Two generations, two different ways of looking at and living with images and imagination. Born in 1975, Cyril Teste, an actor and stage director, trained at ERAC at the Conservatoire National d'Art Dramatique (Anatomie Ajax, 2003), is a child of the television and the information society. Born in 1962, Patrick Bouvet, is an artist and musician. He's also the author of a remarkable body of work on literary deconstruction and a criticism of media overkill including his trilogy - In situ (1999), through the magnetic field of video, describes the difficulty of surviving in refugee camps, Shot (2000), is a series of captions without photos from 1945 to the present day, and Direct (2002), assembles television commentaries on the catastrophe of 11th September 2001. Patrick Bouvet and Cyril Teste met at the National Youth Theatre where they discovered their common desire to bring to the stage these poetic and political writings in the form of installations.
Shot / Direct
Shot. Enter the legend. Oblique commentaries or photo captions - Hiroshima and the TWA Boeing disaster, John Fitzgerald and Jackie Kennedy, the panic in the Heysel stadium and the demi-god status that surgery enjoys today. Shot, the second part of Patrick Bouvet's triolgy, focuses on the anatomy and radiography of society via photography. Microphones and school desks: Cyril Teste's staging and the musicality of Patrick Bouvet's critical collages take us inside the camera that's been capturing the last fifty years.
Direct. Here the spectator goes “live”, in the middle of a television set during that day of disembodied carnage. September 11th, 2001, TV presenters pour out disturbing scenes of the crashing suicide plane-bombs in a kind of big black mass laid on by the media. Cameras, video decks, studios: Cyril Teste and the MXM Collectif's ghostly and frontal production samples images and language used in a world where, nowadays, everything is just as you see it. Cut-and-pasted, Patrick Bouvet's words are trotted out again and again and collide, stuck in a sound loop and in everyone's mouths, hi-jack the signals given out by the mainstays of television. An installation on stage that is comical and lyrical and aims to snap viewers out of a state of media-induced hypnosis so they can re-live the “most up-to-date pictures of history.”
Distribution
stage direction Cyril Teste / Collectif MxM
cast : Jean-Marc Brisset, Alexandra Castellon, Pascal Reneric
lighting : Julien Boizard
original music : Nihil Bordures
programmation video Direct : Éric Ménard, Thomas Rathier
video Shot : Giorgio Partesana
costumes : Alexandra Castellon
assistant director : Philippe Bussière
Production
production : Structure Compagnie
coproduction : 3BC Compagnie, Festival d'Avignon
avec la participation artistique : du jeune théâtre national
avec le soutien : de la DRAC Midi-Pyrénées, de la Ville de Toulouse, de la Région Midi-Pyrénées, du Théâtre de la Digue l'Été de Vaour, de Montévidéo et d'Apple Afrique