Alexis Forestier trained as an architect and a musician. In 1985 he took part in the creation of a musical ensemble, Les Endimanchés, a group of percussionists inspired by both noise-music and popular French songs. From 1993, his interest in forms that mix different artistic practices pushed him to create The Endimanché Company. He wrote and staged theatrical events that came out of the literary cabaret of avant-garde movements. The first show Cabaret Voltaire was inspired by Dadaist research in Zurich. From there, he went on, with Cécile Saint-Paul, to ponder over the theatricality of the poetic works of René Char, Henri Michaux and Francis Ponge before returning to the musical theatre of the Bertolt Brecht tradition whose The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent he directed in 1998, as well as The Threepenny Opera in 2005 at the La Borde Clinic. As a musician, visual artist and director, he then put on shows based on the works of Maurice Blanchot, Franz Kafka, Georg Büchner, Gertrude Stein and Daniil Kharms. This year for the Avignon Festival, he is again staging a production of René Char's play Claire which he first produced in 1995.
At the Avignon Festival, Alexis Forestier and Cécile Saint-Paul presented The Show Must Fall Down as part of the 25th Hour Programme in 2005.
Claire is a doublely poetic figure, at once river and young girl, allegory and reality. She is the one the poet is waiting for. “La Rencontrée” (the encountered one), she is the only one who enables him to chase away his own ghosts and to continue on. Claire is one and many, all who “love, dream, wait, suffer, question, hope, work”. Alexis Forestier wanted to go through the different tableaux of this play, written in 1948, like one would cross a landscape. The men that Claire meets punctuate the different tableaux. Suffering, alienated men who cannot embrace this elusive girl. Through the characters of the Head of Operations in the Maquis, then a Head of Project for the Resistance, the poet behind Feuillets d'Hypnos (Leaves of Hypnos) questions his own contradictions. In Claire, he continues his poetic and political analysis of reality, admits his disappointment with the hostility of a world that should have changed but that was rebuilding itself ignoring that hope.
But far from resignation or flight, the task was then to “place back on the necessary slope, the thousands of streams that cool down and dispel the fever of men.” Here again, it is about standing up, on the side of brightness and light and being vehemently opposed to those who have perverted the hopes of a different future.
Alexis Forestier has sought fluidity, that of the metaphorical river. For this, he generates a continual shift in the set, using sound and music to create insight into the heroine's multiple possible facets. After Feuillets d'Hypnos, this Claire gives voice to another René Char, one who never gave up, “here we'll have to triumph or die, to get beaten up or stay proud”.
Distribution
A travelling show that will move around the Avignon region, an area covered throughout the year by “Nomades” of the Scène Nationale de Cavaillon.
mise en scène et scénographie :Alexis Forestier
avec :Jean Chaize, Brigitte Cuvelier, Bruno Forget, Alain Gintzburger, Antonin Rayon, Cécile Saint-Paul
lumières et régie générale :Denis Gobin
texte publié aux éditions Gallimard
Production
coproduction :Festival d'Avignon, compagnie les endimanchés, Halle aux grains -Scène nationale de Blois
avec :le soutien du Théâtre de Cavaillon - Scène nationale
en partenariat avec:la commune de Mérindol, la communauté de communes du Pays des Sorgues et des Monts de Vaucluse, la communauté de communes du Pays de Sault, la CCAS, la commune de Tavel, la commune d'Oppède et la communauté de communes de Coustellet
L'œuvre de René Char donne lieu à une collaboration entre :le Festival d'Avignon et le ministère de l'Éducation nationale