Under Different Skies Adapted from Virgil’S Aeneid

Under Different Skies adapted from Virgil’s Aeneid © Jean Louis Fernandez A Crossroad company theatrical production Script adaptation Maëlle Poésy, Kevin Keiss Original Writing and Translation Kevin Keiss Direction and Choreography Maëlle Poésy Starring Harrison Arevalo, Genséric Coleno-Demeulenaere, Rosabel Huguet, Marc Lamigeon, Roshanak Morrowatian, Philippe Noël, Roxane Palazzotto, Véronique Sacri With the voice of Hatice Ozer Dramatist Kevin Keiss Director’s Assistant Aurélie Droesch-Du Cerceau Dramatist’s Assistant Baudouin Woehl Translations Christilla Vasserot et Cristina Vinuesa (Spanish), Leila Moussavian-Huppe (Farsi), Federica Martucci (Italian) Scenography Damien Caille-Perret ; Set Design Intern Laure Dezael Lighting César Godefroy Sound Samuel Favart-Mikcha with Alexandre Bellando Video Romain Tanguy Costumes Camille Vallat assisted by Juliette Gaudel ; Costumes Intern Léa Derivet Masks and Accessoires Marion Guérin Make-up Zoé Van Der Waal Choreography Juan Kruz Diaz de Garaio Esnaola, Roshanak Morrowatian, Rosabel Huguet General Manager and Stage Manager Géraud Breton Set Construction Eclectik Sceno Administration le petit bureau / Claire Guièze et Margaux Roy Promotion and Sales Florence Bourgeon A Crossroad company production, co-produced by the Théâtre Dijon Bourgogne-CDN, ThéâtredelaCité – CDN Toulouse Occitanie, Théâtre Gymnase-Bernardines à Marseille, the Avignon Festival, Théâtre Anthéa-Antibes, Théâtre Liberté à Toulon, Scène nationale du Sud Aquitain, Extrapôle, and the Théâtre Firmin Gémier - La Piscine à Châtenay-Malabry. With the artistic participation of the Jeune Théâtre National / Residency at La Chartreuse – CNES de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon Crossroad company is subsidized by the French Ministry of Culture / DRAC Bourgogne Franche-Comté and by the City of Dijon. The company also receives financial support from the Bourgogne Franche-Comté regional government. Maëlle Poésy is an associate artist at the Théâtre Dijon Bourgogne – CDN, ThéâtredelaCité – CDN Toulouse Occitanie, Théâtre Gym- nase-Bernardines and the Théâtre Firmin Gémier - La Piscine. PROJECT INTRODUCTION From Virgil’s Aeneid to the Stage Under Different Skies draws inspiration from the first part of Virgil’s Aeneid, the section of voyages often referred to as the Aeneid’s Odyssey. At the fall of Troy, Aene- as escapes the carnage with his father and sails off in search of a suitable sport to found an empire. Battled by storms and by the raging fury of Juno—who has sworn to destroy the last of the Trojans—Aeneas doggedly continues his quest, spurred on by the will of the gods. From Virgil’s original text, we have taken a few decisive threads—the hero’s flight from a ravaged city, the endless cycle of sea crossings and shipwrecks, the en- counter with Dido—and woven them into a narrative of memory, unravelling, spinning in a space between reverie and nightmare, and in a time when the past and the future continually intertwine with the present. There are several interdependent texts that make up the play: fragments of the first six books of the Aeneid translated from Latin, original writing and theatrical script. These three texts form a sort of palimpsest of the logic of memory; on stage, they piece together a puzzle of encounters, setbacks and hopes in the form of a flashback. In the history of one man’s exile, in the course of one’s man’s wanderings, we find a story of identity transformed—cracked, diluted and finally erased. 2 DIRECTOR’S NOTE Adaptation and Direction by Maëlle Poésy A narrow escape from a devastated city, a journey wrought with adventures, setbacks and sorrow, a destiny to follow and a quest to fulfil… All this, folded into a story about ini- tiation, exile, heritage, identity—a few of the themes that have always fascinated me and that I have tried to explore in the course of the Company’s work. When I chose the Aeneid as the starting point for a new production, I decided that I wanted to delve into the relationship between exile and memory by creating a story that echoes the way memory itself constructs a story from fragmens of experience.And I wanted to continue Hat our Company’s earlier productions had begun: ex- ploring the crossroads of theatrical scripts and literature. With this play, I intend to dig deep into the physical and emotional rapport between the exiled and their own memories of exile. I want the audience to see that Aeneas’ journey was built on the layers of his accumu- lated memories, and that the evolution and transformation of his individual identity depend on both what he experienced and his memory of that experience. It is this identity in mutation, identity caught in a flux of past and present—it is this that I want to understand. I am working with the author, translator and playwright Kevin Keiss on this liberal adaptation of Virgil’s epic. For our “narrative of memory”, Kevin and I decided to focus on certain passages from the first section of the Aeneid, the part dedicated to his Aeneas’ journeys, from the moment he left Troy until he arrives in Ita- ly. We have, out of necessity, made some changes to the order of events, modified and invented certain pieces of the story in order to highlight and clarify elements of Virgil’s original text. The final script is composed of three interdependent texts: fragments of the first six books of the Aeneid that Kevin has translated from Latin, some of Kevin’s original writing, and a theatrical script that the Company developed collectively. « The exile lives in a permanent state of transcience, an interim space where time seems to have come to a stop. The exile says, ‘My soul is still here, but my life is here.’ The exile has, for all intents and purposes, crossed the border that separates two worlds, yet he feels trapped between them, in a sort of no-man’s land of expectation and statelessness. » Lya Tourn Travail de l’exil, deuil, déracinement, identité expatriée (The Work of the Exile: Sorrow, Rootlessness and Expatriated Identity),Septentrion University Presses, 1997 It is this sensation of “in-betweenness” that I wanted to focus on when we were developing the script, because I feel like it is a precise metaphor for the exile: trapped between past and present, between memory and reality. I wanted a story that lives on the edge of multiple times and multiple realities, a story where chronological continuity is shot through with what Walter Benjamin called “involuntary memories” or what Aaron Appelfeld called “the violent stains of memory.” What if we revisited the story of an exile, Aeneas, and approached it with the prism of his own memory? What if we adapted this prism to the stage in a way that mimics the way that memory functions? How is a memory born? What physical sensations, what images, what words, what visions does memory use to remake and replay the traumatic episodes of our lives? How does a memory make itself? 3 In my efforts to adapt this type of storytelling for the stage, I was inspired by the work of a number of psychiatrists at the Primo Levi Center in Paris who have conducted research into the post-traumatic memories of refugees and torture victims, but also by a fateful meeting with Francis Eustache, a researcher in neuropsychology and cerebral imaging who specializes in the study of memory. To me, it is essential that this narrative principle permeate the performance; it must be felt not only in the text but also in the movement of the performers. That’s why I’ve chosen a cast of actors and dancers. The choreography gives us access to the unseen processes of memory and a means to express the unpredictable bursts of memory as “momentary lapses.” But the choreography is critical for the expression of the voyage, for the wanderings of Aeneas and his cohort across land and sea. I imagine dance as a kind of thread that runs through the play, holding it together, spinning a narrative of movement and travel, giving the piece a rhythm and a continuity that resembles an eternal cycle. An infinite starting again. A voyage, once finished, resurges in the mind of the voyager as a memory. The traveller revisits his travels again and again, as the borders between space and time dwindle. And the movement never stops: the voyage is always under way, in real time or in time immemorial. For Aeneas and his crew, there is only motion and transience, a sense of heading constantly towards something but never arriving, of being halfway between one point and another, caught in a movement of eternally repetition. We never really know which present or which reality we inhabit. Memories intermingle with spaces and only become real when they are told or danced on stage. The play must shine light upon the unseen. Aeneas encounters shade after shade in the course of his travels, the shadows of the dead and the shifting forms of the immortal. I love the theater because the stage is the only place where men and gods do meet, where the living and the dead wander together, all spectres, witnesses and actors in the same grand play. 4 © Jean-Louis Fernandez NOTE D’INTENTION Translation, Adaptation & Original Writing by Kevin Keiss Under Different Skies is a personal and sensible reading of the Aeneid, the epic poem that Virgil composed between 29 and 19 B.C. The Aeneid itself is a remake of the Homeric epos, a pastiche, with all the distance that sort of imitation implies. In fact, that’s what seduces us when we dive into the text—the sense that we have been here before. We recognize bits and pieces of Homer’s original story but this time it’s an altogether different voyage, a voyage of exiles.

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