François Orsoni
After he returned from a professional stay in California, François Orsoni, a specialist in financial macro-economics, decided to enrol in a theatre school. He was 27 at the time and started as an actor, before becoming interested in directing to successively present The Imbecile and Cap and Bells by Luigi Pirandello. His encounter with the actors Alban Guyon, Clotilde Hesme and Thomas Landbo, who very quickly became his travel companions, encouraged him, in 1999, to found his own company: the Théâtre de NéNéKa. Putting words at the centre of his artistic approach, François Orsoni and his troupe of actors successively question Pirandello, Pasolini, Bulgakov, Büchner, Olivier Py, Dea Loher, Maupassant and Brecht. The choice of these texts is often linked to the venues, inside or outside, where they will be presented, but also to the actors who will perform them. François Orsoni likes to work with long periods of improvisation allowing the actors to create in greater freedom. Concerned about having them move in extremely simple sets, he expects that they will become bodies that talk serving a text that speaks. After Lucky Hans, it is another youthful work by Brecht, Baal, that the company will present for its first participation in the Festival d'Avignon.
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was 20 years old in 1918. At the time he was a nurse in the German army and read Der Einsame (The Lonely), a biography of the great German poet Christian David Grabbe, written by a future eulogist of Nazism, Hanns Johst. Disappointed by this work, he made a wager to write a better text in four days on this asocial and provocative figure of a poet. A first version of Baal was finished at the end of the year, then a second in 1919. Brecht subsequently reworked this play at regular intervals, proposing a final version in 1955, a year before his death. During his entire life, the anti-authoritarian author of The Three-penny Opera and Mother Courage was haunted by this text that he never staged.
JFP, April 2010