Ludovic Lagarde
Ludovic Lagarde likes to place his work in durable artistic collaborations. It was at the end of the 1980s that he met Olivier Cadiot, from whom he commissioned a first play, Sisters and Brothers, which was premiered in 1993. This was the beginning of a long companionship that would see the director draw from the writer's poetic and novelistic work to deploy all his art. Starting with his cadenced and musical writing, he has composed shows as different as they are high in colour, always accompanied by research on sound and image. Le Colonel des Zouaves was premiered in 1997 and was revived at the Festival d'Avignon in 2004, at the same time of the premiere of Fairy Queen, accompanied by Yes Is for a Very Young Man, a play by Gertrude Stein that Olivier Cadiot translated into French. An actor crosses these three plays and becomes the face of this incredible complicity between the images of one and the words of the other: Laurent Poitrenaux. It is therefore not by chance if we find this loyal travelling companion of Ludovic Lagarde once again on stage in two new opuses by Olivier Cadiot presented at the Festival d'Avignon in 2010, of which he was one of the associate artists: A Magus in Summer and A Nest for What. Director of a company who became director of the Comédie de Reims in January 2009, Ludovic Lagarde also stages texts by classic authors like Büchner, or contemporary ones, including a rewriting of Richard III by the Flemish author Peter Verheist, presented at the Festival d'Avignon in 2005, or recently an adaptation of Recalling Roland by the author Frédéric Boyer. The latter was the project leader of the Bayard 2001 Bible translation and translator of Confessions of Saint Augustin and Richard II, presented in the Cour d'honneur in 2010. Never having abandoned his pedagogic activities, Ludovic Lagarde teaches in different theatre schools, including the ERAC with whose students he presented a graduation project at the Festival d'Avignon in 2008. He is also an opera stage director and works, among others, with the composers Pascal Dusapin and Wolfgang Mitterer. He recently staged Poulenc's The Human Voice at the Opéra Comique.
JFP, April 2013.