1992 · Le Régiment de Sambre et Meuse · (The Regiment of Sambre-et-Meuse) · Vigner (EN)
Français
Deutsch"We do not go to war if we do not like it, if we do not feel determined - destined for the fight. The same goes for theater."
Jean Genet, Les Paravents
"During rehearsals in that icy-cold factory we were all the time listening to the radio, closely following the events of the Gulf War. In this way, in that universe of stone and bitter cold, the war assumed phantasmagoric proportions. It was then and there that I came to think of our next play, as a sort of follow-up: LE REGIMENT DE SAMBRE ET MEUSE. What does war mean to us, to me as a person ? To me, who has never seen combat, never been directly exposed to that reality. So I invented a plot for seven actors in a town in ruins somewhere in the world, where war has raged for years. The actors meet clandestinely in an abandoned theatre, a theatre that no longer exists, in a no-go area, and turn theatre into an act of resistance against reality.”
ÉRIC VIGNER
"There is a relationship between theater and death; between theater and war, between the theatrical work and the military work. In theater, there is danger of imaginary death. In the war, there is danger of real death. The theater is in the situation of a company, a division which has to rise to the assault of a citadel and which has no means to gain a victory. It is necessary to have appeal to invention."
ANTOINE VITEZ [1]
LE REGIMENT DE SAMBRE ET MEUSE is a compilation of fragments taken from literary and poetical texts by ALPHONSE ALLAIS, LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE, JEAN GENET, ROLAND DUBILLARD, GEORGES COURTELINE and FRANZ MARC, reflecting their experience of military life and the war. ÉRIC VIGNER turns classic dramaturgical concepts upside down, bursts linearity wide open; there is no beginning, no middle part, no end. He jumps back and forth in time and across the whole array of authors.
Among these texts there are three letters by Franz Marc - a painter and volunteer soldier. letters to his wife, written from Verdun. But what he speaks of is his art, not the war. He speaks of the spiritual aspects of art. Together with Kandinsky, Marc had founded the ‘Blauer Reiter’, and he was friends with Paul Klee. Now, at the age of 30, he has painted for little more than three years, but has already passed through all the new styles of painting of his time (Cubism, Fauvism…) and is slowly moving towards abstraction. He is the originator of arbitrary - subjective - colour, less representative of nature but so much more expressive: Arbitrary colour is used by these painters to conjure up a frame of mind, emotions, another kind of nature - that of an inner world. Right there, in the turmoil of warfare, he writes to his wife: ‘Behind the war, behind the reality of fighting, of battle, there is something else, some aspect of the order of the world, of harmony’. It is this intuition that he wants to express in his paintings, but he cannot do so because a war is going on around him.
"We are already on the ‘other side’ - on the side of non-vanity, of the non-application of our knowledge. Our knowledge and skills are within us, mute, the noble man does not talk about the technicalities of our existence. There’s only one thing that must be done: Art must be freed from its mask. In our day and age, the purpose of Art is no longer to serve people for their big or small pretences. Art is - or is bound to be - metaphysical, and it is only now that it can be metaphysical. Art is going to liberate itself from human objectives and purposes. We will no longer paint a forest, or a horse, as we like them or as they appear to us but as they are in reality, the way the forest or the horse experience themselves, their absolute nature behind appearances, behind what we see… From now on, we have to unlearn relating animals or plants to ourselves and presenting our relation with them in our works. All things on earth have their very own forms, their formula which our fumbling hands cannot feel but which we grasp intuitively to the extent our talent permits. We will but know in part as long as our earthbound existence lasts - but don’t we all believe in metamorphosis? We artists, all of us: why, otherwise, this eternal search for metamorphic forms? The things as they really are, beyond what they seem to be?... Things speak: there is a will in them, and form. Why should we interfere? There is no wisdom we can impart to them… We stand, I believe, at the divide between two long epochs, but as yet the land lies waste with fragments of old ideas and forms that refuse to go away although they are of the past. These old ideas and creations live on, persist in a sham existence, and we helplessly face the Herculean task to drive them out and make room for the New which is already waiting to replace them. Appearances are trite and plain - cast them off, remove them completely from your thoughts - think yourselves, and your way of looking at the world, free from these appearances: what remains is the world, eternally moving, in its true form, a form of which we, the artists, are capable of catching a glimpse.”
Franz Marc, LETTerS from the FRONT
LE REGIMENT DE SAMBRE ET MEUSE is created at the Quartz Theatre at Brest on 25 March 1992, with seven actors of the COMPAGNIE SUZANNE M., BRUNO BOULZAGUET, ARNAUD CHURIN, PHILIPPE COTTEN, BENOÎT DI MARCO, ARTHUR NAUZYCIEL, DOMINIQUE PARENT and GUILLAUME RANNOU.
This time the whole theatre is the stage. Éric Vigner is in search of the appropriate forms and remodels space so as to cast light on the vertical linkages. With the nervous titter of those about to die, a forlorn hope indulges in one last ‘Great Illusion’.
"Franz Marc confronted the issue of a new form of presenting things. I believe that we are today very close to that period. We have to construct, to go out in quest of the future. I find it very difficult today to create a coherent œuvre in a classic structure. Things don’t work like that in our day and age. What we see is only parts, fragments, I would say, and it is out of the confrontation of these fragments, out of the tension between them, that something like a new world - I can’t say what sort of world - will perhaps be born."
ÉV
LE REGIMENT DE SAMBRE ET MEUSE is presented at the Centre Dramatique National d'Aubervilliers. Eric Vigner then works with ANATOLI VASSILIEV in Moscow, with YOSHI OÏDA (Académie Expérimentale des Théâtres) and LUCA RONCONI. In 1993 he is invited by PETER BROOK to a research work on stage direction. He is regarded as one of the most innovative stage directors of his generation.
© Photography : Alain Fonteray
Texts assembled by Jutta Johanna Weiss
Translation from the French by Herbert Kaiser
© CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient
