The show's on in three minutes. The audience is getting ready. Technicians are busy setting up. Relaxed, the commentators of Epigraph sit down behind their microphones. Smoking a cigarette, one of them plays the programme's opening music, an old swing number. Three, two, one... “For want of sun, learn how to ripen in the snow”: such is the topic of the last episode of the show, which has just been brutally cancelled. Sensing that the set is about to fall apart around them, that the lights will go crazy and dim, the commentators nonetheless begin a new debate. Each in their own way, they will challenge the neoliberal ideology that has just taken them off the air, in a final assault of poetic thinking, with more than a little self-deprecation. A weapon that could by itself destroy that doctrine—articulated in the 1950s by the Mont Pelerin Society—and its provocative slogan, “There is no alternative,” an “argument from terror that disqualifies any other worldview.” From Henri Michaux to the Huichol people, the various inspirations of this Belgian quintet lead them into a situationist reflection on the world. Arguing that the time and moments spent together are essential, and that humour and deep thinking aren't antithetical, the Raoul Collectif give us with their second play a hilarious show about aesthetics and politics, about the collective reappropriation of power through language and imagination.
Distribution
Design Raoul Collectif
Costumes Natacha Belova
Lights Philippe Orivel
Sound Julien Courroye
Assistant director Yaël Steinmann
With Romain David, Jérôme de Falloise, David Murgia, Benoît Piret, Jean-Baptiste Szézot
Production
Production Raoul Collectif
Co-production Théâtre national de Bruxelles, Théâtre de Namur, Théâtre de Liège and le Manège.Mons.
With the support of Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Wallonie-Bruxelles International, Zoo Théâtre and la Chaufferie Acte 1