The audience of the Espace libre theater will not have to wait for the 2024-2025 season to take the pulse of the artistic direction of Félix-Antoine Boutin, appointed to this position last winter. Beats, a series of two shows, of which only five performances are offered for each, precedes the rest of the 2023-2024 programming signed by outgoing artistic director Geoffrey Gaquère. Two interdisciplinary works, See my eyes And This intervalwhich “respond to each other”, in the opinion of the person who paired them, and who have among other things in common that they owe their creation, at least in part, to the playwright and actress Evelyne de la Chenelière.
The author of Strawberries in January and musician Vincent Legault — who also has a career in the band Dear Criminals — created the albums A thousand thousands And Four matches as well as the EP The intermediate space. This latest version of See my eyes (which was originally designed for the launch of A thousand thousands) draws on all this poetic material, including reflections inspired by New Wave films, all delivered on stage by Evelyne de la Chenelière herself. “It’s difficult to talk about it, because it’s not a play that we’re presenting,” she explains. And writing is not the starting point. Often, in the construction of a show, we first have a text, and other languages are added to it. Here, it’s a bit the opposite: he’s a musician who decided to use text, but as an instrument among other instruments. Then a director took possession of the language thus created. The writing path is therefore unusual, and that is among other reasons why this show is super important in my career. »
The production includes extracts from French films in black and white, assembled into a quilt on which the words of Evelyne de la Chenelière and the music of Vincent Legault are over-embroidered. “I claim craftsmanship in my directing work,” adds Félix-Antoine Boutin. I like that we feel the hand of the artist who creates. There’s that too in Evelyne’s work: we feel her writing. »
Another characteristic unites the two creators, he continues, with a mischievous air: “We don’t like the subjects. » And his accomplice clarifies: “It’s a somewhat humorous formula, but it expresses my very deep faith in the critical, political and sensitive force of the form in the theater. Because it is a living art. So if we stay with the idea, if theater is only a vehicle for a subject, it may be necessary, relevant, interesting, but for me, we are not in what theater can deploy more powerful. That’s really the heart of my faith in this art. »
The impact of art
See my eyes And This interval, by the multidisciplinary artist Morena Prats, target art as a prism through which we apprehend life, given the influence that stories and images – whether the latter are cinematographic, pictorial or photographic – have on our perceptions, our values and our expectations. If the first work uses poetic fragments, music and film sequences from another era, the second focuses in particular on the reconstruction of paintings by performative artists.
I want to put the experiment back on stage. See my eyes And This interval are two UFOs, we don’t really know in which category to put them. I really like this question of what makes theater. I think the answer doesn’t exist. I have the impression that it redefines itself each time we make an artistic gesture, like a show.
It was an invitation from Evelyne de la Chenelière, then in residence at the Espace Go theater, who was at the origin of the creation of This interval. Morena Prats took an approach similar to hers: “I created [sur le mur du hall de l’Espace Go] a repertoire of words while she, for her part, put together a repertoire of images which would inspire a choreography – I’m schematizing – images that she removed from their context to make them dialogue differently. »
“Morena works on iconography,” adds Félix-Antoine Boutin, “on gestures in painting and how they have crossed the centuries to reach us unconsciously. » The new artistic director also says he is “very sensitive to the notion of transmission. These two shows use traces of the past, memory. I thought it was nice to start my adventure at Espace libre with that.”
From the heritage of Gravel, Ronfard and the New Experimental Theater, he retains the audacity, the desire to do differently. Thus inspired, he intends to rethink the way of designing theater programming: “We are going to abandon the theater season and we are going to do more series. » It counts, as with Beats, lure the public – who, he says, has been much more likely, since the pandemic, to spontaneously buy tickets than to reserve them – with series of two or three stage proposals having a link between them. And these promise to be bold: “I want to put experimentation back on stage. See my eyes And This interval are two UFOs, we don’t really know in which category to put them. I really like this question of what makes theater. I think the answer doesn’t exist. I have the impression that it redefines itself each time we make an artistic gesture, like a show. »