Along with Par autan, Item is one of final creations of François Tanguy, who passed away in December 2022. Can we go back to the origin of the project?
Laurence Chable: It is difficult to pinpoint the moment when a project was born because, for François, everything was part of a continuous movement. The work began without any premise. The desire to bring us together was not based on any prior script or theme. Except for Don Juan, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Woyzeck with Büchner’s manuscripts, his only prerequisite was a space, which would later be transformed.
François Fauvel: After La Fonderie, which the company had begun to set up starting in 1987, we added in 1997 a second creative space called La Tente. When La Tente was not being used for tours or performances outside the usual venues, it allowed François to work continuously. He worked from sketches of projects for spaces or objects. He worked alone, but we were never far away. He didn’t hesitate to call on the builders, including myself, if needed. He collected material, such as filming a ray of sunlight shining through the leaves of a tree. He would fill entire hard drives. When he felt the time had come, he would summon all of us.
If the starting point was neither a text nor a theme, how did you come together to begin creating?
Laurence Chable: It was not easy to begin without knowing anything, but François welcomed us into sharing that ignorance. He put things into motion, started the process, outside of conventions. There could be no fixed casting, for example. In his interview with Catherine Diverrès, he rejects and pushes back against “professional formalism,” and says that “we rather throw ourselves into the creation of a site.” This word site comes back time and again. To avoid terms like set or scenography, but also to express what brings us together.
Did ideas never precede the form?
Laurence Chable: No, it was this doing, this work, that led to decisions being made.
What happened once you had all been summoned?
Laurence Chable: We spent a lot of time at the table, while he moved around it, sifting through an impressive number of books. The circulation of these readings might or might not lead to a first attempt on stage. These attempts alternated with returns to the table and developed alongside all the other components.
François Fauvel: The distinctive feature of these long periods of creation was that all the material was worked on simultaneously: texts, costumes, sets, lighting, music... The stage was his permanent workshop, within which he moved from reading a book to using a jigsaw, from listening to an opera to sketching a set piece.
Beyond this inextricable connection between bodies, voices, light, and music, the productions of the Théâtre du Radeau, like Item, seem to be characterised by a kind of perpetual motion. The frames that populate the stage and are manipulated by the actors glide over one another, constantly structuring, deconstructing, and restructuring the space...
Laurence Chable: Fragmentation and diffraction are constants in François’s work. This approach affects not only space but all components of the creations—costumes, lighting, sound, speech... For Item, as for the other shows, if a fragment of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is brought into play, François opens up other gravitational fields through leaps, interruptions, or the embedding of memory-traces. He invites Dostoevsky, Ovid, and Walser to the same table. Perception finds its own path, amid this ongoing questioning of the threshold...
This word, threshold, seems fundamental in describing the Théâtre du Radeau, a theatre of evanescence and blur, of appearance and disappearance, of entrance and exit... How would you describe this aesthetics of the threshold?
Laurence Chable: The word points to the necessity of awareness. It invites, for example, working in a way that moves away from the desire for performance. It is more of a pulse than a boundary or limit. It allows presence to raise questions, it makes room.
You used another important expression in relation to this work: “striving toward transparency…”
Laurence Chable: Transparency also means making space, not creating obstruction. François used to say: “release the particles, let the flows pass through, observe and intensify their diffraction.” There is always an indeterminate elsewhere.
That elsewhere is also present in the costumes. In Item, it feels as though, even before the performance begins, the costumes have already lived several lives...
François Fauvel: The various elements that make up the show have often been repurposed to form a collection of sets, costumes, libraries, recordings... They have been built, deconstructed, and rebuilt...
Laurence Chable: This did not prevent François from sometimes having an urgent desire for a specific element, like an Elizabethan panniered dress: a finery, a true theatre costume that suddenly becomes necessary because it resonates with a painting by Velázquez or Renoir… The composition of the costume is fascinating because it never seeks imitation or a “style.” It is never “designed for” something. It is always about highlighting within a whole, be it a space or light, in resonance with words, but without ever illustrating, except for comedic effect. The costume is never a conceptualisation of a silhouette. There is no character, rather passing figures, although it is not about representing. The costumes pass through as well. This is why they are all around the stage during the performance. The wings are also the dressing rooms.
One never moves more than a metre away from the stage.
“It is not about representing.” Could you elaborate on this sentence?
Laurence Chable: Let’s go back to the example of the Elizabethan panniered dress: it is a vibration, a remembering material, like a prop or a wig. There is always something that will blur what could become an image. Likewise, if a sequence from Goethe’s Faust is presented, it is not Faust that is being performed: the sequence is caught in a play of continuity and discontinuity that transforms it and propels it elsewhere, further away.
Interview conducted by Simon Hatab in February 2025.