TEMPERATURE
Freely inspired by William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”.
A fairytale between heaven and earth, lack and illusion, hope and its opposite, accumulation and erasure, music and noise, dance and stillness, painting and transparency, theater and backstage, puppet and man…
Rope-tied and lashed down, Les Passagers set out to conquer their scaffolding, rigged like a ship. Island in the middle of the audience, the pyramidal structure completes the layout. A vertiginous shipwreck unites actors and spectators in an upheaval of the laws of weightlessness. The canvas is a sail, alternately hoisted and lowered, on which water flows and carries away the traces left by the protagonists. Reinforcing the immersion of all the senses, the musical creation uses a spatialized sound system as the broadcast medium.
Despite an impressive scenography consisting of a scaffolding (17m x 17m), a canvas (210 m2) and a canvas pyramid (7m high), the aim of this show is not to impose itself on the audience, but rather to invite them to let themselves be drawn into the wake of a strange vessel in distress. No text, but a contemporary look at the driving forces behind Shakespeare’s drama: the power of illusion and the illusion of power. For the 20 artists of the Cie, more than a year of research based on a sharing of disciplines during which, among other things, the dancer learns from the painter the art of giving rhythm to a pictorial trace, and the painter how to model the stops of his body in the gesture of the brush. “First of all, there are the corridors of power and its castaways, which often lead to the shipwreck of society as a whole, given over to the fury of absurd wars in the midst of which remain islands of resistance and refusal (Sarajevo, Grosny…), where strange things are invented: utopias, magical, dangerous spaces, intense joys, disillusionment. Then comes the confrontation between the real and the magical, bringing us back to the power of illusion and the illusion of power. Finally comes the denouement, through the difficult path of access to our freedoms… ” All of which coincide with the desires and questions of director Philippe Riou.
Frédéric Noguer’s approach: To show movements of paint that are constantly inscribed and constantly erased by a flow of water that seems to emerge from the canvas. Les coulées is a painting in its own right, a painterless painting born of terrestrial gravity, a random painting celebrating Newton’s physics and initiating the new idea of color/coulure. The actor-painters are transformed into painting instruments, their nudity semantized by color, at one with the canvas. As the actions unfold, a “pictorial archaeology” is established, with the different interventions superimposed, erased and overlapping in turn, sedimenting on the surface of the canvas in as many strata of color, making visible the presence of time in the show. Composer Eryck Abecassis’ approach: Tempête… Grain, accumulation of atmospheric micro-disturbances, simultaneous presence of different temporalities and therefore different spaces. Accumulation/erasure, two terms that could be the formal basis of techno music. Here, I want to extend the process beyond the simple fragment, not so much to unify as to subject memory to certain twists.
Technical Information
Duration: 01h15
Number of artists / technicians: 16 artists and 2 stage managers
Structure type: Company scaffolding (W17m x H17m) + PVC canvas (210 m2) + canvas pyramid (H7m)
Gauge : 5000 spectators
Show chronology
2004: Foligno Foligno Festival
2004: LeMans Le Mans fait son cirque" festival
2003: Paris
2003: Périgueux Mimos" Festival
2002: Chalon sur Saône Chalon dans la Rue" Festival
2002: Piazza du Centre Beaubourg Printemps des Rues" festival
