One hundred kilos of clay on stage. Six performers: two dancers, an actress, a director, a philosophy teacher, and the French performer Olivier de Sagazan, here also director. 100 kilos of clay with which the performers make masks. Faces and bodies of earth that they can, with their fingers, gnaw, split, accumulate into cysts, themselves sculpting this over-modeled skin, in constant metamorphosis, both prosthesis and cocoon. A collective transfiguration for the piece The donkey’s mass.
“There is a performance, Transfiguration, which I played everywhere,” recalls Olivier de Sagazan. Created in 1998, this solo has been performed some 300 times in 25 countries. It gave rise to several artistic collaborations — including one with Mylène Farmer, for the video In the shade.
It is through this creation, seen in Quebec in 2012 and in Montreal in 2016, that Mr. de Sagazan, until then a visual artist, experienced an artistic turning point. “It’s a key moment: the painter-sculptor who uses his own body as a canvas produces a sort of astonishing ellipse which makes him a dancer. »
“The moment you start working on your body by putting clay on it, you become a dancer. » Around his covers of Transfiguration — we cannot recommend enough taking a few minutes on YouTube to see first-hand the impact of the living portraits that are composed there — Olivier de Sagazan gives workshops over time, all made of clay.
“It’s quite surprising: I say to the dancers and visual artists who are there: “Make a face for me with these 10 kilos of clay in front of you.” And they all make faces that are generally quite academic and without much interest. »
“Then I tell them: ‘Put the clay on your head, you won’t see what you’re doing, then make a face for me.’ And there always appear, in 100% of cases, absolutely incredible faces. »
“This is also what happened to me when I did my first transfiguration and I had the good idea to put a camera. It was a slap in the face for me. Because what I produced there blindly, spontaneously, was much more interesting than what I had produced the previous 10 or 20 years with my eyes open while painting. »
Face value
Thirty years later, Mr. de Sagazan analyzes the key elements of his initiatory gesture, which he has continued ever since. “When you make a painting, a face, for example, you make an eye, you step back a little, you tell yourself that it is too low, you correct it; then you are in the mimesis. Where there is mimesis there is no poetry. We are just in the work of the technician. »
“Whereas when blind, making your face, you look for something that is in yourself, you don’t judge yourself, you are in a kind of self-analysis, you will bring out and appear lots of astonishing things. We no longer act like mom and dad or [comme ce que] the teachers told us and, in one fell swoop, we open up incredible potential. »
Whereas blindly, by making our face, we look for something that is in ourselves, we do not judge ourselves, we are in a kind of self-analysis, we will bring out and appear lots of astonishing things
The texture of the clay, which on the head muffles, darkens, isolates, is certainly an ingredient in this magic potion. “The game starts with just putting a little clay on my face and I start to change myself, to depersonalize myself; I make a first layer, then a second, a third, thicker and thicker; more and more, I go inside myself and I seek, behind all these masks, the deepest part of myself. »
And with the tips of the fingers or with the whole hand, lines and scars of black and cadmium red are traced on these earthen faces. “It’s acrylic, there’s no mystery there. I use the colors that our ancestors took in the caves: black to draw, red to send impulse, dynamism. This is the basis. »
In The donkey’s masswhich was in 2021 of the Venice Biennale, as in Transfiguration, the images thus staged are strong, hallucinatory, even violent. Mr. de Sagazan regularly refers to Antonin Artaud. He likes to recite: “The human face has not yet found its face and it is up to the painter to give it…”
However, there is no question of “burning on the stage like a tortured person at the stake” as the theater theorist advocated. Working with clay, assures Olivier de Sagazan, is very gentle. Not even any respiratory discomfort, with layers of dirt on your mouth and nose? “A little bit, but you just have to make a little movement of your mouth, shake your head and, straight away, the air comes. »
Artistic thalassotherapy
“Clay gives you baby skin, it’s the same pH as the skin,” smiles the director. It feels like a massage, even. In the workshops, people say they sleep like babies after their day. But, indeed, there is a leap for the viewer: the image is not to be taken at face value. If I open my mouth to tear it, you have to see it in a much more metaphorical way. I’m not puncturing my jaw, am I,” he says, laughing.
Her Masssays the performer, it’s a “ Transfiguration group to push further and not be alone.” In addition to the work with bodies and clay, there are subjects that have haunted him for 30 years: running, the fusion of bodies, political discourse, automatic language, dissection — Olivier de Sagazan was trained as a biologist, he remains fascinated by life and death.
“There are lots of maps that I can lay out to find connections, build from there a kind of choreography or, at the very least, a kind of narration, which has become the basis of The donkey’s mass. »
In addition to filming this show, Olivier de Sagazan is completing an exhibition which will open in Paris in a month. He’s working on his next show. And he is preparing a staging of another mass, less animal, perhaps: the Great Mass in C minor by Mozart for the Limoges Opera, for April 2024.