In simple and repetitive wanderings, the seven performers draw the space with their bodies, tell lived stories while remaining silent.
Thanks to an elaborate light, they detach themselves from their bodies and become shadows, move in a bewitching slowness or, even, appear like characters from the past, dancing on the recording of an old video cassette. Indeed, the scenography is simple. The scene is as clean as possible. Everything is played out in the characters who appear before us, always dressed in different ways, always ready to enter a body in different ways. The movements are fluid, built on daily gestures. During some paintings, the artists create their own environment, in their imagination and through the choreography of their hands. With or without interactions with the others, they constitute their bubble, delimit the lines which surround them and the elements which are there. Very pleasant moments to observe, ourselves trying to decipher what they are symbolically building before our eyes.
Throughout the room play songs from the album Archives by Cédric Dind-Lavoie. Traditional music and songs, recorded in the 1940s and 1950s, take us back to the past. A past from here, where sounds of jitters and well-marked accents bring a smile, a nostalgia for some. Without knowing each other perhaps, without having the same age or the same experience, the artists find themselves in this past, each in their own way, each in their body and their feelings. This one haunts them or are they the ones who haunt the past? Always in the dark, Ghosts leaves plenty of room for interpretation.
Sweet spirits, but…
Far from being funereal, the vigil that unfolds before our eyes is very sweet. For an hour, the performers parade, in turn, sometimes alone, sometimes together. Their interactions then remain simple, fairly ad hoc. The dramaturgy is based more on a diffuse common base of belonging than on the creation of real links between them. One of the elements that also make their unity is softness. Indeed, throughout the creation, we let ourselves be transported by the lightness, the ambient fog and the calm gestures. Time becomes suspended, as in a dream, clinging to reinvented rituals, to everyone’s imagination which is embodied in the living bodies before us.
In the beings who themselves become words, we detect the traces of the ancients, of those who accompany us, whether we know it or not. We understand the noises they can leave in us and what we in turn will leave behind. It is a certain poetry that emerges from the work. Original, the approach of evoking death and the past is here taken with subtlety, like an affectionate celebration and not based on the traumatic aspect and the great sorrows that it can also engender.
Although the moment is pleasant, the lack of binding between the characters and the scenes has created a certain rhythm that is sometimes monotonous, even drowsy. Moreover, the overuse of costumes adds nothing to the remarks, on the contrary. It perhaps distracted the eye, directing it to a useless elsewhere. Finally, the purity and simplicity of the gestures could also have sometimes given way to more nuances, more rhythms and originality. Some passages seemed too close to a sketch and could have been dug to further illuminate the viewer, surprise him a little.