PHOTO by ©Christophe Raynaud de Lage
Compagnie Les Mains, les Pieds et la Tête Ausi (mpta) (Lyon, France)
TAR AND FEATHERS (DU GOUDRON ET DES PLUMES)
Concept by MATHURIN BOLZE
Assistant director – Marion Floras
Performers:
Tsirihaka Harrivel, Maroussia Diaz Verbèke, Erwan Ha Kyoon Larcher,
Mathurin Bolze, Jonathan Guichard
Sсenography – Goury
Lighting design: Jérémie Cusenier and Christian Dubet
Sound: Philippe Foch and Jérôme Fèvre
Duration: 1 h 15 min without intermission
July 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7
Venue: Tereza Durova's Teatrium na Serpukhovke
«The dramaturgy is structured around the scenery. And in its movement, lies the dynamics of our
relationships. The play has unfolded through our factual experience of this set, a story to write together, with the practise on this scenery and its potentialities. When suspended, it oscillates and swings, vanishing support of a ground that slips away. When rising, it then becomes a ceiling, a heavy and threatening cloud.
A crew of fortune, a tribe by necessity or illustrations of outcasts, nobody knows who are the five characters who inhabit this strange and protean space. Are they on a raft adrift, on a tiny island, or on another planet whose revolution they are subject to? There is only one certainty: these odd siblings find themselves on a vehicle… Between the machine and the man, who decides on the movement and on the engine’s direction?
They have no departure point, since their journey has started long before us, and they’re looking for a way out rather than a final destination. Here they are, embarked to the sound of a pulse, both insistent and pierced with blank pages, on a voyage where the territories they traverse are so many reveries, memories, and metaphors. A to and fro of games, melancholy, collections of happy sensations, and chaotic, sometimes astounding inner landscapes.
In this miniature epic, there are no Homeric heroes: everyone is revealed and projected in it, whether through a surge of brotherhood, delicate ties, or dizzying loneliness. And without a sound, in front of our eyes, unravels the poetic language of swinging, tectonic beings».
Mathurin Bolze
“Mathurin Bolze stands out for the ability to carry his ideas through to the ultimate end by turning a single object into a source of numerous scenarios and a fount of ideas. These ideas are bold and innovative and more often than not they are quite shocking. Sometimes they are stringing on one another or seem to be flowing out of each other like a never-ending cascade. It no doubt takes an enormous amount of work to achieve these extraordinary skills in the circus show and thereby to translate every situation into another twist and turn of life and to create most astonishing transformation like turning a teeter-totter into a wrecked ship”.
Rosita Boisseau, Le Monde
“In performing their intricate movements the artists of Mathurin Bolze are raising the question about the purport of life in the time when the world increasingly tends toward the cosmic void of lost values. It is all too evident that the civilization is in crisis. The stage designates the malicious iron world that is bound to blow up, the actors undertake a trip away from this ghastly reality and toward the airy space where fragility is the source of human relationships and where the consistency of actions takes up the ever-increasing rate regardless of the functioning of the machines that have long been shaping our existential modes and fashions... But what really matters is that the audiences applaud not so much the exquisite physical techniques of the performers as the poetic content takes shape in our minds as a result of this superb craftsmanship. And this is happening to the extent that all of us happen to forget that we are merely viewers in the auditorium. This tar and these feathers get stuck to our skins for a long time after the show”.
Pascal Bély, Tadorne
