Olivier Cadiot
Short sentences, a burgeoning of images, graphic compositions, new paragraphs, cuts, pauses, rapid returns: in Olivier Cadiot, the text's tempo is above all musical. Music that does not treat his reader gently and urges him to explore further. In his writer's studio, words pass and pass again. For a long time, sentences look for their place, commas change lines. The texts are enriched and then stripped down, so that what remains in the end, after a process of several years, what must be had of words, for books and novels carved out as closely as possible to their end result. By choosing a writer as an associate for the 2010 Festival, the question was first one of adopting a writing, one of the most innovative of the last two decades. A writing that comes from poetry (Poetic Art, 1988), sound-poetry that resonates, is said, is breathed, carves into the quick and turns conventions upside-down. A writing laid bare, unravelled and sewn, nourished by sounds, notes, cybernetic points, notably during the adventure of the Revue générale de littérature, the last literary laboratory of the end of the 20th century that Olivier Cadiot founded with Pierre Alferi in 1995. At P.O.L. next appeared a series of works that are at the limit of the novel: Future, Former, Fugitive (1993), The Colonel of the Zouaves (1997), Definitive and Durable Return of the Loved One (2002), Fairy Queen (2002) and A Nest What For (2007). All of them combine feelings and images, sensations and reminiscences, triviality and metaphysics, autobiography and recordings of the real, past and present, in a language that has an original texture.
The man Cadiot is also a style: funny, passionate, responsive, generous. He knows how to play collectively but, a meticulous worker, he also needs moments of solitude, that he turns to advantage during long voluntary isolations between the Buttes Chaumont in Paris and the Charente region. Curious about everything, his collaborations are as heterogeneous as they are multiple. He has worked with musicians (Georges Aperghis, Rodolphe Burger, Benoît Delbecq), poets (Pierre Alferi, Bernard Heidsieck, Emmanuel Hocquard), exegetes (under the direction of Frédéric Boyer for a new translation of the Bible), but also philosophers, men of science, theatre and cinema. All this without ever dispersing himself: he knows that he has to tightly build the loophole through which he views the world. In 1993, Olivier Cadiot encountered the theatre. At the request of the director Ludovic Lagarde, he wrote a play Sisters and Brothers, which questioned him on theatrical writing. He came back to it in another way: the obstinacy of Ludovic Lagarde permitting an inching of the pair towards the stage. Adaptations of already published books, editing-cutting incarnated through the recurrent character of Robinson and the actor who played him Laurent Poitrenaux, the tandem is illustrated in four shows, from the soliloquy-laden monologue to the choral comedy: The Colonel of the Zouaves (1998), Definitive and Durable Return of the Loved One (2003), Fairy Queen (2004) and A Nest What For, begun in 2009. Different, his theatre in words-voices, in movements-lights, as a macro-microscope proposes a rare jubilatory experience to spectators. After two principal experiences at the Festival d'Avignon - the premiere in 1989 of the opera Romeo & Juliet whose libretto he signed for Pascal Dusapin, and a residence at La Chartreuse in 2004 at the end of which he presented, with Ludovic Lagarde, Fairy Queen, The Colonel of the Zouaves and Gertrude Stein's Yes Is for a Very Young Man, which he translated into French -, this year Olivier Cadiot is one of the Festival's two associate artists. Apart from readings, one of which will be given in the Cour d'honneur of the Palais des papes, he will present a choral work there, A Nest What For and a monologue written for the occasion, for Laurent Poitrenaux and Ludovic Lagarde, A Magus in Summer. His interest in music will fertilise the Festival notably with Rodolphe Burger and Pascal Dusapin. His meeting with Christoph Marthaler, the other associate artist of this year's Festival d'Avignon, will drive him to new collaborations.
ADB, April 2010.