In his notebooks, Bernard-Marie Koltès writing about this play, seems to invest in Léone a personal souvenir of his own trip to Nigeria in 1978. As soon as she gets off the plane she sees "on a river, a group of black sparrowhawks perched on a swollen, obese decomposing corpse
floating gently in the water." This head-on with abandoned death, on his first ever arrival on the African continent must have left a lasting impression on Koltès. This is perhaps the real starting point of the story. The vision described in the notebook becomes an obsession in the book. The more the corpse is absent, the more it rots the lives of the survivors, the more it strangles two white men on the work site, Horn and Cal. They are panic-stricken - how can you get rid of something you have already lost ? An interminable night stretches on and on, creating a unity of time and space in classical style. All these Blacks who have disappeared, Cal thinks he sees them everywhere. The invisible swallows and spits out - what has disappeared is proliferating in the shelter of their sight. Gradually, darkness thickens and gains more consistency. The unpredictable and opaque night sighs, shouts, whispers, is heard in the wind, the dust, the swarms of insects, in lightning, in the rain. Like chez Michaux, "The night is agitated." Here at last is the face of Africa. Impossible to look it in the eye. Jacques Nichet directs the play by taking up the "combat" in an Africa that is not quite like any particular place on the globe. It's like being on the "inside of the world." An extract from Combat de nègre et de chiens, scene VI, p. 42-44, Editions de Minuit, 1989. The play was first performed in 1983 at Nanterre, and was directed by Patrice Chéreau.
Distribution
stage direction Jacques Nichet
Stage design : Laurent Peduzzi
Lighting : Marie Nicolas
Sound : Bernard Vallery
Vocal design : Georges Baux and Abdel Sefsaf
Vocals : Alain Aithnard, M'Baye Mame Cheikh, Denis Mpunga, Boubacar Ndiaye
Costumes : Nathalie Prats-Berling
Make-up : Sophie Niesseron
Assistant directors : Guillaume Delaveau and Célie Pauthe
With : Alain Aithnard, François Chattot, Loïc Houdré, Martine Schambacher
Production
création : janvier 2001 au Théâtre national de Toulouse
coproduction : TNT-Théâtre national de Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées, Théâtre de la Ville - Paris