The director and puppeteer, who presents “the pond” at the Center Pompidou, explores, in a beautiful icy aesthetic, the depths of the mental space.
by Rosita Boisseau
A white box. Inside, a small defeated bed. An elongated teen silhouette. Multicolored candies thrown on the ground. A blood red spot. Suddenly, voices from we do not know where to zebra space. Words come up against and explode: “Love, death, mother, father, drowning …” The tone rises. Strident cries burst. After an hour and twenty-five minutes of this shock treatment, you are released, anxiety rate on the ceiling, tight belly.
This trying but formidably intense experience is that caused by the Etang, by Gisèle Vienna. Created in 2020, on the poster of the Center Pompidou, in Paris, until December 18, the play, inspired by the eponymous text of the Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956), signs the aesthetics of the Director in Scene, choreographer and puppeteer now spotted internationally: freezing beautiful, brutally sophisticated, emotionally devastated. At the same time, two other shows, this is How You Will Disappear and Crowd, are also on tour of the Program Repertory of the Festival d’Automne, offering an observatory of its trajectory.
Liberating such a strong anxiety rate is rare in the theater. Gisèle Vienne has been an expert in the matter since her first creations, such as I Apologize (2004) or a beautiful blonde child (2005), in which she explored extreme fantasies linking sex and death drive. If the pond does not have the same plastic impact, nor the same psychic virulence, it nevertheless installs a ravaged climate. It must be said that the story, adapted in a very elliptical way, has a lot to do with it. A young boy, Fritz, wonders about the love of his parents, and in particular that of his mother, until staging and simulating his drowning. The ten characters of the original work are interpreted here – and it is a feat – by the two actresses Adèle Haenel and Julie Shanahan, whose voices are tank live by reverberation effects and hallucinating Larsens.
Interior monologues
The strict narration is lost a little, but the spectacle gives the staggering impression of entering an irradiated mental space. In real time cohabit the interior monologues of Fritz and his mother, but also conversations with family and friends in a room of madness echoes. Develop, in a thousand sharp bursts, violence, incest, delirium, the infinite complexity of the mind, the abyss of a personality taken by storm by impulses, ghosts, and who struggles to find a outcome. No wonder Gisèle Vienne is passionate about Ventriloquie, in particular in Jerk (2008) – an ebereling solo around a serial killer and her victims, interpreted by Jonathan Capdevielle surrounded by five puppets, now available in film.
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