Ricercar

A demanding and generous artist, François Tanguy takes the time needed for his ambitious projects that he executes with passion. For Ricercar, he has once again brought together a group of actors and technicians to create a theatre of resistance with methods, with superficial entertainment facilities, with sectarian theories, with formalism, with mindlessness, a theatre that focuses on the pleasure of thinking, the strength of the imaginary and the violence of dramatic poetry. A theatre of urgency that is not created in confusion but in rigor and that summons onto the stage all the arts that can enrich it and without which it would only perhaps be an empty shell: painting, music, literature, philosophy… A theatre of the ceremonial that is built and destroyed in the same movement, a theatre that is composed and decomposed, is effaced and is reborn, that is turned inside out like a glove, a theatre of repeating motifs. The ricercar is a contrapuntal musical form that is less elaborate than the fugue – which appeared later and uses a generating theme in a systematic manner, whereas the ricercar links different episodes in which there are not necessarily any thematic connections. As François Tanguy explains, “the title Ricercar, even if it evokes these intertwining and repeated movements that come from diverse sources and sound dynamisms, will here be the indication of a ‘milieu', derived from the word itself. Ricercare: look for, examine, travel through… That, the returning inclusion of the figures, bodies, words, in the appearing of space and time – deliberations constantly taken up again, summoned and revoked from the quick and the dead, semblances and meanings, airs and herbs.” On the stage, the theatre directs itself. It is not solely a question of having the words of François Villon and Dante, Pirandello and Kafka, Ezra Pound and Mandelstam, Liszt, Berio, Berg, Verdi, Stravinsky or Beethoven heard; François Tanguy and his companions create, drawing from these literary and musical universes, a world of fiction and invention, peopled with disjointed bodies that move in a framed-unframed space, made of depth, skilful diagonals, shadows and light, planks and tulle, that constantly alter the approach to and the perception of images. The show is meticulously built in this constant fragmentation that allows time for suspension and respiration in which everything seems to be able to happen on the stage. Theatre that has absolute trust in each spectator and his immeasurable capacity to dream, to be astonished, to accept turmoil, to penetrate the shadows, to go through the mirror of semblances, to share those ineffable moments that François Tanguy and the Théâtre du Radeau offer us.

mise en scène, scénographie, lumières: François Tanguy
élaboration sonore: François Tanguy, Marek Havlicek
avec: Frode Bjørnstad, Laurence Chable, Fosco Corliano,
Claudie Douet, Katia Grange, Jean Rochereau, Boris Sirdey
technique et production: Théâtre du Radeau

coproduction: Théâtre du Radeau (Le Mans), Théâtre national de Bretagne-Rennes, Centre chorégraphique national Rillieux-la-Pape – compagnie Maguy Marin, Théâtre Garonne-Toulouse, Festival d'Automne à Paris, Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, Festival d'Avignon
Le Festival d'Avignon reçoit le soutien de l'Adami pour la production