Actor, playwright and stage director, Olivier Py says he is essentially a poet of the theatre. Since 1998, he has headed the Centre Dramatique National/Orléans-Loiret. In 1988, he founded his company, L'Inconvénient des Boutures, and staged his first plays. The starting point for the cycle of theatrical adventures with Olivier Py was La Servante, Histoire Sans Fin in 1994. It marked the beginning of an exploration by both actors and audience of the earth and the heavens, of what is human and what is divine, to forget, to lose oneself, to find oneself again and dream together in the magical place of theatre which is, for Olivier Py one of the last sanctuaries for active thinking. Le Visage d'Orphée (1997) and L'Apocalypse Joyeuse (2000), exposed the poet even more as a man of contradictions but also as a man of truth, not hiding behind his words, but instead sharing the risk of total commitment with them, and not by taking the easy way but with great rigour. For him theatre and opera (he's directed five operas), must be places where ordinary people go for big celebrations, theatre-goers who are willing to give up their role of "culture consumers" to set off on an adventure towards new or re-invented lands. At the Avignon Festival, Olivier Py has presented La Servante, Histoire Sans Fin in 1995, Apologétique in 1996, Le Visage d'Orphée in the Courtyard of Honour in the Pope's Palace in 1997, Le Requiem pour Srebrenica and Les Ballades de Miss Knife in 1999 and Apocalypse Joyeuse in 2000.
Olivier Py leads us into a new theatrical epic with his latest creation, Les Vainqueurs (The Conquerors). This new opus comprises a prologue and three parts which takes a whole day, to lead us in the footsteps of a hero armed with an enigmatic smile, who crosses the Mediterranean world and tries to live poetically in a universe vacillating between the most recent contemporary time and the still-living memory of our oldest myths. And this poet transforms into three different identities - a prince, a transvestite prostitute and a grave-digger. His is a tireless bid to find a revolutionary way to approach the world, travelling through the three circles of politics, asethetics and metaphysics, attempting to escape any ideology, any belief, which has a radical view of what is possible and what is impossible, reality and utopia. The hero launches himself into a work of salvation that blows pretence and shallow ideologies to pieces. His journey takes him to a brothel, a prison, a cabaret, a theatre and onto a raft drifting in the Mediterranean, and he does not spare false prophets, rhymesters and bigots of all shapes and sizes. In this mixture of humour and despair, the author does not hide behind his work, but exposes himself in it and with it, just as Genet, Claudel and Garcia Lorca have done, and who only believes in theatre to tell the world as it is. Could human happiness, if it exists, be at the same time pagan, free, cruel and beautiful ? This is what Olivier Py and his artistic crew are looking for in their light-hearted way, amid the eye-catching and shifting scenography of Pierre-André Weitz and what they offer to the spectator. Images and words, spoken and sung, bubble up but are not allowed to boil over, making an enigmatic and mysterious voyage which takes the time to say and to show a veritable hymn to theatre as the last refuge for incarnated poems.
Distribution
Stage director and lighting : Olivier Py
Cast : Olivier Balazuc, Nazim Boudjenah, Céline Chéenne, Frédéric Giroutru, Benoît Guibert, Christophe Maltot, Thomas Matalou, Elizabeth Mazev, Bruno Sermonne
and alternately : Albert Killy, Louis Ritter
and the musiciens : Stéphane Leach, Sylvie Magand, Benjamin Ritter, Pierre-André Weitz
Scenography, costumes and make-up : Pierre-André Weitz
Music : Stéphane Leach
Sound : Benjamin Ritter
Assistant director : Olivier Balazuc
Trainee assistant director : Muriel Ryngaert, Robert Sandoz
Production
Production : Centre dramatique national / Orléans-Loiret-Centre
Résidence de création : à la Ferme du Buisson - Scène nationale de Marne-la-Vallée
Avec le soutien : du ministère de la Culture et de la communication - aide à la création
Avec la participation : du Théâtre national populaire - Villeurbanne et du Carré Saint-Vincent - Scène nationale d'Orléans
Accueil au festival avec le soutien : de la région Centre
Texte publié : aux éditions Actes Sud-Papiers
© photo Alain Fonteray
