2010 · L'Académie · Vigner (EN)
"Any place is good enough as long as it's the one by which one has come in."
ROLAND DUBILLARD
It is with words that everything starts. At first, with the words of Corneille when, in 1968, Éric Vigner, a student at the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSAD) stages La Place Royale with seven of his classmates. Then, in 1991, the words of Roland Dubillard, put on stage by some twenty young actors in an abandoned factory at Issy-les-Moulineaux, in La Maison d'Os - the founding act of the Compagnie SUZANNE M. And two years later, in 1993, when the words of Marguerite Duras, spoken by "the brothers and sisters" in La Pluie d'Été, empassion the stage of the Conservatoire de Paris. The words of Corneille, Dubillard and Duras - that is the stuff Éric Vigner's theatre is made of.
And with the places where it all happens. A city, Lorient. A call from the Ministry of Culture in 1994, while La pluie d’été is being played in Moscow: an offer to assume the directorship of a theatre in his native Brittany, which he accepts. In 1996, he takes residence in that city, once founded by the French State, which placed its second Compagnie des Indes Orientales there to trade with the rest of the world. From this seaport he exports Molière to South Korea, Beaumarchais to Albania, Koltès to the United States, and brings home to it a heritage of foreign-language theatre enriched by his encounter with the Far East, the Balkans, the trans-Atlantic world. The strangeness of language, often seen as an obstacle to understanding, turns into a trump card, a godsend. With the words of MOLIÈRE in Korean, those of BEAUMARCHAIS in Albanian and KOLTÈS in American English - Éric Vigner creates theatre.
"What sort of theatre for the future? What forms should be invented to reach people ?"
ÉRIC VIGNER
On 3 October 2010, he founds L’ACADÉMIE at Lorient. To bring together young actors from different cultures, languages and complexions. To instil into them this love of the word, of books - of the actor's craft drawn from reading and transforming what they read into the spoken word. To work on classic French theatre from the angle of modern writing. Corneille, Smith, Honoré. And to act. Seven actors from seven countries - Morocco, Romania, Mali, Belgium, South Korea, Germany, Israel - form this Theatre Academy in the image of the young people of the world. Their names: HYUNJOO LEE, NICO ROGNER, VLAD CHIRITA, EYE HAIDARA, TOMMY MILLIOT, LAHCEN ELMAZOUZI, ISAÏE SULTAN. They will be working at Lorient for three years.
"These seven mercenaries of the theatre represent, most poetically, the 'youth of the world' in all the diversity of their cultural backgrounds merged into one. It is of fundamental importance, I feel, that the Théâtre de Lorient should harbour a stock of actors, and especially cosmopolitan ones who work in French, practising a 'theatre of art' in a spirit of shared knowledge and experiences closely linked with their differences. The very spirit of this Atlantic port, its history and background, have prompted me to engage in 'commerce', by way of the theatre, with the rest of the world."
ÉRIC VIGNER
The Académie is a place of experimentation, transmission and production, all in one. It aims to perpetuate the dynamics of encounter that has guided Éric Vigner throughout his career and confronts the language and experience of each and everyone involved with the intersecting viewpoints of classic and contemporary writing. While waiting for the production, in 2012, of La Faculté, a piece written for Éric Vigner by Christophe Honoré, the Académie presents, from 3 October 2011 onwards, both at Lorient and on tour, La Place Royale by Pierre Corneille and Frank Smith's Guantanamo.
"The setting has been provided for a group of actors from different countries and horizons, who have come for a fairly long stay - but less long than the time Plato's disciples spent at his Academy: Think of Aristotle, who stayed for twenty years, or of the educational curriculum outlined in the Republic, which suggests that the apprenticeship of dialectics can hardly be completed before the age of fifty, after which the toughest among the students might finally reach the crowning event of their years of learning: the vision of the Good. We can only wait, wait and see what the effects of the work of this new Academy will be on verse, yesterday and today, on Alidor's frame of mind and Angélique's 'pure love', on the violence of law and the irrepressibility of desire, on amorous feelings that it is sometimes more shameful to confess than the abomination of sexuality, on the will to exercise self-control and on one's indifference to others. In any case, the passing of these frontiers - between epochs, styles, the kinds of questions asked, anxieties -, the way these young people meet to jointly work on texts fraught with these questions may well have the same effect as the clashing of stones of which Plato speaks metaphorically as the precondition for the spark of truth to arise. In the Academy, this had a name derived from its parent word, the practice of dialogue, which illustrates Plato's genius: dialectics."
JEAN-CLAUDE MONOD, research fellow at the CNRS and teacher at the 'École normale supérieure' (Paris)
"Let No One Ignorant of Geometry Come Under My Roof."
PLATO (385 B.C.)
"No doubt this ACADÉMIE can only define itself in the course of time, as its members relate to each other, for this is what it's all about - exchanging ideas, striving, building, and all that over a pre-defined stretch of time and - perhaps - beyond. The assets of this Académie are its actors. They will have to assume responsibility for the group as a whole, since their mission is not simply to act in a spectacle or theatrical production but to reflect on what theatre means in this day and age, what we mean by the theatre of the twenty-first century, and above all, how we go about creating it. The group will have to develop a working method that goes much beyond directing actors on a stage. Its members must learn how to direct themselves and to achieve personal liberty within the scope of a given working principle."
TOMMY MILLIOT, Extract from the Journal de l'Académie.
© Photography : Alain Fonteray
Texts assembled by Jutta Johanna Weiss
Translation from the French by Herbert Kaiser
© CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient
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