Can you tell us about the creative process behind Une Ombre vorace (A Voracious Shadow)?
I usually write the text for the play I want to stage in advance of the work on the set, and that text is likely to evolve during rehearsals. I would therefore say I work in a rather typical way as a creator, because I always begin with a story. It can be a very open story, one that looks more like an idea than a precise outline. But I generally feel that the characters and the story exist from the start and stay the same until the end. They’re the start of everything. I always work with the same creative team, the Grupo Marea. We are a four-person collective and we can sometimes spend months talking, thinking, and collecting ideas. Then comes a time when I sit down to write. For Une Ombre vorace, which tells the story of a high-level mountain climber and his cinema double, Mariana Tirantte, our scenographer, came up with the set as I was writing: the set influenced the text, and vice versa. This is a more literary text than my previous works, which were written in a traditional dramatic style. My inspiration comes from 19th-century novels. Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, or Leo Tolstoy… I wanted a story that would be like an impossible novel or film. Une Ombre vorace thus became a play for two actors, built around two monologues that echo each other. Of course, the first challenge during rehearsals was to breathe theatricality into it. While writing, I was obsessed with the increasingly numerous stories of mountain climbers who disappeared and whose bodies are reappearing in mountains all around the world, because the ice is melting. As if nature, abused by climate change to an extreme degree, were giving back the dead it kept for so long. It’s a complex and captivating subject for a fiction. Of course, being from Argentina, stories of disappeared people resurfacing necessarily have a double meaning, especially for my generation. We are the sons and daughters of those who were killed by the dictatorship in the 1970s and 80s. Almost all of us have missing relatives, and no one knows where they were buried, of even if they were. I cannot say what came first for Une Ombre vorace. Was it the story? An idea for the scenography? A sound?
This is your first travelling show. Did this offer by the Festival d’Avignon change the way you work?
I’d already conceived in situ projects and films with the Grupo Marea, but it’s the first time we’re working on a play which is intended to be a travelling show. That is, a show that can be performed both inside and outside, which has to be adaptive. The scenography may bring to mind a mountain environment, but it has to remain modest and transformable. In addition to making a flexible play, we also have to understand the territory around Avignon. It’s very important to think long and hard about what it means to create a play for those villages, a play that isn’t only meant to be performed in big cities. We want to have a direct relationship with the audience, with actors who openly address the spectators.
The show plays with reality and fiction, which keep intertwining…
The play revolves around the story of Jean Vidal, son of a legendary French mountain climber who disappeared in the 1980s while climbing the Annapurna in Nepal. Right as he is set to retire, the protagonist decides to follow the path where his father vanished 30 years ago. But something unexpected will happen to him during this ascent. A few years later, a film is made about his story. Une Ombre vorace therefore tells the story not only of Jean Vidal, but also of Michel, the actor playing Jean Vidal in that film. I’ve always been fascinated by real people whose life is turned into fiction while they are still alive. How can a fiction—here, the film being shot—transform reality—the lives of Jean Vidal and Michel? What does the real Jean Vidal feel when looking at Michel playing the character Vidal? It’s also a play which explores family ties, and particularly the father-son relationship. I imagined that the actor had a complex relationship with his own father, himself an actor who appeared in experimental films in the 1980s: this father had been part of a company from Petersburg touring Africa, but disagreed with the troupe’s colonialist ideas. He then quit to turn to a more radical project and decided to travel the roads of France.
Would you go so far as to use the word “documentary” to describe your work?
This isn’t a documentary play, but we’re playing with the idea of a fake documentary in which performers present, in a rather direct and naturalistic way, their true story. The whole play is then built around the idea of the double: you have Vidal, a “real” person, and Michel, the actor playing Vidal, but there’s also Vidal himself trying to replicate his father’s ascent thirty years later. The idea of being someone else, of being a double of oneself, is omnipresent in the play. Before this project, two years ago, we worked on a film called El Público, which tells fictional stories of spectators. We followed them as they left the show to understand the impact of theatre on their private lives. We were fascinated by those people who come to see our shows. Who are they? How old are they? What is their social background? Do we have an impact on them or not? That film will be screened as part of the Territoires cinématographiques of the Festival d’Avignon. It documents our work and shows our approach to the audience.
You also mention Petrarch and his Ascent of Mont Ventoux, written in 1336…
It’s a fascinating book in many ways. It is particularly relevant in regard to our project for two reasons: Mont Ventoux is located very close to Avignon and, even though Petrarch presents his expedition as entirely real, it is now almost certain that it was a fiction, born of his imagination. Petrarch writes that the person who came down the mountain wasn’t the same one who climbed it: like a kind of obliteration of the self. It is commonly said that he climbed Ventoux as a man of the Middle Ages and came down as a man of the Renaissance, the future promoter of humanism. The fact that this account turned out to be false asks the question of the border between fiction and reality. Similarly, I like to play with our sense of reality. We don’t use video or images to prove that Jean Vidal’s story is real, and the character plays with that doubt. But it isn’t essential for the play that the spectators believe it is real. The audience experiences a fiction presented as real, and it is that experience that is real.
Does the ascent take on a metaphorical meaning?
Yes, it’s not just about climbing a mountain, but about changing one’s perspective, with all the mystical aspects that such an encounter with nature can entail. In Petrarch’s book, the idea of ascending towards God is omnipresent. Of course, the world has changed since then: in our capitalist system, rising has a very different meaning, very different consequences. The mountain also highlights other current themes, such as climate change, which can be measured through the melting of glaciers.
Interview conducted by Moïra Dalant (February 2024) and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach