2011 · Guantanamo · Vigner (EN)
Éric Vigner and the seven young actors continue their work at the Académie with a poetic ritornello on the subject of being a stranger. "Ours is not the classic director-actor relationship but a process of transmission, of research as much as of production that is to extend over a period of three years." The Corneillan alexandrine, which is 'a law unto itself' parallels the telegraphic style of the interrogation records of GUANTANAMO, published by FRANK SMITH in 2010, in the Éditions du Seuil, named after the detention centre installed by the United States in Cuba in the aftermath of 9/11.
"No ideas but in things."[1]
In 2006, the US government published, on the basis of the Freedom of Information Act, the transcripts of the interrogation of three hundred and seventeen prisoners suspected of terrorist acts. FRANK SMITH got hold of them and turned them into a series of 'recitatives': a litany of depositions apparently entirely non-judgmental. Thus rendered fictional, the transcript in the 'white space' characteristic of the language of court records recalls, in places, texts by MARGUERITE DURAS or CHARLES REZNIKOFF. It has all the evocative power of a political and poetic statement. Vacillating between the extremes of theatre play, sound composition and sculptural installation, this performance, which has all the visual beauty typical of the productions of Éric Vigner with his background of stage designer and his careful approach to both the text and the action it transports, lays bare an implacable rhetorical logic in which the absurd is a component of horror and where the absence of any commentary makes it easier to say the unsayable.
"We are going to ask you some questions in order to better understand your story." [2]
Facing a "question"
"The 17th century, the 'Grand Siècle', the era of CORNEILLE: the heyday of civilisation, with the royal court, the grandees, the Sun King, the splendour of the sovereign calling on all the arts to celebrate their grandeur... And the king's subjects, the ordinary people? They remain obscure, anonymous... GUANTANAMO: quite another matter, to be sure, and a different place - a place where people do not walk about freely, where they do not meet each other in the street, but one where they face their interrogators. Nothing to do with the usual problems of the bonds people may tie with one another, bonds of friendship or love, or family bonds (which surge up only from the past, nostalgically, full of desire), for they are all 'isolated' from one another, face to face with an authority and its 'questioning'. They must answer for themselves, for their identity. In GUANTANAMO, one hears, one senses by implication, all the prisoners' concerns, as they answer, for the record, such questions as: who are you, what are you, where are you from, where did you pass in coming here, is that your real name, what is your occupation...? Questions designed to 'put them on the spot', to single them out, questions clearly meant, as Foucault has pointed out, to exercise 'control', to 'police' them in the broad sense of the term (all these functions derive from what one used to call the 'police state' in the 18th century). In GUANTANAMO, it is of course a modern, an ultra-modern state, the United States, who subject to this interrogation people at least some of whom are not at all familiar with life in a system of coordinates in which identities can well be 'sited' in space and time."
Jean-Claude Monod
"You need maps to understand the routes and travels."
ÉRIC VIGNER
A Theatre of Babel
"From century to century, the theatre has always harboured a suspicion regarding the visible part of the world and how it should be represented on stage. From the 18th century to this day, the chosen texts have invariably revealed the vanishing lines and blind spots in space, the shady and inaccessible sides of human existence - that which tends to hide away, to conceal itself, to remain unspoken. Each in its own way, the fables and forms prevailing at a given time, circumscribe without fail the secret scene of a crime, be it symbolic or perpetrated in reality. Doubtless, the essential thing takes place at the level of language, and it is there that the seduction of the visible is foiled. The classic alexandrine - in truth a foreign language; the sparse language of Frank Smith, which reveals the abyss of incomprehension between the accused Yemenis, Saudis, Pakistanis, Afghans... and the members of the tribunal that interrogate them in American English, which the former hardly understand - or not at all; the language mishmash of La Faculté, where Ahmed, Jeremy and their pals learn foreign languages while dreaming of elsewhere and of exile... Different in character, but always poetic and sonorous, each of the texts bursts the surface of imagery, penetrates the hubbub of the world and puts to the test the capacity of languages to come together, to exist side by side, to communicate. The young actors of the Académie seek bodily contact with the diversity of languages that confront them, the material of a Theatre of Babel. It is this process, directed by Éric Vigner, that marks the singular nature of the Académie. In approaching these works together while making sure that they are not 'mixed up', in working on them jointly and at the same time, the actors learn to listen to what resounds for us, in this day and age, in the space - the interval - between the plays, between the texts, between the members of the team, and between the audience and the artists that confront them. The question will always be how the effort to reduce the distances, the differences - human, linguistic, in art, history and social makeup - in a given place and time may create settings where the mind and imagination may circulate freely in unexpected ways, here and now, on stage and in each one of us, together or separately. It is not so much a matter of changing the world but of trying to be contemporaries of it."
SABINE QUIRICONI
© Photography : Alain Fonteray
Texts assembled by Jutta Johanna Weiss
Translation from the French by Herbert Kaiser
© CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient
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