Painting the portrait of a generation, diffracted through the experience of a young activist: this shocking show draws its strength, its energy and its devouring solastalgia.
We live in this crazy world where the “terrorists” are not those who knowingly destroy it and profit from it, but those who campaign and act to try to save it. Filmed in a fixed shot, their faces stare at us from the screen placed behind actress Stéphanie Aflalo, seated behind a table where a microphone, a pear and a tomato are lined up. Heterogeneous objects where nature competes with technology.
As soon as the show begins, the faces disappear and give way to the story. Their names are Taupe, Thelma, Jona, Fauteur and Dédé. Laetitia, who is facing us, recounts their intrusion into a nuclear power plant to light up their banner with the names “Chernobyl, Fukushima, Fickange” with fireworks, all filmed by their Green Fury drone. What followed was their arrest, police custody and ban on seeing each other during the months preceding their trial.
Portrait of the Chernobyl generation
This novel written in free, breathless verse by Hélène Laurain draws from her biography the date of birth of the character Laetitia that Stéphanie Afflalo powerfully embodies, in an incredible mixture of strength and fragility: “April 26, 1986/HAS midnight 44/I was born at the maternity ward of/Orangers/3 minutes before La Sœur/39 minutes before liberation/HAS 2,108 kilometers away / From the 200 bombs of Hiroshima / Billions of billions of becquerel.”
Celebrating the anniversary of the Chernobyl generation every year does not make one particularly optimistic. But it is indeed the portrait of this generation that the author delivers with her burst of writing through the words of Laetitia. With her friends, she lives in Lorraine, the local trash bin where “the Luxembourgers the Germans the Belgians come to dump their shit”. Where the project to bury radioactive waste is making headway.
An emotional capsizing to which the music of Nick Cave and Nina Simone brings abysmal depth
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Through incisive, sharp touches, we get to know the gang, their family, a mother who died of cancer, a father who capitulates to his daughter’s depression, this solastalgia that nothing relieves, a twin sister at ease. in the norm of an abnormal world and a lover, the author, a determined activist, inspired in particular by the documentary Wild Plant by Nicolas Humbert.
A dive into the mental, festive, digital universe that connects them and that the scenography organizes by cutting the space in two – on and off-camera filmed live and projected on the screen. An emotional capsizing to which the music of Nick Cave and Nina Simone brings abysmal depth.
Burn the fire
Before their big rally in the power plant, the gang had prepared the fire festival, in order to “melt the last lead of reason“. Laetitia’s story ends with another outbreak, filmed live on Facebook, with an immolation in a wedding dress that she goes through alone. Fauteur did not come to join her even though he had launched the idea by email: “Look for the quote/I, the ordinary man/The gray man/I am in love/Of freedom.”
These are the words left by Piotr Szczesny, a 54-year-old Pole who set himself on fire on October 29, 2017 in Warsaw to protest against the ruling PiS. If reality blends and sticks to fiction it is because it is its source and, who knows, the spark capable of awakening consciences.
Fire everywhereby Hélène Laurain, directed by Hubert Colas, at CentQuatre, Paris, as part of the Festival Les Singulier·es (from January 15 to February 15)until January 18; at the Joliette theater, Marseille, from April 2 to 4 and at the Latitudes Contemporaines festival, Lille, in June.
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