Rachid Ouramdane's new piece takes us to the gates of barbarism: there, where people have been handed over to torture. Faced with this violence and the negation of their humanity, how did these people react and how do they construct, even today, their own memory of what happened? Forgetting, denying, remembering, reliving, of course, but by what means, with what tools, through what remembrance channels? To answer these questions, Rachid Ouramdane met a dozen people all of whom had been confronted with this violence that pushed them to go into exile, to take refuge, elsewhere, far away. Natives of Brazil, Chechnya, Rwanda, Palestine or Chile, they chose to go beyond their victim status to bear witness. Working with the video-maker and documentary film-maker Jenny Teng, Rachid Ouramdane filmed them, listened to them, aware that he was plunging them back into their trials. The narratives and images of these “ordinary witnesses” compose the raw material of the piece, that the bodies of the five dancers take possession of onto the stage. To create the portrait of individuals subjected to torture means to set off in quest of an impossible form. Which gestures, which sounds, which images, which postures should be found to relate and embody what, since the experience and then the memory of violence, has gradually solidified? Necessarily delicate, shattered, fleeting forms, as if the movements and images had trouble becoming concrete under the impact of the violence that comes back from the past. Effects of fog, disappearance and reappearance, metamorphosis, strangeness invade the stage to present personal accounts and to transmit their atrocious banality. ADB
Distribution
With the Chartreuse de Villeneuve lez Avignon:
conception: Rachid Ouramdane
scenography: Sylvain Giraudeau
video: Jenny Teng, Nathalie Gasdoué
music: Jean-Baptiste Julien
Lighting: Yves Godin
costumes and make-up: La Bourette
with: Lora Juodkaite, Mille Lundt, Wagner Schwartz, Georgina Vila Bruch, Yeojin Yun
Production
production: l'A
coproduction: Bonlieu Scène nationale Annecy, Théâtre 2 Gennevilliers, Festival d'Avignon, Festival d'Automne, Festival d'Athènes et Épidaure
et dans le cadre d'un accueil-studio: les Centres chorégraphiques nationaux de Grenoble, du Havre et de Créteil
avec le soutien: de la Région île-de-France
Le Festival d'Avignon reçoit le soutien de l'Adami pour la production