"In the hollow of the ear", theater in the days of the coronavirus

Text by: Siegfried Forster

This sunny voice on the other end of the line is that of actress Joséphine Serre. At the time of confinement, La Colline, a national theater in Paris, continues its theatrical adventure with performances-readings offered by telephone: an actor performs a text for a spectator-listener. The shared words "In the hollow of the ear" then transform our confined life into a stage larger than life. A leap into the unknown. Interview.

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It is a unique experience in our age of uncertainty and new horizons. You choose the desired date and time. You reserve your "seat" at the La Colline ticket office. Then one of the 70 voluntary actors and interpreters (from Jil Caplan through Maruschka Detmers, Anouk Grinberg, Arthur H or Nancy Huston ...) calls you on your mobile for a poetic, theatrical, literary or musical moment.

After having recently staged her piece Data Mosul on a dystopian future at La Colline, Joséphine Serre, 37, author and actress, is also participating in the Au hollow de l'oreille initiative.

RFI: As an actress and director, what does the current closure of all theaters mean for you during the coronavirus crisis ?

Joséphine Serre : For me, it's not just the theater issue. I feel that the question is much broader and stronger and how it affects absolutely all the mysteries of society. My worries, hopes, expectations are turned to broader questions than that of strict theater.

In the hollow of the ear , he is an actor and a spectator-listener. Is it a " single on stage " with a " single to the public " ?

I do not participate at all in this perspective. For me, it's almost beyond my job, it's human to human, from one person to another. I don't see it at all as a performative thing. For me, it's really to come back to the lowest common denominator of what connects us, questions and moves us. To share in a moment where we can no longer meet, where we can no longer go into the unknown, towards chance, is to provoke or replay somewhere what we no longer have access to. And then come back also to very intimate, strong texts, which were founding for oneself and which we consider it important to share and exchange. It is to return to this necessary humility of a text, a poem, a voice, an ear. This is what touches me, more than perpetuating at any cost a theatrical act or gesture. Regarding that, I'm not worried, it will come back.

Does that question you as an artist ?

We artists, creators of all kinds, we really have a huge question to ask ourselves about the revolutions of the imaginary. How do we propose another grid for reading the world, how do we also revisit our myths, our mythologies, our referents to succeed in thinking about the world differently. Obviously, the way we think about it today generates acts and policies and worlds that are obsolete. We are faced with very big questions and this little exercise, In the palm of my ear , seems to me to come back to the smallest, to the smallest starting point.

The actress and director Joséphine Serre whispers "Au hollow de l'oreille". © Laura Cortès

What were your first experiences with the other in Au hollow de l'illeille ?

So far, I have had two people on the phone. I don't do it every day, but two or three times a week. I had a very young woman and one around my age. The first, I read him two chapters of a book I discovered a little over a year ago. He has accompanied me a lot since then and I love him immensely. It is the book of an author-gardener, garden historian, Marco Martella: A small world, a perfect world . In each chapter, he questions a garden, a gardener. Often, it turns out that these gardeners were also artists, authors. He poses the question of the relationship to the earth, to time, to the trace that we leave in plants, to the absence, to what prolongs us ... There is a whole relationship of humility of humans which finds a horizontal place, a more humble part.

The two women on the other end of the phone, how did they react ?

It's special to assess people's reactions on the phone, because we only have the voice, the silence. There is an eloquence of that, but we do not have our usual benchmarks: the faces, the expressions of the public ... The two times, at the end of the text, there was like a suspension, the impression that, she like me, we were gradually returning from a trip. We had to come back in real time.

Both times, I was struck by the great full silence that there was at the end. By chance, the first person to whom I read Marco Martella's texts - there is a whole passage where a Portuguese gardener appears - it turns out that the girl on the phone was also Portuguese. Suddenly, she told me about it, because it had aroused buried memories in her. This first young girl also quoted two poems from a collection that she had prepared and that she wanted to read to me. So I was able to experience it the other way too.

So the roles of the actor and the spectator change. You know the name and the voice of the spectator and he also speaks in front of you. Does the spectator-listener also become an actor ?

Yes, there is an interaction. It must be said: "Hello", introduce yourself a minimum. There is a small exchange. In addition, we have an increasingly intimate, personal relationship with this object, the telephone. There is something like a little human-to-human encounter that completely abolishes the fact that there is an actor and a spectator.

In the theater, the curtain rises, or, if there is no curtain, as in the Festival Festival's main courtyard, trumpets signal the start of the show. What is the equivalent of the curtain on the phone ?

It starts when I open the door to my room, with the books I have chosen, annotated and often chipped. Then there is this little ritual that I did not imagine at the start, but it was done, as, I think, many actors do before the theater. We all have rituals before going on stage. So, I take my books, I open my door, I take my little chair, I put it between the bed and the window, on the same side, to have light, and then, I sit down, breathe in a little . I take thirty seconds, one minute, to clear the air, to breathe a little. I pick up the phone, I dial the person's number. When it rings, the curtain raiser is imminent.

Today, in the era of containment, everyone is rushing to digital, the Internet, other social networks. For you, even at the time of confinement, the “revolutions of the imagination” always happen in the theater, even if the link between the actor and the spectator is changed ? Does the " theatrical agora " still exist ?

Yes, I am sure. From the moment there is a listener and someone to say a text, whether it is read or learned, just like in the days of the Greeks when it was songs. For millennia, there is a whole tradition of orality which, little by little, has been inscribed in texts, in literature, etc. I think that as long as there are two people, one speaking and the other listening, there is already theater. What makes theatrical strength is that it is something infinitely simple. For this, too, it is at the heart of our humanity. She can do without technique, even if there are a lot of techniques in the plays I am putting on.

When we are at the theater, we are directly with the people in the room, we hear their breath, their laughter, we have the bodies which are very close, we feel an energy which emerges from a room and which is never the same from one evening to the next. When you're in front of a screen, you stay alone at home ... And there, in this case of the phone call, there is a very precise address. I know who's on the phone. And she knows my name and my voice. There are two of us in this relationship. It is something exclusive that makes it possible to share this common time.

► In the hollow of the ear , a pilot fish from La Colline, national theater, in Paris, from Monday to Friday, from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. or from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

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