Co-founder of the Association Notoire (Association of the Notorious) in 1989 and director of the Bibliothèque Censurée (The Censored Library) cycle, Thierry Bedard is someone who unceasingly questions societies where the “assassination of thought” - in the words of Hermann Broch, 1934 - is at work. After having worked on a tribute to the International Writers' Parliament, an organisation that showed artistic solidarity with censored writers the world over, Thierry Bedard met Reza Baraheni, an Iranian literary theorist and encyclopaedist whose fragmented works of poetry lie on the edges of imagination and reality. Born in 1935 in Tabriz, arrested and tortured in 1973 for protesting against censorship under the Shah of Iran, then assaulted and exiled by the Islamist regime of Ayatollah Khomeiny, Reza Baraheni is today a refugee in Canada where he teaches at the University of Toronto. A prolific and learnèd author, his rich body of work – some fifty pieces today – has become a reference for a new generation of Iranian intellectuals.
QesKes3
What is QesKes ? First of all a lexical root which means both “to cut into pieces” and “to tell a story”. In Persian, Kes means the “story-teller”; in Arabic, Qes, means “to kill”. It's also a lesson in poetry. It's the one learned by writer Reza Baraheni who had to renounce his mother tongue – Azeri – for official Persian when he was humiliated and traumatized as a child and was forced to lick a school newspaper in public. The torments of thousands of years of history penetrated his skin and his tongue and since then, the writer has not stopped deconstructing and re-inventing literature with an incredible-sized linguistic appetite. QesKes is a story about the violence of the world and the fragmentation of thought. QesKes could be the tale of a Thousand and One Nights watched over by guards. Carried away on bad Persian carpets across History, the audience is invited to listen to the tales of this man who is an artist of dismembering. The “sensitive mechanism” set up by Thierry Bedard allows Reza Baraheni, who is on stage himself, to be part of the stories, commentaries and improvisations with the help of simultaneous translations. Three QesKes and the same number of cases to dismember: QesKes 1, the mother or the mother tongue; QesKes 2, the son and impossible transmission; QesKes 3, the father, God and power all at the same time. Between Reza's world and the world according to Baraheni, this exceptional encounter is also an encounter with contemporary history. Withstanding the shock of prejudice, rather than that of civilizations, QesKes unveils the hidden and mixed faces of the East and of the West, telling all the stories of the world that would not be told.
Distribution
stage direction Thierry Bedard
cast : Reza Baraheni, Marie-Charlotte Biais, Bruno Blairet, Gurshad Shaheman
lighting : Jean-Louis Aichhorn
sound : Jean-Pascal Lamand
Production
coproduction : notoire / la Bibliothèque Censurée, Bonlieu - Scène nationale d'Annecy, Festival d'Avignon
avec le soutien : du Fonds d'insertion des jeunes artistes dramatiques de la Région Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur et du Centre culturel canadien de Paris