Christophe Huysman is an actor, writer and stage director, with the company, Les Hommes Penchés as well as being the founder of Laboratoire mobile HYC. His activities are diverse but they havea single aim – to share the voice of the poet which he claims is the priority, whatever form he chooses. He is keen to experiment with multimedia performance, with circus, with song recitals, with sound art, travelling through theatre where each discovery, meeting or fancy leads him. He likes to team up artists from different backgrounds to give the audience a chance to rediscover what is real through what should seem like new eyes and new ears. Everyday routine is turned into surprising poetical and theatrical work made up of fragments, tiny bits and pieces which are very carefully put into shape.
Les Hommes dégringolés (The Brokendown Men), Cet homme s'appelle HYC (This Man is called HYC), Espèces, pièce de cirque (Species, a circus play) and Les Repas HYC (HYC's Meals)… are all stages of the permanent construction of a universe that is always fragile, where words, voices, sounds, images and living bodies resist any attempt to destroy what is human.
At the Avignon Festival, Christophe Huysman presented Les Hommes dégringolés in 2001 and Cet homme s'appelle HYC in 2002.
A race in 53 chapters, 53 short prose poems that actor and writer Christophe Huysman reads in the half-light on stage, as 759 Polaroid snaps he took over the past ten years and that he has altered, scribbled on and recreated are shown. They form a living wall of images, the work of Jacques André who improvises visual rhythmic variations, giving a counterpoint that is a mixture of abstract and figurative design to the text which is projected on to the floor. These snaps, a combination of self-portraits, landscapes, bodies, are all part of a moving decor flowing in synch with the flow of the poet's words. The author's desires, anxieties and fantasies are assertions of resistance against the threat of disappearance and death. The actor's body is exhibited in the centre of the stage, moving in time with the voice which spews out words, throws them, holds them in or shouts them out. It is a Theatre of Dark and Light which opens a new territory to words and images disrupting the normal way we look and listen. It is theatre where disaster is foretold and at the same time combated with the poet's arms. It is a journey into the ‘personal' where ‘I' is the master of the game - asserted, exposed, doctored. The work of a poet who reveals himself in his words and through his body, and always with the sincerity of a necessary struggle.
Jean-François Perrier
Distribution
de et par : Christophe Huysman
réalisation multimédia : Jacques André
développement multimédia : Max Wolkowinski
régie : Mehdi Toutain-Lopez
production / diffusion : Laure Guazzoni, Marie Faure pour et bientôt...
Production
Production déléguée : Compagnie Les Hommes Penché