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Sans titre - 13 juillet 2024 10.49_edited.jpg
Sans titre - 13 juillet 2024 10.49_edited.jpg

A project under construction imagined by Johanny Bert in two parts.
Creation 26-27

We are looking for partner theatres for these two creations.
Project Presentation: Update - April 2024

After researching the subversive history of the puppet and its current roots, I was able to develop two projects around our intimate and political bodies through sexuality, freedom and love which allowed me to create Hen (2019) then La (nouvelle) Ronde (2022).

Today, I would like to continue a new research with this free, popular and insolent instrument that is the puppet for adult audiences, in a story, our story to try to understand the mechanisms of a historical political movement: The National Front or National Rally.

As with all my creations, I try to capture and understand our world with the collaboration of authors of our present. This time I would also like to surround myself with historians, political scientists and journalists, women and men who will nourish the writing of two complementary and autonomous creations:

- Love Glory and Cement!

21st Century Farce

Traveling project that can be played indoors or outdoors.

- History does not forgive people who lie down.

Puppetry podcast - stage creation -

Poster of the 1986 legislative elections

The Project Update - April 2024

I have been working on this project for several months, years. Through these two creations, we will not seek to create a naively polemical theater or to constitute “a theater of charge” but rather to analyze a political but also human story. To understand the mechanisms of fear, erasure or reinterpretation of history.

Addressing in the theater this political thought born in the aftermath of the Second World War, its evolution, its repercussions in our political, cultural, human lives is an old desire that I took time to define in order to build a project. The many far-right parties and movements on the European continent have some differences but all share common traits, in particular their very marked social conservatism, their rejection of immigration and their nationalism. The rise of the far-right vote in Europe is linked to multiple factors, including several crises that have affected the continent in recent years. According to Le Monde Diplomatique, the far right can be defined as an ideological family of parties, movements and groups that have in common a radical critique of democracy in the name of an authoritarian, racist and nationalist ideology tending to exclude a part of individuals. Their speeches express nostalgia for a golden age, the apology of elite societies and virile strength, the fear of miscegenation, the censorship of morals and the rejection of intellectuals. The puppet, a political gesture From obvious disobedience to suggestive circumvention, from militant commitment to interested cooperation, from the offensive to strategic withdrawal, the puppet-object and the puppeteers are part of the history of acts of censorship, resistance but also propaganda. These two new creations are based on personal research as well as on the very fascinating study coordinated by Raphaèle Fleury (Doctor of Literature, Head of the Research and Documentation Center of the International Institute of Puppetry) and Julie Sermon (MCF Performing Arts, Université Lumière- Lyon 2) through the publication Marionnettes et pouvoirs: censures, propagandas, résistances. I like to confront serious and committed social issues with puppet forms. These prostheses, these plastic extensions of the actor allow me more freedom to create a disturbance, to show a materiality that lets the form explode and densifies the content, the subject through symbolic intentions that place the spectator in a constantly renewed convention on stage. Through these two projects, I wish to place the Art of Puppetry at its right level of requirement through the interpretation of the actors. First of all in a farcical and offbeat work specific to the popular and satirical puppet in Amour Gloire and Ciment. Then in a new research for L’Histoire ne pardonne pas aux peuples qui se couchént by creating a documentary theater engaged in a dialogue between human bodies and puppet bodies.

Project “Story Detail” creation 1

garden-gnome.png

Love, glory and cement!

21st Century Farce

Traveling project that can be played indoors or outdoors.

All audiences from 12 years old

Piece for two puppeteer actors/actresses.

Presentation

The garden gnome, a naive and political object? I want to transpose the birth of a political movement through the prism of the pop kitsch fantasy world of garden gnomes. Creating puppet objects representing a tribe of garden gnomes is playing with a naive and popular image like a puppet can be. The kitsch aesthetic of these statuettes allows for farce, shift and a universal message. In this creation, the Front National political movement and French political figures will never be named or represented. Everyone will be able to see them or not. The challenge in this project is to transpose the ideologies of the political movement such as conservatism, immigration phobia, nationalism into a satirical and popular farce accessible to everyone with different degrees of reading.

Project “Story Detail” creation 2

ELLE-Marine-Le-Pen-calls-at-the-Elysee

History does not forgive people who lie down *

création saison  26-27
Podcast marionnettique - création plateau -

*Citation de Jean-Marie Le Pen dans son livre « Les Français d’abord," éd. Carrère-Michel Lafon.

Presentation

For this creation, it is not a question of writing a political satire or caricature but rather of creating a documented and historical work. Our ambition through this creation is to remind ourselves and to highlight the fundamentals of a political history that has important repercussions today. This project is conceived as an artistic act, documented that does not want to be naively incriminating but constructed, historical and in dialogue with our present. It seems to me more than urgent and necessary to take action through an artistic and therefore democratic form. The desire also to tell the younger generations the foundations of a political movement, of a thought that was built in the aftermath of the Second World War. The National Front is a saga that has lasted for 50 years. Five decades of extremes, political turmoil, media scandals, crushing defeats, resounding victories and family rifts. Today, Marine Le Pen, the "de-demonized heiress" of a radical party today, the National Rally, is knocking viciously on the doors of the Elysée. Let us remember that in 2002, 2017, and 2022, the FN / National Rally made it to the second round of the presidential elections with a number of votes that doubled in fifteen years, going from 5.5 million to nearly 11 million votes. A puppet podcast A speaker-historian, a life-sized puppet character, manipulated in full view by three puppeteer actors, addresses an audience. She seems to be addressing past or future generations. With meticulousness, she dissects this political movement born on October 5, 1972: "The National Front for French Unity" up to the present day. With meticulousness, the four puppeteer actors accompany her, giving life, breath and voice to this dreamlike character. Her speech is documented, historically precise. During the story, her body is transformed. Her face changes like skins that she puts on or gets rid of. She becomes the personalities she describes. Women and men politicians, journalists, activists. She plunges into the history of those who have built far-right thinking in France. Political but also personal intentions. Transformable puppet with multiple faces. Hybrid and manipulated body. Her voice is also transformed to make the real voices and speeches of the personalities heard in counterpoint to anonymous people, young activists or repentant FN.

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