Johanny Bert
Romette Theater Company - Clermont-Ferrand / France
THE LITTLE BATH
Creation February 2016
Creation for all audiences from 2 years old.
Production Romette Theater
Partners: the New Generation CDN Theater - Lyon, the Paris Villette Theater - Paris, Graines de spectacles - Clermont Ferrand, La Cour des Trois Coquins - Clermont-Ferrand.
Le Petit Bain is my first creation as a director for very young spectators (and the adults who accompany them).
The writing of the show is linked to an assumed wandering, a reverie based on an aesthetic and also playful material: bath foam. It is an element that is both concrete and recognizable for the child, and which can become an abstraction, a playground for the imagination. It is a fascinating material that can create volumes, and ephemeral play spaces, fragile and transformable masses that I imagine as a playground for a body in movement, a body that confronts the material, or even a large transformable puppet, both character and landscape.
For this creation, I asked Yan Raballand, choreographer, to accompany me. We wrote it with desire, curiosity, like a dive into the bath of our childhood, avoiding nostalgia.
We have tried, I believe, to remain demanding and faithful to our feelings in order to be able to share them with this precious young audience, and perhaps try to create new feelings in them, bubbles of memories that they will keep or that will perhaps disappear but which will leave, I hope, a color, a light, a movement, or a sensation.
I don't know if writing a show for very young spectators is so different than for another audience. Each creation is for me an opportunity to seek a new relationship between matter and dramaturgy, between the human and animated forms. The research requirement is the same. For this creation, I felt the need to find a more sensitive writing, aware of the responsibility of addressing an audience that is probably coming to the theater for the first time. I remember the first shows I saw. I didn't understand everything but strong sensations still remain today.
It is a show that I conceived as a dialogue since the child is always accompanied by one or more adults. The way one looks at the other is fascinating.
THE NOTEBOOK TO READ AFTER THE PERFORMANCE
Le Petit Bain is an experiment that I want to offer to spectators in two stages: the time of the performance, then the time after the performance. I commissioned three authors (Alexandra Lazarescou, Marie Nimier, Thomas Gornet) to each write a story based on elements of the show. These texts are published in a small booklet given to adults as they leave the performance.
Three stories like three points of view of spectators, three imaginations that have bubbled each in their corners, to give the sign that in the theater each spectator has perhaps not seen or understood the same thing, and has told his story according to his own experience. This is what I find fascinating.
These texts will, I hope, allow a dialogue to be created between the adult and the child, between the words and the memories of the show, at the age when we tell stories to little ones after their bath.
Conception et mise en scène Johanny Bert
Collaboration artistique Yan Raballand
Interprètes Rémy Bénard, Samuel Watts, Manuel Gouffran (en alternance)
Assistante chorégraphique Christine Caradec
Création lumière et régie générale Gilles Richard
Création sonore et régie Simon Muller
Régisseur lumière Bertrand Pallier
Régisseurs en tournée Armand Coutant, Marc De Frutos, Jean-Baptiste de Tonquedec, Frédéric Dutertre, Véronique Guidevaux, Emilie Tramier, Garance Perachon Monnier
Plasticienne Judith Dubois
Costumes Pétronille Salomé
Scénographie Aurélie Thomas
Construction décor Fabrice Coudert assisté de Eui-Suk Cho
Commande d’écriture du livret Alexandra Lazarescou, Marie Nimier, Thomas Gornet
Administration, production, diffusion Mathieu Hilléreau, Les Indépendances
Logistique de tournée Zoé Wilmart
Photographies Jean-Louis Fernandez et Simon Gosselin
Production Théâtre de Romette
Partenaires le Théâtre Nouvelle génération CDN - Lyon, le Théâtre Paris Villette – Paris, Graines de spectacles - Clermont Ferrand, CDN de Montluçon, La Cour des Trois Coquins - Clermont-Ferrand.
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