Diphtong

What is it that pushes writing towards the limits of extreme experience ?
Where is this place of no-return ? In action, word, regard.
How do we go about accepting a disappearance, how do we revive the missing person through all other human bodies we come across?
How do we survive losing this love ?
How ?
How can we revive this love that made us tremble with the promise of endless impossibilities, unlimited desires, how can this love convince us to accept a world that shrugs off our tenderness, our doubts ?

Living is no longer bearable. Being close to other loved ones is no longer bearable. It’s no longer possible to have other loved ones.

Beings, objects become fetishes. Bodies brought together with feelings of love, are transformed, dismembered, crushed, ready for their turn in ceasing to exist. More loving love, more gestures. More nothing.
What remains is the potential desire for the Loved One. A remembered reconciliation. So loved, so longed for, that it has an effect on us, our acts, our despair.

Sarah Kane leads us into a world of writing where the energy of the words and their power in performance, transgressing the limits into what cannot be represented. We can’t on stage. That feeling is too distant, too distant, impossible to show, impossible to do, impossible to love.

What is sex on stage about ?
Can theatre be about the extreme ?
How can the actor’s writing show us the unrepresentable ?

Hubert COLAS

Most of the time, Sarah Kane’s brutality cuts right to our core, with a kind of natural violence where action is not only voluntary but also internal, impulsive. Devastating action. The body is gripped. Gripped and relieved of a need, not a sexual need, but a need to see, know, here, now. (...)
What desires lead us to choose a writing like that ?
Something is produced like a revelation, skin to smell, a body, a voice. It engulfed me.
The feeling of intense closeness ?
Yes, but also an impression of recoconition before this state of disarray, a need.
We find an interest in reconciling the human with the world. I feel like I’m seeing the strain and to feel everything in her writing move towards that, to the point where she can accept the devastation. But we also feel that what is in the text cannot be represented.
Is unrepresentable.
That is just what we describe by the word unrepresentable, it’s what is hidden, but which exists entirely in space. The unrepresentable for me is that idea, it’s a shape that has no image but which exists as a compelling force between the actor and the listener. We finally come to believe that the sight of what remains hidden, exists and is present.

Hubert COLAS
Excerpt from a converstation between Hubert COLAS
And Suzanne JOUBERT
24th October 2001

Director and set design : Hubert COLAS

With : Jonathan BIDOT, Jeanne CASILAS, Virgile COIGNARD, Vincent DISSEZ, Franck FRAPPA, Peggy PÉNEAU, Thierry RAYNAUD, Frédéric SCHULZ -RICHARD, Xavier TAVERA.

Lighting : ENCAUSTIC

Sound : Jean-Marc MONTERA

Costumes : Cidalia DA COSTA et Peggy PÉNEAU

Images : Laurent GARBIT

Images Assistant : Jean-Christophe AUBERT

Dance : Isabelle MOUCHARD

Sculptures : Françoyse HAMEL

Technical Director Xavier FANANAS

Text translated into French by Evelyne PIEILLER.

Production : -Diphtong Cie
-Théâtre des Bernardines
-Théâtre du Merlan-scène nationale de Marseille.

Production at Théâtre des Bernardines, Marseille 27 November -15 December 2001

With the artistic assistance of the Jeune Théâtre National

With support from : -Montévidéo
-La Halle aux Grains
-Scène nationale de Blois
-Le Théâtre, scène nationale de Mâcon.