In 1977, Louis Castel formed the Théatrographe in Avignon to bring to the stage literary or dramatic works showing the full force of their powerful ideas. He defends writers whose styles, each of them unique, contain eternal human questions which often reach the most personal part of us. Molière, Adamov, Strindberg, Sade, Philip K. Dick, Novarina and Chekhov have enabled him to bring out images from words, that are sometimes whispered or murmured, sometimes uttered and projected clearly. He knows how to give words voice in almost the same way as they were written and how to create with just a few props, photos, sometimes puppets or more often videos, the universe that is special to each of the works he chooses. He works on the author's rhythm, breathing, even the heart-beat that he perceives in their writing and tries to make them perceptible to others. At the Avignon Festival, Louis Castel presented Comment Construire un Univers qui ne S'effondre Pas Deux jours Plus Tard adapted from the work by Philip K. Dick in 1993.
"I don't make any distinction between what happened to me and what I imagine happened to me. Part memory, part imagination..." This is how Raymond Federman talks about his work as a writer, a sort of single big book that inextricably mixes fact and fiction. He was saved from deportation by his mother who locked him up in store cupboard the day of the Velodrome d'Hiver round-up in Paris during the German occupation in World War Two: her last word to him was "hush". He emigrated to the United States, earned a living as a labourer, then as a soldier in Korea, before he became a university professor and writer, as well as a good friend of, and expert on, Samuel Beckett.. This unclassifiable author has always had a three-dimensional vision of his writing, staging it in its calligraphy as well as in its page layout. It is "double-writing" because R. Federman uses French and English to cover the biographical elements on which the fiction is constructed. It is a plural form of writing where several "I"s combine, - one narrates, one records, one listens, without mentioning the public who ask questions during the telling of the tale. Louis Castel uses these rich and fragmented resources at his disposal to proceed with his work essentially based on three works of Federman's, The Voice in the Closet, Amer Eldorado and Double or Nothing to summarize a work which invents a literary form out of which can be invented a form of theatre that is fragmented and rhythmic, where the writing materialises in a space. Body and words interact constantly to create a verbal, oral and visual universe that is as close as can be to that of the man who decided to live.
Distribution
Direction : Louis Castel
cast : Louis Castel (cast in progress)
with the participation of : Raymond Federman
Scenography : Damien Caille-Perret
artistic collaboration : Pierre-Yves Diez
Assistant direction : Isabelle Lusignan
Projected writing : Pierre-Yves Diez
Images vidéo : Georges Meran, Marc Tommasi
lighting : Philippe Grosperrin
Costumes : Corinne Fischer
Production
Coproduction : Le Théâtrographe, Festival d'Avignon, Centre national des Ecritures du spectacle la Chartreuse de Villeneuve lez Avignon, AMDA Production
Avec le soutien : de l'Institut Supérieur des Techniques du Spectacle