It was at Véronique Nordey's drama course that Stanislas Nordey began his training as an actor, which he continued at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique of Paris. He had already directed actors in these two structures before presenting his first work as a professional director with The Dispute by Marivaux in 1988. An ardent supporter of collective work in a troupe, he was, with his company, associate artist at the Théâtre Gérard-Philipe in Saint-Denis from 1991 to 1995, before joining, still with his troupe of 12 actors, the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, at the request of Jean-Pierre Vincent, who brought him into artistic direction. In 1998, he was appointed director of the Théâtre Gérard-Philipe in Saint-Denis, which he left in 2001 to join the Théâtre National de Bretagne as pedagogic director of the school, then starting in 2002, as associate artist. Considering himself someone who directed actors rather than a stage director, he worked successively on contemporary and classic authors such as Pasolini, Marivaux, Bernard-Marie Koltès, Manfred Karge, Hervé Guibert, Jean Genet, Heiner Müller, Shakespeare, Didier-Georges Gabily, Jean-Luc Lagarce, Feydeau, Martin Crimp, August Stramm, Wajdi Mouawad, Fausto Paravidino and Falk Richter. He staged Seven Seconds (In God We Trust) and Nothing Hurts by Richter before proposing a montage based on Das System for the Festival d'Avignon. He has also continued his work as an actor, notably with Christine Le Tailleur in Philosophy in the Bedroom by Marquis de Sade and acts with Valérie Dréville in the staging of Thérèse the Philosopher by Anatoli Vassiliev.
At the Festival d'Avignon, Stanislas Nordey presented Vole mon dragon (Fly my Dragon) by Hervé Guibert in 1994, Contention – La Dispute et autres bestioles (Contention – The Dispute and Other Tiny Beasties) by Didier-Georges Gabily in 1997 and was scheduled to present Attempts on Her Life by Martin Crimp in 2003.
Born in 1969 in Hamburg, Falk Richter studied directing there and began working at the Schau-spielhaus as an author, translator and director. He then joined the Schaubühne in Berlin, where since 2006 he has been associate director. He staged plays in different theatres by contemporary authors such as Harold Pinter, Marc Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp and Jon Fosse, but also more classic authors like Chekhov and Shakespeare, and his own texts, including Section in 1996 and Nothing Hurts in 1999. His most recent plays, brought together under the term Das System, are part of a global project including Electronic City, Seven Seconds (In God We Trust) and Under Ice. For Falk Richter, each play is written with an artistic team composed of professional or amateur actors during a period of four to six months. It is performed one to five times in the place where the rehearsals themselves are held. These presentations can integrate films, video, music, lectures, debates, documentary theatre…
By working on Falk Richter's plays, Stanislas Nordey continues his research on contemporary political theatre, a theatre that must be the place for truth, confronted with the lies widely unloaded by the media, manipulators sometimes manipulated, as when the second Iraq War spread out. Through fragments of plays, monologues or dialogues, extracts from the author's journal, Stanislas Nordey composes “his” Falk Richter as Falk Richter composes “his” system. Faced with the state of the world as it is shown to us, the images, ruses and myths must be put in perspective to make reality appear. With Das System, the idea is, through relatively short, sometimes tragic, often humorous and whimsical texts, to raise critical questions on our incredible facility for accepting the society of the spectacle as it is spread across our small luminous screens and penetrates the most intimate part of our daily lives. Documentary theatre to make us think, theatre of the mastery of style and writing, theatre of the urgency of the jolt, theatre of the satire of an increasingly minimalist coded language, theatre of the pamphlet – with Falk Richter's texts we are shaken, disturbed, amused, never indifferent. It is not just spectators that Stanislas Nordey summons to follow in Falk Richter's footsteps but citizens of the world to whom he offers this work, intended as a means of tearing away the thicker and thicker veil of the accumulated counter-truths that prevent us from really seeing the history that we are in the process of living. By putting his actors in a real-life situation, more than putting them on stage, he seeks the exactitude of the words that are addressed and the strength of the physical engagement on the stage to have this powerful voice heard, the voice of an author who considers himself extremely close to the world around us.
Distribution
traduction: Anne Monfort
mise en scène et scénographie: Stanislas Nordey
collaboratrice artistique: Claire Ingrid Cottanceau
avec: Mohand Azzoug, Moanda Daddy Kamono, Olivier Dupuy,
Damien Gabriac, Julie Moreau, Laurent Sauvage, Margot Segreto (distribution en cours)
lumières: Philippe Berthomé
son: Michel Zurcher
production déléguée: Théâtre National de Bretagne-Rennes
Production
L'Arche est agent théâtral du texte représenté
Stanislas Nordey est artiste associé au Théâtre National de Bretagne-Rennes
production: Théâtre national de Bretagne-Rennes, Festival d'Avignon, Compagnie Nordey
avec la participation: du Théâtre du Rond-Point Paris
Le Festival d'Avignon reçoit le soutien de l'Adami pour la production