Avignon, une école (Avignon, a school) is part of a series of projects with young actresses and actors. How did it come about?
In 2020, the Festival d’Automne and the Adami asked me to create a play with young actors who had just graduated from theatre schools. That creation—Le Chœur—was done with people I didn’t know, which was something I’d never done before! I found myself having to explain the way I work, to convey the materials I use to create a play, something I usually do not put into words. I felt a sort of responsibility towards them. By talking to them, I realised they often had a limited understanding of their craft as actors. They’d been taught the history of theatre in a classical manner, from the point of view of directors and authors—mostly “white men”—but never from the point of view of the actors. That experience made me want to create another play, with four actors from Le Chœur, which I called Une autre histoire du théâtre (Another history of theatre): a play which intertwines the theoretical research I told them about every morning and archival documents, in order to highlight what, according to them, “makes theatre” today. The idea was to look through those archives while questioning their relevance to the present: in the afternoon, they improvised based on the theoretical narratives shared in the morning. They brought me scenes they wanted to play and “copied” documents: I quickly came to notice the ability of these young people, aged twenty to twenty-five, to do so with great skill!
Did you proceed with the same mindset for Avignon, une école?
For this third-year graduation play by the actors and actresses of La Manufacture in Lausanne, I tried to find common ground to serve as a foundation. Theatre does not exist just to unite but also to divide, to almost-quote Jean Vilar. This graduating class is a perfect illustration! After all, the Festival d’Avignon has always been an example of that tension between plays, aesthetics, and artists. It is a real place for debate. Through the various archives we explored, Avignon, une école reflects this diversity. We drew from this material to allow these young people to tell their stories today.
Can you tell us more about your method?
I read everything I could find about Avignon, I interviewed the people who currently work there or used to, found various sources of information… You can easily imagine that finding material was not an issue! Enough to make plays for the next ten years! From there, I summarised what I found, I showed them a number of documents to highlight key moments, major works, or performances I thought essential. We share everything on a drive, and then it’s up to them to bring out what seems important to them from this shared memory.
How do you then make use of this interaction between your research, your proposals, and theirs?
What interests me is how they react to these archives and to the questions that arise from them. Their knowledge of theatre is based on often recent references. I guide them by drawing their attention to older things. What is beautiful about the Festival d’Avignon is that it’s not only a history of aesthetics and forms: it’s also a history of spectators, of criticism, of cultural policies. When it comes down to it, it is the story of a permanent debate where challenges come not only from politicians and artists, but also from spectators. And let’s not forget the scandals, and not only in 1968 or 2005: for instance, when Jean Vilar staged a play by Georg Büchner, a German author, only a few years after the war! The idea that “it wasn’t better before, it won’t be better after, it’s just different” is something that appeals to me… How can these young artists build themselves through this?
You have a background at once in theatre, dance, and performance. Your productions are impressive for the precision of the acting, the movement, the energy of the text on stage… How do you work on the body with young actors and actresses?
In addition to the dance class with which we begin rehearsals every day, the idea of a form always precedes the idea of a text. When I’m working on a play like Le Chœur, I engage principles which allow me to work on this choral aspect. The text comes after. For Une autre histoire du théâtre, what mattered most was the history and the light on the bodies or the situations. Directing, for me, means directing bodies: I write performance spaces to better convey the language. For Avignon, une école, I wanted to be guided by the form of the archives and their evolution over time. Those are at first sound archives since we only have voice recordings. Then they become visual but static—in black and white: for a long time, all we have is photographs. Finally, moving images and colour make their appearance… Moreover, studying the reproduction of work documents allows us to understand precisely how directors put their shows together: it’s fascinating.
Avignon, une école explores that diversity, always with humour. What did you learn from those actors and actresses?
With those two recent productions I mentioned, which Avignon, une école explores even more deeply, I feel like we are transmitting things to each other. I learn a lot from them: their perspective as young people is extremely rich. Needing to tell them why I do things the way I do has led me to clarify my approach. Those plays, in their development, lie between transmission and creation. Spectators receive what we have built as we learnt it. It’s a very powerful space of sharing. In my work, learning also involves fairly simple formal responses: continuing to be who I am, not getting lost in the archives, staging my productions with a sort of poverty of means and urgency: no sets, no costumes. Faced with these archives, I try to remain vigilant to stay in the present without ever doing an homage or hagiography. The title, Avignon, une école, says one thing above all: to learn better—from the Festival d’Avignon—who we are today.
The text is very present in your work, and inseparable from a very physical dimension. You have also never directed a play before. How do you work on this relationship with words, imbued with humour?
Every project determines the focus of the work. If I’m working on philosopher Michel Foucault and his text The Discourse of Language, it’s about conveying the meaning of the text. It was different when I commissioned the poet Pierre Alferi, with whom I worked until his passing… For Avignon, une école, I write, I have the actors improvise, and then I go back to writing based on that new material. I can work and rework on an improvisation for weeks after weeks, physically testing it. It’s a form of stage writing, even though it remains very intellectually guided to stay connected to the moments of theoretical research. I’m actually a collage artist. The artists I like do not proceed any differently. The final image is produced by the beholder. Everything is laid out to see: I unfold the forms; nothing is hidden on stage. I trust the spectators. As for directing texts originally “non-theatrical,” I want to say that audiences are ready for anything, and they have been for a long time. The history of avant-garde art has distanced itself from the linearity of plays, and there is such a thing as rhizomatic thinking among audiences. There will always be people who think theatre should follow a linear narrative scheme. But I don’t have any preconceived notions about how theatre should or should not be made today. There are endless possibilities. I’m willing to try anything. I just try to find the right form based on my research, on the texts. With the desire to create new narratives today. So far, I haven’t been able to find those in theatrical texts. As for humour, I don’t know how to do without it!
Interview conducted by Marc Blanchet (February 2024) and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach