With Claude Régy, the imaginary saves us from the often distressing reality by opening spaces of dreams and mysteries that touch the deepest part of our human nature. His encounter with Fernando Pessoa, an author who lived only through dreams, successive digressions and the multiplication of self, was if not inevitable, at least natural. In a modern world in which reality is strongly questioned by the virtual, presenting the Portuguese poet in his most violent and delirious amounts to plunging into what is most necessary in artistic creation. In this Maritime Ode, we are burnt at the limits of a universe of violence and cruelty, magnified by an overflowing, irate, extreme lyricism. Pessoa is the only one who can evoke the world's chaos by arranging words in such a precise and structured way. And Claude Régy is the only one who can turn upside-down, once again, the certainties of a theatre that could make us more consumers than active spectators. Together, for those who want to go as far as possible in the freedom of desires, they propose an exhilarating imaginary journey. Here, the sea is a great deal more than an immense expanse of water: it is a call to travel, in the tradition of those launched in their time by Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Walt Whitman. But in listening to the thousand verses that compose Maritime Ode, we perceive that it is not only the sea, present without being clearly described, that interests Pessoa, but also and especially the world of ships, the world of machines, the modern world. By denouncing in passing his nation's imperialistic campaigns and the violence against the colonised populations that resulted from them, he creates here an iconoclastic work in a country that lived and survived for a very long time by means of its distant territorial possessions. It is through the unique voice of Jean-Quentin Chatelain that all the nuances of this text will be suggested, this text that does not reject heady lyricism, or the terrifying scream or even the gentleness of a whispered murmur. JFP
The mysterious Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) who only won fame after his death, at the age of forty-seven, when thousands of unpublished pages were discovered, piled up in boxes. The strange Pessoa who rarely left his city of Lisbon and who, however, wrote some of the most beautiful travel narratives. The disconcerting Pessoa who invented ghost writers for himself with detailed biographies, like so many facets of himself and who could, following the whims of his doubles, be a pagan poet, an epicurean poet and that lyric and modernist poet who, under the name of Alvaro de Campos, composed the masterly work Maritime Ode. JFP
Distribution
direction: Claude Régy
translation: Dominique Touati
adaptation: Parcídio Gonçalves et Claude Régy
assistant to the direction: Alexandre Barry
scenography and costume: Sallahdyn Khatir
lighting: Rémi Godfroy, Sallahdyn Khatir, Claude Régy
sound: Philippe Cachia
with: Jean-Quentin Chatelain
Text published by éditions La Différence
Production
production: Les Ateliers Contemporains
coproduction: Festival d'Avignon, Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, Théâtre de la Ville-Paris,
Théâtre des Treize Vents Centre dramatique national de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon
avec l'aide: du CentQuatre établissement artistique de la Ville de Paris et de la Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian-Portugal
Le Festival d'Avignon reçoit le soutien de l'Adami pour la production
© photo Pascal Victor
