Anooradha Rughoonundun tells "The body of the old people"
Author and actress Anooradha Rughoonundun, Grenoble, May 2021 © Olivier Favier
Text by: Olivier Favier
5 mins
The 21st edition of the Regards Croisés Festival in Grenoble, devoted to contemporary theatrical writings, ended on May 8.
All the recordings are accessible free of charge for one month on the website of the association organizing the event, the Third Office.
Among the texts presented,
The body of the old
by Anooradha Rughoonundun strongly marked the audience.
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In Anooradha Rughoonundun's eyes, one reads the same mixture of determination and doubt that radiates her writing.
She studied directing at Insas, in Brussels, but now she lives in Trièves, south of Vercors.
To subsist, alongside her projects as an author and actress, she did more odd jobs, such as home help, in 2016, for four months.
“
It was just one job.
The question of care, I had not asked myself.
In my text, the narrator says
: it's a funny job / we meet there because no diploma and nothing in the CV / we take you without asking a question / old people there are new ones every day .
"
She continues:
"
But it has nothing to do with serving beers or sell bread.
You suddenly enter people's privacy and contact with their bodies, their daily lives, their homes, their habits.
"
A "
vertigo paid at minimum wage
"
From what she defines as "
vertigo paid at minimum wage
", she extracts six months later, in a few weeks, a precise and dense text, partly imaginary, but written in the first person. “
It wasn't to presume feelings that I can't imagine. It was born from the desire to write, to share my emotion, to say things that are not written and that happen to everyone.
"
During the first public reading, a spectator had a very virulent reaction. "
It's a text that makes me uncomfortable myself
," she admits. "
Is he respectful
?" Is it good to say that, to say it like that
? Am I legitimate to say it
?
“Beyond these questions, which are not rhetorical, there remains the need for her to
face the taboo
. To that of the end of life, is added that of the reality of a profession, hard, banal and invisible, too.
"
Every day I expected that there would be a dead person behind the door
" she remembers, and it is no coincidence that her text also recounts this event, to exorcise him.
The narrator does not have the slightest contact with her colleagues, she has no one to confide in in a professional context, and her private life comes down to fleeting encounters with other bodies, young this time, with whom she abandons itself at night.
"
I wanted to stage these two solitudes that look at each other
", that of people at the end of their life and that of people paid to take care of them.
The taboo and the unspeakable
“
There is what is taboo and what is unspeakable.
Often it's close and both interest me.
"
To tell this reality, it is restricted by nothing" romanticize ".
“
I only keep the things that bring me to the core.
I'm looking for an effective way to say which I hope provokes poetry.
"
On reading Emilie Le Roux
, we immediately perceive the need to speak out loud and give flesh to this text.
For narrative and descriptive it may be, it takes all its strength in the orality of the theater.
“
When I write a text, I want to see it on a stage, I want to see a body with it
” confides Anooradah Rughoonundun.
In this specific case, this desire was mixed with curiosity: "
What would be the body of an actress who would say that
?"
She only talks about other people's bodies.
The only thing she says about hers is that he's young.
She also talks about her exhaustion.
Does this fatigue change his body
?
Is she aged by it
?
"
To go further
:
► Anooradha Rughoonundun, guest of La Danse des mots on RFI in 2016. She also evokes the figure of her father, the poet Vinod Rughoonundun, who died in 2015.
► Anooradah Rughoonundun's interview with Pauline Bouchet following the readings of her plays
Le corps des vieux
and
Canne à sel
.
The recordings of the pieces and interviews of the 2021 edition are online here.
► Among the other guests of the festival, we note the presence of Souleymane Bah and his play
La Cargaison
, which won the RFI Theater Prize 2020.
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