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It's a blow to the Avignon Festival. A show that is both obvious and striking, with the power of Virgil 's Aeneid and the poetry of today. On the plateau of the cloister of the Carmelites, Maëlle Poésy, 34 years old, renews with Sous heavens the theatrical language of today. With intelligence and sensitivity, this "Virgil of the 21st century" returns to the original performative force inherent in this poem written between 29 and 19 BC. JC after Homer's Odyssey . Interview.
RFI : You do not start your show with a sentence, but with a choreographed movement. An intense and powerful dance : repetitive, rhythmic, throbbing, with impulses, jerky moments. For you, are the body and the movement as important as the word ?
Maëlle Poésy : It's not more important, but it's also important. I really wanted the story of this trip to be about the body, not just the story, the poem. I wanted to use the possible metaphor of dance for that. It was a long-term job, with the actors, with the dancers, to find movements that could talk about this determination, this survival in the journey. That the multitude of the arrivals, the departures, the exhaustion, can be translated by the body of the interpreters.
This is the first time I have seen a show about a Greek epic - even if it is written in Latin by a Roman poet, Virgil - and that I understand everything. However, the show is neither didactic nor pedagogical. Is the ambition to be understood by all, a priority in your theatrical work ?
In any case, I want to make a theater that is a theater of sensation, emotion and that is accessible. I do not want it to be a theater giving lessons or a theoretical theater. In addition, when one immerses himself in ancient poems, in epic poems, I think there is a dimension of violence, even physical, and a dimension of the rhythm of the language. This is extremely important for the essence of the poem to be understood, intellectually, but also physically.
Why did you choose Aeneas to show the fate of an exile ?
He carries something that I find beautiful. After fighting for the preservation of his city, which he sees being destroyed before his eyes, he leaves with a small group. In the history of the Aeneas, there is really this idea of being in search of a hospitable land. To face a test of considerable destiny, to have to change almost identity, country and land. It is an identity in movement, in perpetual "loss and recommencement". This story of "foundation" is also a story of miscegenation.
You tell the story of Greek mythology, the birth of the Roman Empire, and finally the filigree creation of our current Europe with its inherent disputes. What was your starting point in your political thinking of the play ?
Where Aeneas questions something really strong today is that it's not a unique identity story. This is not a story of the origin. There are stories and origins. There is not a story and an origin. It is this question of miscegenation that first interested me. This identity in motion. To speak about the origins that are plural and that we stop with this history of national identity.
The second thing, in the interviews I had with doctors and refugees at the Primo Levi center [ specialized center on the traumatic memory of refugees and victims of torture, ed ], I discovered this question incredible: to be on the border between two worlds. There is a relation to space and time which is extremely sensitive in exile. We are at a time in a total present space, and at the same time its past and the soul are there, life is there. They are constantly telescoping. The reminiscence of the country from which one comes and the country in which one is. This creates a disturbance that is for me extremely strong and poetic enough to bring to the plateau. This mixture of temporalities and spaces.
It is often said " translation = treason " . You stage the text of Virgil with fogs, projections of flames, surtitles, tango, rap ... At the same time, you say that Virgil himself made a remake , a kind of bric-a-brac from Homer's Odyssey . Are you somehow the " Virgil of the 21st century " ?
Maybe (smile). Virgil has this very funny thing: he takes Homer back and plays with codes. One goes through almost the same journey as Ulysses, but with another point of view, completely different [ that of the vanquished instead of the victors, ed ]. And then, it's a fragmentary narrative, it's not at all linear. There is no linearity in the show. They are like fragments of rambling memories that finally reconstruct the overall narrative of the show. Above all, it was a poem that was not meant to be read, but to be "performed", in movement, in mime, with musicians, with singing. There was a performative force in the poem. For us, it was also important to be in that line to try to transcribe it nowadays.
► To read also: The Odyssey in Avignon: " It's like a Netflix series "
► To read also : Christiane Jatahy in Avignon : " Making theater is an act of resistance "
► To read also : Architecture , the radical or failed opening of the Avignon Festival
► See also : Opening of the 73rd Festival d'Avignon : Europe, exile and odysseys