Dieudonné Niangouna & Stanislas Nordey
DIEUDONNÉ NIANGOUNA
An author, actor and director, Dieudonné Niangouna is one of the leading figures of the theatre renewal in sub-Saharan Africa. The artistic director of the company Les Bruits dans la rue (The Noises of the Street), founded in 1997 in Brazzaville with his brother Criss, he also created the international stage festival Mantsina sur scène, which is held each month of december in the Congolese capital. One creation after the other, Dieudonné Niangouna has created a singular path : shortly after the civil wars of the 1990s, he debuted as an actor on the Brazzaville markets and he is now presenting his plays on stages worldwide. Dieudonné Niangouna proposes to his fellow citizens as well as to all the spectators he meets far beyond the borders of the Republic of Congo a theatre of urgency, nourished by the reality of his country marked by years of internal conflicts and the consequences of French colonization. Eruptive and carnal, his writing calls on the most classic French language as well as a more popular, a more oral but also a more poetic language that brings to mind that of the great Congolese writer Sony Labou Tansi. If Dieudonné Niangouna's theatre is based on strong, scathing and reinvented words, on a “living language for the living”, his stagings are also extraordinarily expressive, showing man and society's excesses through obsessive stage images.
Dieudonné Niangouna's works have already been presented at the Festival d'Avignon: in 2007 with his monologue Attitude Clando and in 2009 with The Flying Ineptitudes, a duet in which his words mingled with the notes of French accordionist Pascal Contet and immersed us in the civil war in Congo. After writing and staging The Basis of Vertigo premiered in 2011 at festival Les Francophonies en Limousin, and also performed at the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers and at the Wiener Festwochen, he is now working on the writing and staging of a new play for the 2013 Festival d'Avignon: Sheda.
LP, November 2012
STANISLAS NORDEY
A theatre and opera director and actor, Stanislas Nordey is a man of the stage. An advocate of troupe work, he was, with his company, associate artist at the Théâtre Gérard-Philippe in Saint-Denis from 1991 to 1995, before joining, with his troupe of twelve actors, the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers at the request of Jean-Pierre Vincent who brought him into the artistic direction. From 1998 to 2001, he co-directed with Valérie Lang the Théâtre Gérard-Philippe, the national theatre centre of Saint-Denis. In 2001, he jointed the Théâtre national de Bretagne as pedagogic director of the theatre's school (he will stay director of the school for ten years), than as associate artist. Each of his dimensions allows him to find a balance: the director has the public discover his texts, the actor physically gives himself to the play, the pedagogue ensures the responsibility of transmission. Stanislas Nordey recognizes himself in the expression “an actor's director”: his stagings bear witness to the essential place that he feels the actor has: stripped down, they focus on gestures and words to not impose a single reading on the spectator but to allow him the freedom to build his own vision of the play.
He was invited by the Festival d'Avignon with Fly, My Dragon by Hervé Guibert in 1994, Contention - The Quarrel, by Didier-Georges Gabily and Marivaux in 1997, The System by Falk Richter premiered in 2008 and My Secret Garden co-created with Falk Richter in 2010. As an actor, he was also seen at the Festival in Skies by Wajdi Mouawad in 2009 and in Closing of Love by Pascal Rambert in 2011. He recently staged To Find Oneself by Luigi Pirandello and Living! from writings by The Living Theatre company. He will direct Black Animal Sadness by Anja Hilling for the very beginning of 2013.
LP, November 2012