Close your eyes to see further with Richard Peduzzi

With Percussion DiscussionActes Sud allows the great French scenographer to delve into his memories for the third time in the company of Arnaud Laporte.

« Brünnhilde falls asleep and wakes up in the most beautiful setting in the world », wrote in 1977, Sylvie de Nussac returning from Bayreuth, on the occasion of the Ring of the Centenary. Has anyone actually done anything more immarcescible than this decor, certainly inspired by a painting by Arnold Böcklin – to which he immediately offered a providential resurrection – but which, half a century later, remains effectively what the lover of aesthetic shock at the opera has seen something more beautiful in his life. That of Lucio Sillaalso all in shades of gray stone, sculpted by light and shadow, also had a small effect at Les Amandiers, in Milan, Brussels. Both have placed the Hanseatic imagination of Richard Peduzzi at the pinnacle of opera scenography.

The dark man (as Peduzzi was imagined) had come out of the shadows for the miraculous History of a Ringa substantial volume for several voices published after the five historic years of Bayreuth, then for two soliloquies: I already played it tomorrow et It’s outside there followed by The Smell of Theater. Here he is back, delivering “ parts of himself that he had not revealed » to Arnaud Laporte, journalist and producer at France Culture who, although he doubts in the work that the year of Lulu was 1979 (which every lyricomaniac has inscribed in the flesh of his memory), and although he became virilized, in Autumn dreamMichèle Marquais in Michel Marquais, had the pleasure of hosting in 2010 at the Louvre, the only – and fascinating – public exchange (fully transcribed at the conclusion of the book) that Patrice Chéreau shared with his scenographic alter ego.

Of Karma has Familypassing through Inspirations et Transmissionthe eleven sections of Percussion Discussion are punctuated by a few oases all titled Close your eyes : the opportunity, for the man who admits to preferring perspectives (a complete chapter is devoted to the exhibition at the Galerie des Gobelins sponsored by the Mobilier national: Perspectives) retrospectives, to further broaden its field of vision and thereby ours. “ You never know where ideas come from… » « What I seek more than ever is to express the inside, the depth of things, while considering the outside. » « It was in the stage cage that I found the place to paint my dreams. » « As time goes by, we move further and further away from the world. We have to fight against it, get out in front of things and people. » « I’m the opposite of worldly but I love the world. » « The present only exists for a second…» « A theater stage is heaven and earth. » The heart of the work contains sixteen pages of sketches giving an idea of ​​this “ paint with my emotions, my feelings » with which the artist prefers to define himself.

The « dunce » that he was (haunted by the syndrome of “ the imposter ), future director of the School of Decorative Arts, future resident of the Villa Médicis, future exhibition curator, pays tribute to one of his teachers, Charles Auffret, who, through one of these detours including the life is customary, it will later become the “superior ».

Regularly wondering if he is a decorator or a painter, Richard Peduzzi, who never ceased to savor his luck that neither Chéreau nor Bondy imposed their ideas on him (admitting in passing that with other directors he was not not as strong this link between the actors and the setting“), also designed furniture (Louvre, Orsay, etc.), also architected interiors, made Cézanne’s mantra his own (“ go to the landscape “) by professing: ” Watching is my job. » He also evokes, at his home (where Charles Dullin lived), his daily emotion for the photos that bear witness to the passing of time, speaks of his loved ones, confesses his vigilance in the face of the political evolution of the world (the lines on the current Italy). He confides, from Wagner to Barbara, his musical tastes (the title of the booklet is also borrowed from a play by Charlie Mingus) but also cinematographic (he was the decorator of Chéreau’s first films), keeping the vivid memory of shootings of Fellini films where he had the chance to attend Cinecittà.

We smile along the way to learn that the “ kid from the twelve labors of Hercules in Bayreuth » that he was jealous of the « great beauty » drawings by Patrice Chéreau. And we finally pinch ourselves to believe his revelations concerning the impasse between the two men following the first Ring (1976), to the declarations of one: “ I didn’t want to work with him anymore “, as on the other: ” I didn’t want to talk to him anymore “. In Bayreuth, spectators of the second Ring, the one, so magnificently revised and corrected, from the summer of 77, were far from realizing how close they had escaped!

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