Courts-Circuits

A place for fiction, theatre permits the choreographer and director François Verret to take his time. To leave behind limited, hurried, measured time, the time of profitability and immediate benefit, of urgency and blindness, to institute a time "that is accountable to nobody." Using time to express the visions, thoughts, questions that the contemporary world inspires in the different artists he brings together around him: dancers, actors, musicians and circus artists. It was after he read at the same time Falling Man by Don DeLillo - which describes the atmosphere of a street in New York on the evening of 9/11 -, and a scientific text, Awakenings, in which the neuropsychiatrist Oliver Sachs details an incurable pathology that plunges the victims into a lethargy from which they can only escape by taking powerful but dangerous drugs, that François Verret started to imagine his new creation, Courts-Circuits. In a "post-traumatic" space, men and women aware of the fog that surrounds them, the absence of a horizon, work together on the driving forces of their own survival; they discover that they are "close" simply because all of them have gotten out of the time that reigns outside, an outside where everything goes faster, where the atmosphere is explosive, "insurrectionary", electric... For a long time, they had found themselves caught, seized, snatched, carried off by a swirling of devouring, maddening, blind, nihilistic forces against which they tried to resist in vain. Then suddenly, a series of short-circuits occurred and they stopped, frozen, immobilized where they lived and worked. At the same time, they became "obsolete", ineffective, incapable of keeping up with the required speed and flow of circulation. Annoying obstacles on the rapid paths of so-called "normal" people, they found themselves isolated and created the conditions of a "backwards time," a mythical time that carries elsewhere, a cathartic time, against today's so-called "real" life. There, they exorcise the figures that haunt them and create a space where they can breathe. Against the many forms of diffuse brutality that our contemporary world generates, François Verret and his companions set violence: the violence that Jean Genet claimed as the ultimate possible defence when the individual is crushed down. A violence that, on either side of the scream, can turn into tenderness, harmony or melancholy, and be expressed by the bodies, voices, words, musical notes and images that occupy the stage. At the end of this theatre adventure, how can we not think of Pier Paolo Pasolini who was convinced that only the artist could "say what is kept quiet"?  JFP

director François Verret
scenography Vincent Gadras, Karl Emmanuel Le Bras
lighting Robin Decaux, Karl Emmanuel Le Bras
sound Géraldine Foucault
video Manuel Pasdelou
costumes Laure Mahéo

with Jean-Baptiste André, Alessandro Bernardeschi, Séverine Chavrier, Jean-Pierre Drouet, Mitia Fedotenko, Marta Izquierdo Munoz, Natacha Kouznetsova, I Fang Lin

production Théâtre national de Bretagne (Rennes)
coproduction Festival d'Avignon, MC2:Grenoble, Théâtre de la Ville-Paris, Espace Malraux-Chambéry Scène nationale de Chambéry et de la Savoie, MC2 Grenoble, L'Apostrophe Scène nationale de Cergy-Pontoise et du Val d'Oise
avec le soutien de la Compagnie FV
Par son soutien, l'Adami aide le Festival d'Avignon à s'engager sur des coproductions.

François Verret est artiste associé au Théâtre National de Bretagne à Rennes.