Johanny Bert
Romette Theater Company - Clermont-Ferrand / France
Research laboratory/Fablab.
Unpublished text by Lisiane Durand
A Fab-lab project in collaboration with Artcéna.
- Residence from December 3 to 7, 2024 Les Tréteaux de France CDN
Presentation of the project on December 13 and 14
- Residency from January 30 to February 6, 2025, Blois national stage
Lab presentation on February 6th
Equipe du laboratoire
Yaël Ciancilla, actress
Juliette Allain, actress
Marion Lhoutellier , musician (violin and electronic machines)
The team
I imagine this project with two puppeteer actresses and a musician.
From the first reading I had the feeling that the main character, Rachel, was "prevented" or "outside a certain norm". That the energy she deploys to extract herself from a reality and to fantasize this story could be at the same time a fight, an escape and an affirmation. I met several actresses with physical disabilities with the desire to follow this intuition for this text. I find it interesting that the subject of the text is not the physical disability precisely, but that the character's situation creates another desire, another view of the world, another relationship to the body.
This intuition raised a lot of questions for me about the presence of people with particularities on the sets of
theaters. I have worked on these subjects several times in shows, notably with deaf actors and actresses including Emmanuelle Laborit. But never with someone with a physical disability. This text led me towards that.
It seems important to me to work with an actress who is truly physically disabled.
These people are rare on theatre sets. It would be a great way to show young people once again
spectators that difference can be a strength.
The text
An Easter Sunday in the countryside. Rachel is looking for eggs in the big, vast meadow behind the house. She wanders away, wanders away, more attracted by freedom and solitude than by chocolate eggs. The further she wanders away, the more the rumors coming from the family home swell: her father's remarks about her nose being too big, her father's warnings about the dangers of wild animals, her father's comments about immigrants, her
certainties about an upcoming global cataclysm... Rachel accelerates, tries to escape the family fatality, takes to her heels among the wild grass.
In the middle of the quiet of the fields, during her escape, by chance in the meadow, Rachel trips over an ear. It is a human ear, there is no doubt about it. But what is this macabre object doing in the middle of the tranquility of the French countryside? Rachel picks it up, shelters it from the dogs' hunger. This mysterious ear becomes a confidant, a lair to pour out everything that can't be said to anyone, everything that no one wants to hear.
Creating for young audiences has always been present in my career as an actor and director. My first creation in 2001 at the age of 21 with Le Petit Bonhomme à modeler which I performed for seven years then Les Pieds dans les nuages in 2004 which I also had the chance to perform for eight years. Following these creations, I alternated between projects for young people and all audiences and projects for adults but always working with contemporary authors. For young audiences, I have often worked with authors in the form of writing commissions and in a writing dialogue: Les Orphelines by Marion Aubert, Elle pas Princesse/Lui pas héros as well as Frissons by Magali Mougel, Pastoussalafoi by Philippe Dorin. Le Petit Bain (written by three authors and a choreographer). Or by working on unpublished texts that I discovered in reading committees: De passage by Stéphane Jaubertie, Le Processus by Catherine Verlaguet still on tour this season and next season.
For me, thinking about and creating shows for young people is a greater responsibility, but a sparkling responsibility. For some children, the topics we can address, the way we are going to talk about them or show them on stage can have important repercussions in their learning and their understanding of life as a citizen. I believe a lot in this active thinking that theater creates for young spectators. They are potential philosophers! They do not always know how to put words on what they feel but their sensations, their emotions are intense and generate deep questions in them. I find it exciting to present them with complex, opposing reflections. Their eyes aspire to the world to better understand, search for and play with what surrounds them. Creating for young people is above all thinking about the dialogue between generations, from child to adult and it is a fundamental element in the reflection of a creation. I think that all themes can be addressed for young people and I am committed to finding in each creation the right, precise and committed way to approach a writing, a subject. What drives me as a creator established in the region for a long time is that through young and general public creation, we continue and reinvent again, the fundamentals of cultural democratization through concrete and committed actions.
Johanny Bert