Rennes (AFP)
"Artist-director" of the National Theater of Brittany, Arthur Nauzyciel breathes for two years to the Breton institution his vision of a theater "of creation, factor of emancipation", which he delivers a concentrate to the TNB Festival, until November 17th.
Coming from a family of Polish Jewish émigrés of the "small middle class", nothing predestined the young Arthur a theatrical adventure, nor to direct the third National Dramatic Center of France (CDN) in volume of grants.
Checkered shirt, finely trimmed beard, the young man in his fifties still likes to tell his first thrills of theater, he who staged puppets to five years.
"For me, the theater was something inaccessible, but when the shows are strong, they stay in you," he said the "Britannicus" staged by Antoine Vitez in Chaillot in 1981.
A first memory that he owes to his documentary teacher, Nicole Régnier, a passionate who struggled to bring to Paris the students of Ulis (Essonne) to see "the best of what we could see".
"He was very intelligent and scored all his teachers," said the latter forty years later. "Today it is he who transforms me".
A student in History of Art and Cinema, Arthur Nauzyciel studied psychoanalysis of art and semiology, and met Étienne Daho, his "big brother", who introduced him to the world of music and night.
At the age of 19, he became a student of Antoine Vitez, then went on to play theater. At 32, he made his first staging, a success, with the company he created the name of the number of his grandfather, survivor of Auschwitz.
"His stagings are artist's gestures, his programming is open to dance, the visual arts, music, cinema, and it is played abroad, which is quite rare", says of him his friend playwright Pascal Rambert, who describes him as "generous, funny, and like me very anxious".
- "Experimental artists" -
"Everything makes sense in Arthur When he staged Koltès in Atlanta, it's the whole question of segregation that he poses," analyzes the critic Patrick Sourd.
After managing the Orleans CDN, Arthur Nauzyciel changes gear with the TNB, one of the most important theaters in France with 13,500 subscribers, 12 million euros of budget, which became in 2002 "European theater and choreographic center".
"By leading a place, we take an artistic and political place in a territory defending certain values and participating in a form of emancipation of people," he claims.
"The artists of the Nauzyciel era are more experimental, more intercultural", Judge Sophie Lucet, professor of theater studies in Rennes 2, also emphasizing "the great attention paid to memory, to history".
Judged "sometimes cerebral but sincere" by the critic Gilles Costaz, Mr. Nauzyciel pleads for "a theater of innovation" open to all audiences, including young people.
"To attend a show is not a question of education or intelligence, but of openness and of heart," insists the actor. "To say + the public will find the elitist piece + it is to assume that one should just entertain with funny and easy things people who do not have the good social class or few means", adds the one who reformed the contest entrance to the TNB school to diversify the recruitment of young comedians.
Designed as a "sound box" of the season, the TNB Festival offers about twenty shows "theater, dance, performance, augmented reality, circus".
"For fifteen days, Rennes is at the crossroads," Patrick Sourd plebiscite. "We devour the theater, it's an opportunity to make up for what one day will not be played anymore".
"For professionals, this festival is on the map of major international festivals," says Nauzyciel, recalling that "French public theater is one of the few in the world to encourage inventiveness and risk taking", even he fears that the decline in subsidies "will suffocate this diverse and innovative landscape".
© 2019 AFP