Le Beau Monde tells the story of a ritual commemorating the usages and gestures of the 21st century. How do you see the world where this tradition takes places?
Rémi Fortin, Simon Gauchet, and Blanche Ripoche: This ritual of recollection is meant to be celebrated every sixty years, from one generation to the next. The people who perform it collected fragments they found here and there. Those fragments are mementos of the trivial gestures that make up our lives, of certain events, of songs stuck in a corner of your head. For the people of this future world, many of those gestures are now meaningless, like dancing a slow dance. So they try to perform those movements, to embody them with utmost seriousness, sometimes in a surgical manner. But they’re devoid of meaning. For us, as actors and actresses, it’s the same level of seriousness as that of children playing at being pirates. To be honest, in this show, we don’t say much about the future world in which this ritual is performed. That’s not the focus of the show in our opinion. This faraway world seems to have a different set of values, because theatre no longer exists, and neither do tears… But the circumstances that led to this disappearance remain untold. It’s nothing more than a step to the side to take a better look at our present. We wanted to open an encyclopedic space and create a small anthropology of our time.
How did you choose those forty-six “found” fragments of the 21st century?
First of all, when we started writing this project, we thought it would be a harsher look at our world. To write, we tried to put a name to those things that arouse emotions in each of us. Those fragments are deliberately subjective and personal. We wrote them together, all four of us, each with our own sensibilities and life experiences. We asked ourselves what we’d keep of our lives today. That’s when we started seeing the tenderness of our worlds, almost despite ourselves. Rather than denouncing a global system doomed to disappear, we took care to focus on the small and big things that move us. It’s the fragility of emotions as they appear that we wanted to pass on to the inhabitants of this uncertain future. We told ourselves that if they were to find those forty-six fragments, they could recreate part of this lost humanity, with the same meticulousness one uses on an archeological site. The question of the duty of remembrance is also one we thought about. “Do we have the duty to keep a trace of the upheavals and the violence of our years?” It’s a question we ask on stage, in an open way. Finally, Rémi Fortin also interviewed some of his friends and loved ones to ask those questions to people outside our group. Four of those voices made their way into the show, spoken by the actors, in order to provide different outlooks, different remembrances.
How did you approach the rhythm of this fragmentary writing?
Putting what we’ve written to the test of the stage leads to some obvious choices: some of the fragments didn’t seem to find a place, while others worked effortlessly. It’s as if theatre were showing us itself what belongs to memory, what we should keep a trace of. The intuition of fragmentary writing came pretty quickly, like those ancient plays of which only a few lines remain. In Japan, jo-ha-kyū is a term used to describe a specific rhythm. It’s used for instance to talk about the progress of the sun in the sky every day: it starts slowly, speeds up, and ends swiftly. We tried our best to write with this idea of a progressive build-up in mind, as if the three characters were losing control of this ritual they’ve been embodying since the start of the show. It’s a rhythm that also allows for a great freedom in terms of writing and composition. And as the fragments unfold, a ruin starts to appear: rocks, made out of ceramics, slowly build up on the stage. It might be a sign from Hansel and Gretel, showing us a way back to a possible home.
What role do the spectators play in this ritual?
It became obvious pretty quickly that this show-ritual had to leave the theatre. We wanted to make theatre appear in gardens, on a football pitch, in a car park, or in a gymnasium. Those places we all know show, sometimes in spite of themselves, the concrete aspect of our lives in the 21st century. The scenography for the show is limited to a set of bleachers on which the spectators sit to listen to and experience this ritual. Those bleachers are enough to create a theatre, we like to set them up in places where they were never meant to be. Etymologically speaking, “theatre” means “a place for viewing.” By performing in places usually not dedicated to performance, we like to make people look at those banal places again, to look at them with new eyes, as if they were a set, or a sacred place where this tradition occurs. By sitting on those bleachers, the spectators take part in this ritual and become witness to our attempt to sketch this “beautiful world.” They share its memories and reactivate their own.
Interview conducted by Lucie Madelaine and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach