Raphaëlle Boitel and her Company l’Oubliée.
Bodies, images, and situations, suspensions in the shadows that make you dream, that give you vertigo, but never make us let go.
She shakes herself in the air and tells us about a cellar. What boldness! What height! On her apparatus, she swings and seems to whisper both her thoughts and her memories. It’s her adoptive brother in a nurse’s smock who will stop her from flying off the handle on solid ground after a final smile at her father, immobilized by age, like a Raymond Burr without a wheelchair, remember, those of you who are elder? The hero of “Ironside,” a series from the 70s, like a pillar, a mole to cling to. He whose family is so airy, so light. He waits at the table and overcomes the troubles that marriage causes, the rages, the sudden incompatibilities, the lone periods like an inverted i since the sister is suspended head down and asks, “Is anybody there?” Sometimes misunderstanding, then reconciliations like the couple where one talks about the other to the therapist but never face to face, and finds each other at the therapist’s, tumbling into hip hop, the controlled peril of bodies that abandon themselves, the light drinks them in, and the reflections of silhouettes—let’s not talk about them or rather let’s talk: they transform the characters into beautifully disjointed puppets. The improbable scene with the telephone to which one is attached: I’m climbing back up, the interlocutor basically says before the table, which was taking to the air, is lowered again. This entire family is bored on the ground and only finds existence in the air or in motion. There are some like that! One member of the troupe worked with James Thierrée in “The Chimpanzee’s Scream,” invited to the Fire Theatre in Nice, the first show of Charlie Chaplin’s grandson! You see, when we’re telling you it’s visual… and also musical! What a marriage of situations and melodies, including “Bridge over Troubled Water” by Simon & Garfunkel that sticks in one’s mind and that ‘stubbornly’ clings to one of the lone characters who cannot shake it off. Oh, I forgot, most of these scenes, played, danced, or suspended on thick ropes (James Thierrée’s early creations used them impressively), when spoken, are also signed for the hearing impaired. Really visual, as I was saying!
Friday 20th at 8 PM at the Cuisine Blvd. du Mercantour. National Theatre of Nice.
Information: 04 93 13 19 00
R. Haugades
