Art defies death in “Invisibili” by Aurélien Bory at the Théâtre de la Cité in Toulouse

New director of the Théâtre Garonne, it is on the national stage of the Théâtre de la Cité that the Toulouse director Aurélien Bory presents his latest creation “Invisibili”. A piece born from a residency in Palermo which places art and people at the heart of the creative process.

“When Pamela Villoresi, director of the Biondo Theater invites me to Palermo, I have in mind the history of Sicily marked by the many influences, visible today in every street, every square, every building in the city”, comments Aurélien Bory. “While going to see the Annunciata di Palermo by the great painter Antonello da Messina, I came across by chance the Triumph of Death, an anonymous fresco from the 15th^e century, painted on the wall of a hospital which welcomed the dying. The unexpected remains for me the best sign for my creative projects because ideas, like encounters, cannot be decreed.”

Orpheus and Eurydice

From this vestige of the Middle Ages, Aurélien Bory found inspiration to tell a story for today. “I stopped in front of this fresco and said to myself: that’s theater,” explains the director. “In addition, it measures 6 m/6, the size of my sets, generally, with characters painted on a human scale. I had the stage score of my play which had to be read and interpreted like a text”. This fresco which shows death in the face is composed like a spiral in which a young woman and a young man, the protagonists of the show, are carried away.

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“At the time, people died from the Black Death but today it is breast cancer which kills young women while many young men risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean,” notes Aurélien Bory. “Sicily is marked by these shipwrecks. Through the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, I found the structure of my play.”

A story of encounters

And then, as is often the case, in Aurélien Bory’s work, it is the encounters that guide his creations. The director went looking for his performers in Palermo as he did in China for “The Seven Planks of Ruse” and in Morocco for “Taoub”. “It was inconceivable that I would arrive with an artistic team already formed and say this is how we do it. In Palermo, I met Chris Obehi, a Nigerian migrant who makes music and plays himself in the play I also found three dancers who are the three fates represented in the fresco. And then, the great Sicilian saxophonist Gianni Gebbia agreed to be this last breath which intimately links life to death.

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It is this musical and visual poem that Aurélien Bory offers with the sense of aesthetics and humanity that we know from him, around a stage curtain which represents the fresco “The Triumph of Death”.