How did you meet performers Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas, known as Bert & Nasi, and how did you come to work on this project together?
Tim Etchells: A few years ago, I saw their performance Palmyra, and I was very impressed by their work. In 2020, they received the Forced Entertainment Award, which is awarded to young artists who work to reinvent theatre in a new and unique way and with new audiences in mind. This award comes with a stipend, but also with an offer of support from the Forced Entertainment collective. It's meant to help artists develop their careers. This led to an exciting and inspiring dialogue about their work and when I received this invitation from the Festival d’Avignon, I thought of them right away, and asked them to join the project. We started with a very simple idea, a few lines of text or the sketch of a situation, which led to a series of improvisation sessions I guided in a very organic way. Bert & Nasi excel in those kinds of exercises, which makes the process playful, inventive, open. The writing is based on small fragments taken from the recordings we made of our creative sessions. First I study and transcribe them, then we rework them and add more things throughout the rehearsal process. It’s a way of working I particularly enjoy. It allows the finished text to feel closer and more natural to the performers.
From this very ordinary situation (a waiter/a customer), the story quickly spins out of control. Meaning comes in waves, and the performance turns out to be much more complex than it seems...
I like to start from a situation, an event, and to explore all possible alternatives. Rather than telling a single story, I like to develop several and have them clash and contradict each other to offer different readings and interpretations. The idea is to heighten and amplify the scene to turn it into something at once funny and tragic. This trivial starting point can lead to thousands of sketches. I think it’s part of my desire to dig deep and to really examine things. In L’Addition, which is based on a very simple structure with a waiter and his customer, a staple of slapstick comedy, it quickly becomes clear that it’s all about this relationship of power. Who waits on who? Who is in control? The power relationship between the protagonists turns into a fierce but playful struggle, in an atmosphere of instability. What I want to do is to see how this relationship can be subverted, inverted, how we can play with it. I never choose explicitly political subjects, but I always hope that the work we do will become a means to help us understand the outside world. Even if they don’t find their source in the political, performances are always a reflection of the political. The performance questions society itself, beyond the rehearsal studio or the theatre venue. Power is a fundamental element of any relationship. There’s something unbearable in being with someone else. In a duo like Bert & Nasi, while the struggle for dominance is unavoidable, there’s also solidarity and mutual assistance. This rivalry makes them hate each other, but they also need each other. They have to rely on each other. It’s just as true for the customer and the waiter. We wanted to use both the antagonism and interdependence that define this duality. The association of opposite elements creates in the audience an interesting tension. As a spectator, you don’t quite understand what’s going on. The performance can surprise you and circumvent your defenses. One moment it’s very funny and light, and suddenly it becomes very serious and dramatic. Or vice versa. You have to keep your guard up and sharpen your mind: I really like that. At the heart of every creation there is the desire to take the audience on a journey they would never have imagined, be it in terms of images, ideas, reactions, or questionings, while showing them that the truly fun thing is to make this journey as complex as possible.
Words often dictate the rules of your performances, which are nevertheless sometimes wordless. How did you tackle the question of language, of words and of their value in this show?
As a writer, words are of great import for me. I always try to be precise, to articulate language in an entertaining and subversive way. As a director, I’m also very sensitive to all the other elements of theatre, like energy, temporality, movement, and the way words can be embodied by the performers. In L’Addition because we replay the scene several times and the dialogue can be pretty dense, words lose some of their importance, become insignificant. They become empty of meaning, then are filled up again. What’s interesting is the content of what is said when we talk, but also the fact that language is music, texture, rhythm, energy. I ike discovering new ways of performing between those two aspects. It requires from the audience a different kind of attention. We’re so used to hearing a text as content that when we feel it more musically or rhythmically, we lose some of the meaning. Then it surfaces again, in a different way. Theatrical performances are interesting because action is often synonymous with excitement. On stage, everyone speaks, everyone runs. There’s a certain kind of energy. But it’s always fascinating when it all comes to a halt, when all are quiet, when we stop in the middle of it all. I always keep in mind the balance between this flow of information that clutters our mind and those moments of emptiness, where nothing happens. From this “nothing” can be born some incredibly rich material, if it comes at the right time. The goal is to create instants when the audience fills the silence and stillness with their own imagination, to create moments of introspection. Silence plays an integral part.
The Bill is this year’s travelling show. How did you approach the scenic constraints induced by this desire for movement and the relationship to the audience in very different contexts?
When I watch a performance, I particularly like the sensation that the performers are in the middle of inventing something, that they’re playing with a finite material. I’m not a big fan of huge stages laden with sophisticated machinery. I like to start with a very simple set up like a table and a few chairs. This economy will allow imagination to unfold in a free and extraordinary manner. Bare-bones sets can lead to the fantastical and weird. Both as a director and a spectator, I’ve always liked establishing an explicit, minimalist framework, which can be used to distort space and time. As a travelling show, the play will be performed in various contexts and locations, on different stages. We therefore need a light set-up, which works very well for this sort of pared-down creation. I don’t see it as an obstacle; I like those simple situations that force me to work on the show’s complexity even further. The magic of the performance resides in how it springs from the ordinary. In our creative process, while thinking about this idea of a travelling show, I also wanted to give Bert & Nasi tools to communicate directly with the audience. Due to the varied nature of the venues, inside and outside, including some spaces not meant for theatre, I thought we needed to think differently. It’s a performance that will no doubt transform as we tour, upon encountering the reality of audiences. It can and most likely will change our decisions. We always have more to learn from the pleasure of performing in different situations. We can’t wait!
Interview conducted by Malika Baaziz and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach