With CAPRA (une chèvre), you lead the audience into the twists and turns of memory, exploring its remarkable powers. How has the art of memory, practiced since Antiquity, inspired you?
We chose to explore memory both as a means of transmission and as a means of survival. To inform this reflection, we drew on two books. The first is The Art of Memory by the British historian Frances Yates. In this book, Yates explains how, from Antiquity through the Renaissance, people memorised events and stories using mnemonic techniques, associating images with places in what they called “memory palaces.” She shows how these memory palaces reappear in Renaissance painting, which recreates the ancient world through allegorical scenes and architectural settings while itself becoming a tool for remembering. By looking at these frescoes and paintings, one learned how to remember. The second book, which became one of the guiding threads of our research, is Painting at Dora by François Le Lionnais, an autobiographical account of the author's deportation to Germany during the Second World War by the future co-founder of the Oulipo. He recounts how he survived by describing to one of his fellow prisoners the paintings he had committed to memory. Le Lionnais possessed an extraordinary memory. He could recreate these works in the smallest detail and, in a sense, make it seem as though the two of them were wandering together through an imaginary museum of fine arts. He introduced one of his companions to the history of painting while delighting in blending works together, bringing scenes and figures into conversation: a Brueghel with a Bosch, a Titian with a Rubens, a Chardin with a Magritte, and so on. In this way, he created impossible paintings, visions that helped them endure the hell of the prison camps. These are two great books about memory, but inseparably also about the powers of the imagination. Memory is also the source of invention, and therefore of art. These are our two poles: remembering and inventing, ordering and imagining; in other words, attempting to bring order to the chaos of human experience.
Destruction and death are equally present in both of these works: the memory palaces furnished with recollections have, for the most part, vanished, while Le Lionnais's act of reconstruction is born of his imprisonment.
The question of destruction is present on both sides. For Le Lionnais, it forms the backdrop to his entire effort to reconstruct the paintings of the past. And Frances Yates shows that there can be no memory without destruction. At the beginning of her book, she recounts the story of the ancient poet Simonides of Ceos, who, according to legend, invented the mnemonic technique whose history she traces. Simonides had been invited to a banquet to deliver a eulogy in honour of his host. In the middle of the feast, he stepped outside for a moment, and the roof of the palace collapsed, killing most of the guests. When he returned, all that remained was a heap of rubble from which the bodies had to be recovered one by one. But the violence of the collapse had made many of them difficult, or even impossible, to identify. Their bodies had been crushed. It was then that Simonides conceived of a method for restoring each victim's identity. Because he was able to reconstruct in his mind the exact layout of the banquet, he could place every guest back in the position they had occupied within the hall. In this way, the bodies could be returned to their families. The story has the quality of a myth, in which the work of memory, in a sense, brings the dead back to life by restoring them to the place they occupied before they died, reconstructing the space in which they spoke, ate, drank, and shared one another's company.
From one play to the next, music always plays an important part in your work.
Ever since Le Crocodile trompeur / Didon et Énée, created in 2012 with Samuel Achache and Florent Hubert, it has become indispensable to my work. I can no longer imagine making theatre without live music on stage. It opens up a more intimate, almost tactile space. The acoustic sound changes the way we listen. It creates a different kind of connection with the audience. In this show, three pianos form the heart of the stage set, accompanied by three cellos and a range of other instruments. There are eight performers on stage. The project’s musical director, Thibault Perriard, is a multi-instrumentalist, while Matthieu Naulleau is the pianist. Together, we conceived of music both as a material and as a theatrical device. They assembled an entire spectrum of sonic textures and arrangements from which we can draw, ranging from medieval chant to Robert Wyatt, from Thelonious Monk to Scarlatti. It remains, above all, a vast instrumental laboratory, where we “prepare pianos and guitars.” As in most of my shows, everyone is liable to sing or pick up an instrument. Music can emerge at any moment and from anywhere.
From one creation to the next, your theatre remains resolutely artisanal, relying above all on imagination.
Within the company, we like everything to be made in full view of the audience, in a spirit akin to Arte povera. We are always asking ourselves: How do we bring something into play? How do we put ourselves into play? How do we set things in motion using only the simplest means? This economy of means rekindles theatre's power of suggestion, its power to awaken the imagination. I keep returning to this territory, probing it relentlessly. This persistent thread in my work belongs to my own memory palace. It undoubtedly comes from the artistic forms I encountered when I was younger, forms that continue to haunt me. They live on within me. When I create, I devour them and then give them back, transformed, like living matter in constant circulation. At a time when theatre can sometimes feel saturated with images and video, I sense a kind of absence, as though something of its most primal nature has been diminished. Returning to a theatre that is simple, handmade, makeshift, and tangible allows us to reaffirm its essential strength: a joyful, direct force that never ceases to remind us how precarious it is to be human. The scenography, which Lisa Navarro and I are developing, consists of a façade with two doors, behind which we never know what is happening. We see only what presses against the doors, the surge or the ebb of whatever spills onto the stage. As in the story of Simonides, we do not witness the collapse itself; what emerges are the bodies, or the remnants of humanity. I imagine this movement as a continual back-and-forth, like the movement of memory palaces themselves. There is what enters them, and there is what comes back out. But what if these palaces became inhabited while we slept? What if they were traversed by the unconscious of the places themselves, haunted by those who had lived there before us? Then there would be no knowing what might emerge from them, what memories, what nightmares. Once the door opens, anything can happen.
Interview conducted by Vanessa Asse in March 2026