Paysages partagés isn’t just a show. How did the idea for this project come about?
Stefan Kaegi: We were thinking about theatre outside of the theatre, trying to figure out how it would change and add to our practice, and what it would in turn bring to those territories. These days, more and more of us are concerned about nature and the living, and more and more of us are trying to get close to it. And even though artists think about this phenomenon, most of the time they keep expressing themselves in theatres or museums, where nature is represented and simulated. We wanted to find a way to be together in and with nature, with all the difficulties that implies. Constraints that have to do with accessibility, weather, the unpredictable nature of the thing…
Caroline Barneaud: Theatre is an often urban art, especially public theatre. We wanted to make a move, to bring our community—audiences, artists, technicians, etc.—and the tools of the theatre—attention, time, etc.—as close as possible to the living. It’s a European project developed with about ten European artists, which will be reproduced in seven different European territories, mostly in places that aren’t on the radar of a certain idea of culture. Every time, we ask ourselves how the project will resonate within the territory, and vice versa. It will create a network not of urban theatres, but of green, rural peripheries.
Ecology and respect for the environment are unavoidable themes as soon as we start talking about natural landscapes. The Festival d’Avignon has grown ever more sensitive to those questions. How does your project tackle those issues?
S.K.: Land artists used nature as a canvas and natural materials—or not—to create works in situ which were more or less permanent, subjects to the elements, leaving traces on the landscape. We want the traces we leave behind to be almost only memories: the memory of having been together in this place, of having had a different experience. The project adapts or readapts to each place, in different European languages, and will encounter different types of local terrain, fauna, and flora. It’s a real challenge for the artists, who have to collaborate and work with the constraints each of the places we chose bring. But it creates fascinating conversations, and scenographies which play with the terrain, with atmospheric conditions, with light, heat, the wind…
C.B.: In the mission statement we sent the artists, we asked them to create works in the open, in a field or a forest, which can be set up with local artistic and technical teams. They must leave a minimal footprint on the environment and on the site itself, infrastructures must be light, mobile, and removable, and must coexist with the other uses of the site. Those limitations allowed us to do away with some habits or to focus on what’s already there, but also on what really matters for each project, and forced us to be inventive.
S.K.: The choice of locations has much to do with the question of ecology. We chose public spaces, where anyone can go. Walkers, joggers, locals, neighbours, and others… Useful places that are always in use. We didn’t want to pick spectacular or exceptional places so as not to be invasive, and not to be in a competition with the beauty of those places.
C.B.: To bring three hundred spectators to a protected site would go against everything this project stands for. We’re interested in those places between the city and the country, zones where we can already speak of “nature” because there’s lots of green around, but which are very domesticated and used for agriculture or leisure, transition zones, meeting places. A sort of “green periphery,” or rural periphery. Moreover, those semi-urban places are often accessible by public transportation or bike, which was also one of the criteria of our reflection about the ecological impact of the project.
S.K.: Same thing for the food which will be served on site, we’ve asked our partners to find local solutions that don’t require heavy installations. Similarly, the project takes place during the day, so as not to need heavy lights, in order to reduce our energy consumption to the minimum and to avoid disturbing nocturnal animals. We’re aware of the impact the spectators who’ll come to collectively walk through this space will have, and we’re trying to reduce our other impacts.
Landscapes are a human construct, shaped and made unique by so many different visions.
S.K.: Yes, the concept of landscape has become much more complex and varied, in part today due to the use of digital images. We often look at landscapes through a screen. Here, the spectators will sometimes be lying down, with a vertical point of view, or they’ll be moving through space along a choreographed path between the trees, or they’ll be swept up in atmospheric elements. A vertical perspective, a movement, or a game with climatic conditions invites us to (re)discover spaces we thought we knew.
C.B.: The way we perceive a forest or a distant mountain range is still largely influenced by the way painters and authors, the Romantics for instance, walked and described them. It’s a cultural construct. But it’s also a sensory, corporeal, and physically immersive experience of the world. To insist on the dimension of “sharing,” to have a single landscape shared by multiple artists, shared with others spectators, other users, allows us to operate a shift in those ways of seeing ingrained in our habits, to complexify them, to question them, to bring some nuance and experiment with them, maybe even to deconstruct them. The situations and contents developed by each artist create different levels of reading and shine a light on less visible realities.
S.K.: The duration of the journey is also a very important notion. In this longer, slower time offered by Paysages partagés, and with which the artists compose, spectators are given the opportunity to shift their perspective, to look at details or aspects that are invisible at a glance. This longer duration makes the experience richer and gives it depth.
Tiago Rodrigues spoke of a “café lumineux for Europe” in his vision of the Festival d’Avignon. A place for debates, a melting pot of cultures, of conversations with the world. As a firmly European project, how does Paysages partagés fit within this vision?
C.B.: This project brings together artists and teams from cultural institutions located in different European regions. The idea was to share ideas, experiences, questions, to find projects that could be presented in each location, and in general to think together. To pool together, at the international level, interrogations about the local relationship to territories and to the non-urban public is a very rich endeavour, as much for those institutions and their staff as for the artists. The idea is to learn from each other by creating together.
S.K.: There’s also a very “local” aspect to this projects. As travellers, we tend not to be aware of “nature” places close to our destinations, if they aren’t spectacular or well-known. This project will shine a light on more anonymous and ordinary places. The project will also change based on the landscapes and languages we encounter, on the local staff we work with; it will reinvent itself as it travels throughout Europe. We’ve partnered both with big and middle-sized institutions and with smaller ones: the Temporada Alta festival in Spain, Tangente St. Pölten in Austria, the production structure Zona K le Piccolo Teatro in Milan and, in Portugal, Culturgest and Rota Clandestina, the Berliner Festspiele in Germany, and Bunker in Slovenia.
C.K.: And the biggest ones have been learning a lot from the smaller ones throughout this project… It’s really about adapting, which is going to be a major challenge in the future. And it also brings those European cultural institutions together with local actors and users of the territory: local administrations, associations, farmers, inhabitants… who come together to share this territory in a lively and ephemeral way…
Interview conducted by Malika Baaziz ans translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach