The performing arts are once again subject to the harshness of a pandemic freeze, the duration of which is still unknown. While waiting for the great thaw, The duty wanted to talk to three headlights about this shifted back to school in order to hear the ever beating pulse of the theater. Against all odds.
In March 2020, at the time of the first confinement, Fanny Britt and Alexia Bürger were preparing to attend the creation of their piece, Lysis, on the stage of the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. After almost two years of small and great mourning, reinvention and more or less forced resilience, the two women of the theater were back at the post, strongly determined that their rereading of the comedy written by Aristophanes in 411 BC. AD finally saw the light of day under the leadership of Lorraine Pintal. That was before Omicron came to the theater and forced another painful postponement.
The stroke of fate is all the more cruel as Lysis has been around for four years now in the imagination of its authors. The piece with the formidable mechanics also exists between the pages, having been published by Atelier 10, in March 2020. You have to go back to 2018 to seize the first spark, while Fanny Britt accepts an invitation to dinner from Lorraine Pintal. “From the outset, she suggested that I adapt Lysistrata, explains the author. She had dreamed of directing this play for 10 years. She imagined a big show, with a lot of actresses on stage, a performance at the heart of which would be this question of the war of the sexes. I accepted his proposal on one condition: that I could accomplish this task with Alexia. “
In doing so, the two creators opened the floodgates for a reflection which, pandemic or not, containment or not, strongly challenges our present.
A premise to revisit
The tandem first became familiar with different versions of the work: the more faithful translations, like that of the Hellenist Victor-Henry Debidour made in the 1960s, but also the freer rereading, like that of Michel Tremblay or Chi-raq, a 2015 film in which Spike Lee finds Lysistrata in Chicago, in the South Side neighborhoods torn by gang warfare.
“Aristophanes’ comedy is vulgar, crude and, in places, downright misogynist,” says Fanny Britt. The action is thin and the construction leaves something to be desired. What has stood the test of time, what still strikes the imagination, of course, is the premise. “Let us recall the said premise: to put an end to the war which rages between Athens and Sparta, to bring men to their senses, the Athenian Lysistrata convinces the women of all the Greek cities to lead a sex strike:” To stop the war, refuse your husbands. “
While welcoming the fact that the play has inspired activists all over the world to organize sex strikes which have borne fruit, particularly in Liberia and Colombia, the two creators are quick to question this “means. pressure ”. “We understood that this premise had aged very badly,” explains Bürger. “In the contemporary Western context,” says Britt, “the idea of depriving men of sexuality suggests that the latter is an instrument of power, which completely obscures the desire of women. On the other hand, since when has women’s refusal prevented men from getting what they wanted without consent? “
Questioning power
Thus, the creators have instead chosen to represent what they consider to be the real lever of women today in the face of male power. “In the original play,” Bürger explains, “it is the war that the women want to end. In our play, it is a patriarchal system dominated by capitalism and neoliberalism that women attack. If they stop giving birth to the human beings who are the material for this system of oppression, this unjust and destructive world, they will break the chain, put a solid stick in the wheels of the cogs. “
“The real power these days is in business,” says Britt. Campaigning in a pharmaceutical company allowed us to tackle the conflict of interest between politics and the corporate spirit, between public health and profit. ”Incarnated by Bénédicte Décary, Lysis is responsible for the management of a drug against infertility.
When she learns that the treatment could be dangerous for the mental health of women, she resigns, becomes an activist and joins a collective movement, a birth strike, a revolution that will upset the established order. “Lysis’s personal story is going to meet the big story,” Britt warns. Let’s just say that his commitment to the cause will be severely tested. “
From ancient Greece, the creators of Lysis were keen to keep the scale. “It was important for us to find the vibration, the sacred, the choreography, the chorality,” explains Britt. The choir, of which all the characters take turns, announces the misfortune to come, translates the stakes of the play, expresses the antagonisms, in particular between the feminine and the masculine. »On the original music of Philippe Brault, we promise a choir that slams and sings!
Focused on life
A women’s choir is also what we find in The daughters of the St. Lawrence, a play written by Rébecca Deraspe in collaboration with Annick Lefebvre and published by Dramaturges éditeurs, last October. Directed by Alexia Bürger, the show created at La Colline, in Paris, last November, was to be presented at the Center du théâtre d’Aujourd’hui in January. The institution had no choice but to announce its postponement to a future season.
As seven corpses were spat out by the River, unidentified, unclaimed remains, seven women must contend with the shock of the discovery. “I wrote during the pandemic and it can be understood,” explains Deraspe. The way death was constantly bursting into life, this constant trauma, all of that is present in the play. This unexpected encounter with death could well be life saving for the protagonists, it could well have saved their lives. “
“It’s a play that talks a lot about death, but which is resolutely turned towards life,” says Bürger. The link between these women, who have hardly any points in common, who are at various ages, at very different stages of their existence, is the idea of concrete death, without disguise, of which we cannot turn away. It is this shock that allows their voices to unite in a single choir. Then, their ways of reacting, of speaking, then of acting, they are very contrasted. “
With this new piece, less realistic and more polyphonic than the previous ones, the author of Gametes and of Those who evaporated continues, with that bittersweet humor that characterizes his universe, to explore the themes that are dear to him. “I rarely have the objective of addressing women’s issues,” she explains. These are the characters who guide me there, on the territory of the intimate, which is in my opinion quite naturally feminist. What then draws us towards the collective and which allows the public to project themselves into what we are telling them, is the way in which the word circulates between the characters, in which both make it their own. Alexia’s staging gives all of this a rhythm, a harmony whose beauty and efficiency still impress me. “