VINCENT MACAIGNE En Manque VINCENT MACAIGNE EN MANQUE 2 EN MANQUE
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COMPAGNIE FRICHE 22.66 THÉÂTRE DE VIDY Direction production and touring Camille Hakim Hashemi Caroline Barneaud Mail : [email protected] AV. E.-H. JAQUES-DALCROZE 5 [email protected] CH-1007 LAUSANNE Elisabeth Le Coënt Mail: [email protected] VIDY.CH/PRODUCTION VINCENT MACAIGNE En manque VINCENT MACAIGNE EN MANQUE 2 EN MANQUE Text, direction and scenography : Vincent Macaigne Collaboration scenography : Julien Peissel Light : Jean Huleu Props : Lucie Basclet Sound : Marianne Pierré Jonathan Cesaroni Voice : Matthieu Jaccard Subtitles : Mike Tjissen Stage manager : Sébastien Mathé Decor : Ateliers of Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne Assistant director : Salou Sadras With : Thibaut Evrard Liza Lapert Clara Lama-Schmit Sofia Teillet and the extras as well as the kids Production : Théâtre de Vidy Compagnie Friche 22.66 Coproduction : Théâtre de la Ville – Paris La Villette - Paris Tandem Scène nationale Holland Festival With touring support of : Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council and Institut Français Compagnie Friche 22.66 is supported by DGCA Ministry of Culture and Communication France as “national company“ With the collaboration of Jeune théâtre national Administration Cie Friche 22.66 : AlterMachine, Camille Hakim Hashemi, Elisabeth Le Coënt Creation on December 13th 2016 at the Théâtre de Vidy Estimated duration: 1h45 VINCENT MACAIGNE EN MANQUE 3 DIRECTOR’S NOTE To look at oneself. To look at oneself and face it, one’s own failure and one’s own weaknesses. To try to go looking for new collaborators. To attempt to listen to the noise of the world and to come out with a sensation. What did we achieve ? How to have faith in a gesture again ? How to turn a performance into an organic field of thought ? How to ask oneself questions again ? Well, sorry I lose myself trying to justify a work that would rather be my own attempt to meet actors, collaborators, an organisation, a public. The furious attempt to embrace the multitude of questions, of pain, of joy, of what one could have heard from the world during these last two weeks and four days of work. Not to create a performance on current events. But on our dark and bright profundity. Our love and intimacy in the world. Our anger and fear of the future. Our culpability and the road already travelled. Not to resolve paradoxes and contradictions. To try to be bigger than the frame. Here is what it has been like for me ! And I hope you could see my own failure, my own doubts and my own uglinesses, my love, my anger and my great melancholy, but also my joy, our joy ! Our anger and our will to embrace ! VINCENT MACAIGNE, DECEMBER 2016 « Here bellow, you will scatter yourself in a billion vile stories. There is no more new stories to tell here. Setting this foundation down there, in the valley, where lives the mob, you’ve shouted you wanted to open your arms to the world, and to get eaten by the world. And that’s true, my family has eaten all the vital force of thousands of young men, all the people living down there, in the valley. But this is how it is. » VINCENT MACAIGNE, EN MANQUE (EXTRACT), 2016 En manque © Mathilda Olmi VINCENT MACAIGNE EN MANQUE 4 PRESENTATION Once upon a time there was a society in which the people living in the high altitudes accumulated money, power and culture. They took control from governments that were incapable of organising community life up there, far from the disorder and violence. In the absence of any collective project, their hierarchies and individualism took hold : better to stay far away and save yourself rather than endanger humanity’s most precious treasures, such as love and culture. Money, power and culture had become a sole force, a single space, the glorious image of the kind of success and exaltation that cannot be shared or can only be shared with parsimony by mitigating the sentiment of lacking and unsatisfied desire. And yet, if those from “up there” lived in a place as euphoric and self-satisfying as all that, it would seem that their world has reached its end. They are without perspective and without any other objective beyond self-celebration and omnipotence. The whole of European culture has been privatized and is being held under lock and key. Ennui reigns and joy is lacking. The only alternative left for those living on high who want to preserve something vital, something alive, is auto-destruction. And so to destroy the family, to destroy desire and confront the rage, they will deliver themselves to those living below. When there is no joy only destruction is capable of revivifying life. Vincent Macaigne situates En Manque in a private foundation that has locked up the entirety of European art in a safe. But the author, actor and film and theatre director does not criticize or expose the savant metaphor of a society blocked by its certitudes, where a handful organise the misery of others. He uses the theatre to get out of the box, beyond the certitudes and obsessions. He sets out in desperate search for a renewed desire to live. To live together, beyond the long- imposed constraints that seem so natural and necessary, he addresses those who’ve come to meet him with the urgency of renewal, in order to avoid total collapse and escape the anguish of solitude. VINCENT MACAIGNE NEW CREATION 5 En manque © Mathilda Olmi VINCENT MACAIGNE EN MANQUE 6 THE THEATRE OF VINCENT MACAIGNE The theatre of Macaigne is a powerful, keen and ravaging theatre. Its vivacity, its violence - and one might even say, its cruelty - come from rage as much as euphoria, from love as much as despair, from tenderness as much as unconditional refusal. He does not look for a solution, he looks for vitality. He does not seek absolution or conviction, he seeks to remain alive and overtake ideas with actions, to transform analysis into collective action. It is not about pleasing or even convincing, but about setting into motion. It is a theatre of waking, of startling, a theatre which marches on without fear, without shame, without restraint; entirely accomplished in its released power. For Macaigne, theatre answers a need for exaltation, which is above all a means of going beyond each person’s lot - the weight of the past, hackneyed social conventions, prefabricated dreams. Thus, theatre must be “larger than life” and play with its limits. The director takes this as a public service mission, reminding us that another life is possible. However, he will not tell us what this life is, but mirror our ambiguities back at us instead. He will be neither preacher, nor mentor, nor professor; he will do nothing to reassure, but will be a catalyst for energy, a destroyer of repeated norms without objects, an outlet for sad passions. Macaigne falls within that line of artists and intellectuals whom Walter Benjamin named the “destructive characters” in 1931. They seek no new images, he wrote, no new ideal, attach themselves to nothing, because they know that nothing lasts. They grab everything they find, fully conscious of their situation in history. But for these same reasons, all circulations appear possible to them, and any event is the occasion to blaze a new trail. So must they always destroy that which pretends to absolve itself of the present moment, but only in order to create a new path, which they will have to provoke and prepare at the same time. Vincent Macaigne is one of those. Macaigne is an artist who attempts to expose the moral ambiguity of existence. Like Benjamin’s destructive character - which is not destructive - Macaigne does not want to describe new images, or determine a new horizon. He “tests the world in its vocation to be destroyed”, “ruins the existing” “where others run into walls”; however, it is not in order to destroy, but to open new paths and entertain the possibility of setting foot on them. In that, his rage - which is as much an appetite as a “sublimated violence” - is a powerful response to the moribund wait-and-see attitude that characterises contemporary Europe. In his own way, he answers what Philippe Ivernel described as “the double crisis of tradition and modernity which leaves the disconcerted subject in the middle of a desert crossing, chewing yet on some remaining food. From this an energy can suddenly erupt, which is, precisely, disruptive. Munch: The Scream. Monet: Impression Sunrise. Brecht: ‘There is only one limit to doubt: the desire to act.’” ERIC VAUTRIN (TRANSLATED BY SARAH-JANE MOLONEY) VINCENT MACAIGNE EN MANQUE 7 VINCENT MACAIGNE Born in 1978, Vincent Macaigne joins the THEATRE DIRECTOR Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris in 1999. He directed Friche 22.66, his first play, in 2004, Highlights : 2004 Crave by Sarah Kane, Jeune Théâtre National then Requiem 3, an initial version of The Idiot, and 2006 Requiem ou introduction à une journée sans héroïsme by Vincent Hamlet, At Least I Will Have Left a Beautiful Corpse : Macaigne, Ferme du Buisson four generous and vociferous hours at the Festival 2007 Requiem 3, Festival Mettre en scène Théâtre national de Bretagne (2008: Maison des Arts de Créteil, 2011: Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord) d’Avignon in 2011. He also put on plays abroad, in 2009 Idiot !, based on The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Théâtre Chile and Brazil, among other countries. In his National de Chaillot and tour cinema work, he belongs to the younger generation 2009 On aurait voulu pouvoir salir le sol, non ? de Vincent Macaigne, MC2 2011 Au moins j’aurai laissé un beau cadavre [Hamlet, At Least I Will now emerging on the scene.