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Editorial Lille
Published on
Jan 2, 2025 at 1:40 p.m.
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It’s a spectacle as astonishing as it is impressive which opens the new theater year in Lille (North). At Great SouthLa Rose des Vents offers “ And Ring de Katharsy » on Thursday January 9 and Friday January 10, 2025. creation by Alice Laloybased in the heart of Dunkirk with its “company called Reviens”.
A show like no other
The trained puppeteer from the Strasbourg National Theater school opens a new path by using human actors as puppets. Already with Pinocchio live #2 presented at the Théâtre de l’Idéal in 2024, she featured young children transformed into puppets in mass production factories.
Ici, humans become avatars of a video game played on a giant stage. Commanded by two gamers who confront each other and manipulate them with invectives: “Forward, Turn, Pick Up, Attack”.
The points earned and bonuses are displayed to mark the progress of the game which is played over four rounds. Each action is a battle between two teams present in the ring. The uniformly gray avatars (this monochrome gray by the visual artist Hans Op de Beeck seen last year at the Museum of Flanders) ordered by the players respond to injunctions.
They dress themselves, after having acquired clothes that have fallen off the hangers; feed after frantically tearing apart packages containing food. The battle is not always exciting, because the food fight is fought without regard for the adversary.
It gives rise to fierce clashes between the two teams in which all physical blows seem authorized. Just like the trash cleaning test. They are subject to the impatience of those who find that the order is poorly executed, too imprecise. All surprised and revolted that the injunction of their own brain does not fully respond.
Impressive inventiveness
It is true that the characters thus commanded have stiff, clumsy gestures. To the point that the spectators, too, want to correct them. The stage set-up developed in the Bercail production site is impressively inventive: the furniture held on the ceiling falls onto the playing space gradually to give a setting to each of the four rounds.
Their sudden installation due to their fall creates a certain tension. Morality is cruel. And if social gaming was just a video gamewith its dominants that can be modified like “Fight” for aggressiveness or “Love” for its softer moments? And if soon we were just avatars that others would command with what this represents of arbitrariness, manipulation and submission under bullying and insults?
The whole thing is made credible by an astonishing troupe of actors and actresses, acrobats with an international cast who have internalized the body techniques of robots, and who can make us forget all human appearance. Alice Laloy manipulates them at will.
Shows at the Grand Sud (50, rue de l’Europe) Thursday January 9, 2025 at 7 p.m. and Friday January 10 at 8 p.m. More information on the website larose.fr
Jean-Michel Stievenard
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