Open!, like FabricA, the new rehearsal and residence venue of the Festival d'Avignon that Groupe F is inaugurating at the junction of the Monclar and Champfleury districts. Open! like the spirit of this creation that will be given outdoors, designed in liaison and dialogue with a territory in which the company spent several months in residence. A residence during which it notably moderated, each month, with the Festival, workshops in the neighbourhood's elementary schools. Its members harvested sensations and images from them, absorbed this venue's past and present to create, based on the notion of precariousness, a poem enlivened by all the lights that makes unexpected imaginary dimensions spring from the ordinary. In a landscape recomposed by fire, flames and images, men as fireflies travel, soar and make our reading of the environment vacillate. In the fireworks ballets of Groupe F, there is the disturbing power of the volcanic eruption and the attentive gentleness of the story whispered to children. “A big bang that took place in an instant”, sums up the director Christophe Berthonneau, who is orchestrating the encounter of several dozen fireworks technicians, acrobats and actors on the electronic music of the composer Scott Gibbons, well-known by the Festival d'Avignon's spectators for his work with Romeo Castellucci. Moved by the encounters they had in the FabricA district, the artists of Groupe F present a gift to its neighbours and festival-goers. A spectacular, poetic explosive charge to open a utopia factory dedicated to inventing new possibilities. RB
Distribution
direction Christophe Berthonneau
music Scott Gibbons
aerial choreography Brendan Shelper
artistic collaboration Dominique Noel
project manager Cédric Moreau
video Thierry Dorval, Jean-Luc Pennetier, Yann-Loïc Lambert
costumes Ann Williams, Gitta Heinz-Franquet
sound Seco
with Pavlo Antonov, Susana Beiro, Dennis Cent, Claudia Greco, Alper Turgay, Elizabeth Williams
Production
production Groupe F
a request of The Festival d'Avignon
with the support of the SNCF Foundation for the workshops made with elementary schools Louis Gros, Saint-Roch and Scheppler of Avignon