Feux

A student at the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs of Strasbourg, then the Théâtre National de Strasbourg school, Daniel Jeanneteau became, in 1989, the scenographer for the director Claude Régy for whom he did, for over 15 years, most of his scenographies. At the same time, he conceived scenographies for the theatre and dance for Catherine Diverrès, Gérard Desarthe, Éric Lacascade, Charles Tordjman, Jean-Claude Gallotta, Alain Ollivier, Marcel Bozonnet, Jean-Baptiste Sastre, Trisha Brown… After having co-produced two shows on the work of Fernando Pessoa along with Clotilde Mollet and Hervé Pierre, he decided to direct his own shows accompanied by Marie-Christine Soma. Starting in 2001, he journeyed through the universes of Racine (Iphigénie), Strindberg (The Ghost Sonata), Sarah Kane (Blasted), Martin Crimp and George Benjamin (for their opera Into the Little Hill) and Bulgakov (Adam and Eve). His collaboration with Marie-Christine Soma evolved towards a total partnership in theatre creation and directing. As pedagogues, they have just staged Les Assassins de la charbonnière (The Coalwoman's Assassins) after Labiche and Kafka with the students of group 37 at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg school. Associate director at the Théâtre Gérard-Philipe of Saint-Denis from 2002 to 2007 then at the Espace Malraux of Chambéry and the Maison de la Culture of Amiens, he has just been appointed director of the Studio-Théâtre of Vitry.

Marie-Christine Soma holds a bachelor's degree in classical literature and a master's in philosophy. After being lighting engineer at the Théâtre de la Criée in Marseille, she devoted herself to creation starting in 1985. She assisted Henri Alekan then Dominique Bruguière for the premiere of Time and the Room by Botho Strauss directed by Patrice Chéreau. Working both for the theatre and dance, she has created the lighting for shows by Geneviève Sorin, Alain Fourneau, Marie Vayssière, François Rancillac, Jean-Claude Gallotta, Jean-Paul Delore, Jérôme Deschamps, Jacques Vincey, Michel Cerda, Éric Vigner, Arthur Nauzyciel, Catherine Diverrès… Since 2001, she has been Daniel Jeanneteau's artistic collaborator for all the shows whose staging they now handle together.

Born in Münster in 1874 into a modest family, August Stramm was first destined for theology before entering the German Post Office Ministry in 1893, in which he carved out his career, becoming an inspector in 1909. Starting in 1903 he concurrently had a career as a writer, publishing eight short plays, three poetry collections, two long poems and two prose texts. His first work Émigrés is an essay that was followed by his first play The Peasants. It was after 1909 that he successively wrote, apart from poems, The Sacrifice, The Husband and The Sterile, then The Rudimentary System (1912), Sancta Susanna and The Bride of the Moor (1913). He had problems finding a publisher and it was his meeting in 1914 with Herwath Walden (director of the review Der Sturm) that made it possible for his works to be published. Before being mobilized in August 1914, he wrote The Last, Waiting, Awakening and the draft of Forces, which he finished while on leave in January 1915. After having been in trench warfare in Alsace, then in the Somme, he was sent to the Russian front in April 1915. He died there on September 1st, the last combatant in his company, after having prepared a collection of poems, Thou / Love Poems and finishing his last play Destiny.

Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma invite us to discover a German author little known in France. Three short plays, three incisive views on human passions, three immediate direct observations of the desires and impulses of individuals confronted with every tropism… Neither complaisance nor moral judgement, just great lucidity on human behaviours, dissected with a scalpel, examined under a magnifying glass in a set construction combining transparency and light like a scientific laboratory. To have us follow the progression of thoughts that inhabit his characters, August Stramm invented a rigorous style based on a radical economy of words, a style that evolves through the three plays, presented here in the chronological order in which they were written. From the extraverted naturalism of The Rudimentary System to the cold expressionism of Forces by way of the lyric and poetic symbolism, close to Maeterlinck, of The Bride of the Moor, August Stramm wrote theatre to be acted, theatre for actors in which the slightest gesture, precisely inserted in very rich didascalia, is often more expressive than the words. We discover an author who digs deep into his characters' unconscious, who expresses, in a unique manner, the halting and constantly doubting thinking of man held in the labyrinth of his passions, his frustrations and his impotence. After Sarah Kane and Bulgakov, Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma continue along their theatre path with an author whose freedom they admire both for its form – each text pushes the possibilities of expression a little bit further back – and for the opening of meaning, Stramm having had the courage, at an extreme moment of his existence, to consider life with complete lucidity. A journey to go, outside any soothing pity, as near as possible to what is built and destroyed between men when social conventions explode, when moral laws can no longer be applied, when civilized man, a prisoner of himself, forgets himself and voluntarily or unconsciously exposes himself.

texte français: Huguette et René Radrizzani
mise en scène, scénographie et lumières: Daniel Jeanneteau et Marie-Christine Soma
avec: Axel Bogousslavski, Jean-Louis Coulloc'h, Julie Denisse, Mathieu Montanier, Dominique Reymond
costumes: Olga Karpinsky
son: Isabelle Surel
production déléguée: Maison de la Culture d'Amiens

coproduction: Studio-Théâtre de Vitry, Maison de la Culture d'Amiens –Centre de création et de production, La part du vent/Compagnie Daniel Jeanneteau, Festival d'Avignon
avec l'aide: du Théâtre national populaire Villeurbanne
avec le soutien: de la région Île-de-France et du Goethe-Institut Paris
Le Festival d'Avignon reçoit le soutien de l'Adami pour la production