Kyoto (Japan) (AFP)

Her next piece will be "on a Japanese island": Ariane Mnouchkine, creator of the Théâtre du Soleil, told AFP this half-confidence during a meeting in the archipelago whose dramatic art has nourished so much .

Winner of the Kyoto Prize, a distinction awarded by the Inamori Foundation in the field of science and technology as well as arts and philosophy, she has just spent three months in Japan with the aim of immersing herself in "the truth, the "essential" of the country.

This is where she sets her next creation, a "show about the world today but the chance of it happening on a Japanese island, which must be obviously fictional but profoundly right".

- Hippie trip -

Child, it is not from Japan but from China that Ariane Mnouchkine dreamed, a passion broken by a visa refusal.

"I took a boat one beautiful morning in April 1963 in Marseille, to arrive a month later in Yokohama", near Tokyo.

She then remained five and a half months in the archipelago, "hating it at first, then gradually falling in love with the country, people, food, architecture and theater".

It was not a study trip, "it was more hippie than that, it was the time when young people were doing what I regret they do not do more, that is to say take a backpack to go see the world ".

- "The theater, that's it!" -

"Little by little I started to go to the theater in Japan and understand that I had fallen into a treasure, right in the middle! The luck, the time, my country had allowed me to see things that were going to feed me until my death, "she says, praising the sumptuous marriage between visual and rhythmic beauty, the architecture of the halls.

"When I saw kabuki, noh, bunraku (three forms of Japanese theater, Ed), it's as if someone had shot down the scepter of the theater in front of me, saying to me + you see, little, the theater is that! + ".

At the Cartoucherie de Vincennes, headquarters of the Théâtre du Soleil, spectators are greeted by Ariane Mnouchkine: they eat, sometimes spend the day, participate in the life of the troupe. This is not a coincidence: it is "inspired" kabuki, where we go in kimono, where we taste "bento", where we throw interjections key moments parts.

And the one who, at the age of 80, in the line of the late Jean Vilar, has been working for more than half a century for a popular theater, to deplore that the prices of kabuki places in Tokyo are now "monstrous".

According to her, it "lacks a cultural policy, because theaters like Kabukiza in Tokyo should be public theaters, it should be subsidized so that people can take back their theater".

- "Greed of a certain capitalism" -

This tireless advocate of the "need for the practice of art from an early age" welcomes the chance to be in France, "because there are countries where a woman who plays is a woman dead, because in some countries it is forbidden ". But she regrets that certain territories of France have been deserted by culture.

"The guardians want only large trees well trimmed and easy to control," says the director, not small weeds "we do not know what to do." But yet, "it's that little sprout that's important," she says, pointing to herbs in a Kyoto garden.

What Ariane Mnouchkine feels, however, is "a desire to make theater outside the institutional structures, to escape the labels, the formats" and, she insists, "to the economic models", that she excrete and "against which the people revolt", because they are everywhere but not in the service of all, according to her.

"I do not see where the issue is without violence, I'm sorry, but, even if I believe in non-violent movements, I do not know how to respond to such greed and greed of a certain capitalism" , she says.

Hint: "the next show will probably be on it".

Appointment at the end of the year 2021 on stage.

© 2019 AFP