Les Pauvres Gens

All is dark. The mother is worried, sitting alone in the decrepit cabin. All night she waits, fearing the worst for her husband, gone fishing in the hopes of feeding their five children, now asleep. When finally she decides to walk down the coast to see if she can glimpse her husband's boat, she passes by the cabin of another mother, a widow, recently fallen ill. She opens the door and finds a terrible scene... Victor Hugo's How Good Are The Poor is an ode to adoption, but not a statement of principle. Yet the everyday heroism depicted in the poem is for Denis Guénoun nothing short of a concrete vision of goodness and ethics. Invited conjointly by the Institut Supérieur des Techniques du Spectacle and the Festival d'Avignon to direct the graduation show of the stage managers and engineers of the class of 2014, Denis Guénoun has a long history with the poetry of Victory Hugo. Seen as a vector of the values of the Republic at school, the poem How Good Are The Poor was taught until the 1960s everywhere on the French territory, including in Algeria, where Denis Guénoun grew up. He therefore thought that, to bring together a group of professionals of the theatre who aren't actors, the formal constraint of the poem could be like a springboard, the many symbols a challenge to rise up to. Defining poetry as the ability to see, in every concrete act, a potential transport, Denis Guénoun asked the engineers he works with to make it their law: to use their knowledge and the practical means at their disposal to transfigure the real and make theatre happen.

How Good Are The Poor is part of the first series of poems in La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages), originally titled Les Petites Épopées (Little Epics), conceived as a depiction of the history of humanity. Armed with his romantic faith, Victor Hugo paints the portraits of famous and anonymous heroes in order to show the path of the Being towards the Ideal. A mainstay of the work of the poet in exile, the struggle of man against external forces here takes the form of spectacular philosophical scenes that show the persistence of Goodness even within the humblest reality.

Marion Canelas, April 2014

Direction Denis Guénoun
With the friendly contribution of Stanislas Roquette

With the stage manager and the leader machinist trained in 2013-2014 at the Institut Supérieur des Techniques du Spectacle
Jean-Cédric Aubert, Fabrice Barroo, Benoit Bregault, Vincent Coulon, Margot Falletty, Jean-Marc Filippi, Paul Fontaine, Nicolas Gauthier, Thierry Janvier, Stéphane Massa, Yoan Mourles, France Nicolas, Vincent Platel, Guillaume Rubin

Production Institut Supérieur des Techniques du Spectacle en partenariat avec le Festival d'Avignon