Genèse n°2

Galin Stoev comes from Varna in Bulgaria. He graduated at the Sofia Theatre and Cinematographic Arts National Academy where he started out as actor and director in 1991. He created a number of plays there including Madame de Sade by Mishima or The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht. His activities quickly lead him to work internationally. In Slovenia, he directed Marivaux's Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard (The Game of Love and Chance), in Macedonia, he put on Antigone In Technoland based on the Sophocles play. He performed in Berlin and was invited as Artist-in-Residence to the London Royal International Theatre. He has also worked in Leeds, Bochum, and notably in Stuttgart before settling in Brussels. There he gathered a group of French, Belgium and Swiss actors, met during a master-class, and created his own company, Fingerprint.
His meeting with the young Russian author Ivan Viripaev was another turning point. He has staged a number of the latter's plays: The Dreams (2002), Oxygen and Genesis number 2. Galin Stoev belongs to a new theatrical generation, whose work comes out of the transformations in the Eastern bloc whose notoriety is post 2000.

The hybrid nature of the text “on the limits of language and narration, where dialogue and discussions are infused with a profound political meaning” is for Ivan Viripaev the opportunity to evoke another form of reality and dictatorship: a form that is marked by relativity and where man loses his references. The Russian playwright made his name by taking what might be described as “a journey to the heart of a modern deconstructed conscience”, which he began in his native town Irkust in Siberia. He started out there as an actor before forming his first independent company Play Area.
The success of his first play, The Dreams, and its unorthodox intention, took him to Moscow where he joined the New and Social Play Centre Teatr. doc, an experimental creative space for young artists. Playwright, scriptwriter and director, Ivan Viripaev built on his early reputation, notably through Viktor Ryjakov's production of his script, Oxygen, also staged by Galin Stoev in 2004. Among his more recent works is a feature film, Euphoria, and July, a play staged in Moscow in 2006.

In Genèse n°2 (Genesis number 2), there is God first and foremost, Lot's wife and the prophet John: three characters. There are others present too: the text and the two authors, Ivan Viripaev – an outstanding personality of Russian theatre – and Antonina Velikanova – a real or imaginary figure, a psychiatric patient suffering from schizophrenia and who believes she is Lot's wife. Ivan Viripaev writes the way a musician composes a partition. He carefully juxtaposes the fragments of the story – like the reflection of a shattered identity, and, more generally speaking, of a contemporary subject. To give form to the text received from the young woman, he inserts part of their correspondence as well as comical songs attributed to the Prophet John.
How to depart from reality? The playwright's question returns like the time-worn refrain of a song. Galin Stoev, another figure of this new theatrical approach, reflects this obsession in the way he directs. The Bulgarian director, who has been living in Brussels for the past two years, has a close working relationship with the Siberian author and he has staged a number of his plays. Genèse n°2 adopts different styles: dramatic, documentary, epistolary and poetic, but also different temporalities: return to myths and the spoken word, with a content firmly anchored in reality.
With his mirrored and reflected staging, his three actors and three musicians, Galin Stoev orchestrates this polyphonic writing within a setting that reflects the vulnerability of beings and the musicality of language, the prophetic tonality, its quest for meaning, from belief to nihilism, while embracing all the nuances of his public address.

traduction française de: Tania Moguilevskaia, Gilles Morel
mise en scène: Galin Stoev
avec: Céline Bolomey, Vincent Lécuyer, Antoine Oppenheim
et les musiciens :Mélanie Evrard (violon), Marine Horbaczewski (violoncelle), Michel Lambert (accordéon)
scénographie, lumière, vidéo: et costumes Saskia Louwaard, Katrijn Baeten
musique originale: Sacha Carlson
texte à paraître aux éditions Les Solitaires Intempestifs en juin 2007

production: Théâtre de la Place-Liège - Centre dramatique de la Communauté française, Centre européen de créations théâtrales et chorégraphiques
en coproduction avec: la Compagnie Fingerprint (Bruxelles)
avec l'aide de: la Ministre-Présidente, de la Ministre de la Culture et du ministère de la Culture de la Communauté française de Belgique - Service Théâtre et du Commissariat général aux Relations internationales