After Titans, a duo that caused a sensation in 2018, Euripides Laskaridis is back at the Festival TransAmériques. The Greek director presents this time Elenita larger-scale show where ten performers at the top of their game serve up a fable as sublime as it is grotesque, as literal as it is symbolic, as grandiose as it is decadent, a distillation of humanity that will leave no one indifferent.
Taking place entirely in an invented language, the party borrows unceremoniously from the clown, the jester, the commedia dell’arte, the mime and the burlesque. We meet in this circus with operatic accents beings of a strong singularity: a perched aristocrat, a babushka who skims the ground, a drag queen dinosaur, a woman with a mustache, a narcoleptic little girl who seems straight out of the Wizard of Oz… Fairground beasts and proud of it, the characters are masked, made up or disguised, young or old, tall or short, some even amputated.
More than anything, the representation is based on the notion of disguise, that is to say that it achieves revelation by employing dissimulation, that it touches on the truth by passing through distortion, that it contests the codes by diverting them, that she challenges the established order by depicting its reversal, its metamorphosis. Surreal and outsized, absurd and wacky, ridiculous and monstrous, the show is eminently queer, due to its unbridled aesthetic as well as the offbeat view it takes on the world.
Apart from a slight drop in speed in the last third of the performance, it is with jubilation that we constantly slip from the tragic to the hilarious, from the serious to the insignificant, from prehistory to futurism, but also from masculine to feminine, from young to old, from human to animal. It’s a joyous carnival, an irresistible hustle and bustle, a smoky and musical ritual during which the large stage of the Théâtre Jean-Duceppe is turned upside down. But it is also a carnival in the Rabelaisian sense of the term, a celebration of all possibilities, a courageous return to the sources which could well allow us to imagine the sequel in complete freedom.