An Armchair for the Orchestra – The Parisian theater reviews site » Little players, design by François Chaignaud, at the Louvre Museum / Autumn Festival

Nov 08, 2024 |
Comments closed on Little players, design by François Chaignaud, at the Louvre Museum / Festival d'Automne

ƒƒ article from Nicolas Thevenot

Usually we cross them without lingering, we step over them with hasty steps, we barely deign to calculate them, these rooms which are not really like antechambers where an immemorial time would wait, a space that looks like a gigantic underground exhaling a fresh breath from beyond the grave. We are under the Louvre, in its foundations, thick walls of excavated stones, whispers of another time: the medieval Louvre. At the invitation of the Museum and the Autumn Festival, after the non-human dances of Jérôme Bel presented a year ago, it is the turn of the vibrant and exciting François Chaignaud to get involved. While clearly coming off. Because investing in these lowlands, which have neither the luster nor the brilliance of the great halls celebrated throughout the world, is a bit like walking under your mother's skirts, or under the table of a banquet. , it is deserting the golds to gain the commons. It’s also, literally, going back to basics.

THE Little playersthus baptized by its designer, come together with the exhibition Figures of the fool. From the Middle Ages to the Romantics which opened at the Louvre Museum, and which must be seen before or after the ambulatory performance proposed by François Chaignaud. Not that one would illustrate or decode the other, but rather that the two function together like echo chambers. The audience enters, one by one, a silent period of time between each, the opportunity to leave the mundane to enter a new world, albeit an old one. That of Little playerswhich certainly signals the refusal of the big game, and perhaps just as much that of the big I, the contemporary ogre who devours us whole. Forming so many stations on a sideways path, solitudes, duos, trios, and more numerous together decline so many combinations and archipelagos of the human being. These Little playersdistant cousins of the madwomen of the Middle Ages, seem straight out of a painting by Bosch or Brueghel. There is something in the costumes, in the painted faces, which beckons in this direction, but even more it is the bodies, like those in this opening scene, frolicking around a large red balloon, which take us back there. Progressing on all fours, round back, like an egg, tumbling, clinging, the madman is the one who does not follow the right path decreed by the established order, much more than the mentally ill with whom we now associate the entirety of the term, without sharing. Funny, playful, the little shapes swarm a route, nestling in the crevices of the space, thus forming a walkway. Turning upside down, acting like a two-headed or three-headed beast, making winds, governing a flotilla of vibrators, the Little players certainly disturb common sense. But even more, these crazy figures (in the medieval sense) extricate themselves from time, create it, dig it, like so many galleries piercing an impassable wall. Magnificent a cappella songs resonate like an endless loop in these corridors of time, the distant joins the near. The past catches up with the present. The performative force of the event is due to its diffracted structure working in a deep, invisible and organic communion of the performers, but also to the frail, minor character of the acts involved. It is this small which becomes immense, as if under the effect of a magnifying glass that we could finally adapt to our sight. Madness is a critique of its time. That of Little players is perhaps to point out the lost tomb of our race, the overbidding of our society of the spectacle: their reserve, their calm, their absorption in the present of the living, their silence, their simplicity, outline a poetics of withdrawal which takes on a value particularly ethical.

Little playersdesign by François Chaignaud.

With (in progress): Esteban Appeseche, Cécile Banquey, Marie-Pierre Brébant, François Chaignaud, Samuel Famechon, Florence Gengoul, Pierre Morillon, Cassandre Muñoz, Marie Picaut, Alan Picol, Maryfé Singy, Ryan Veillet

Artistic collaborator: Baudouin Woehl

Assistance with musical direction: Marie-Pierre Brébant, Alan Picol

Costumes : Romain Brau

Creation and lighting management: Abigail Fowler

Costume designer: Alejandra Garcia

November 4, 7, 9, 11, 14, and 16, 2024

Continuous from 7:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. each night of performance, entries every 20 minutes

Louvre Museum

75001 Paris