Sous les visages (2008)
Direction Julie Berès
Script, dramaturgy, texts Julie Berès, Elsa Dourdet, Nicolas Richard, David Wahl
Set Goury
Sound David Segalen
Musical composition Frédéric Gastard
Lighting design Jean-Marc Segalen
Video Christian Archambeau
Costumes Aurore Thibout
Wigs Catherine St-Sever
Body perspectives Lucas Manganelli
Plastician Juliette Barbier
Set builders Stéphane Lemarié & Le Quartz
Created and performed by Olivier Coyette, Virginie Frémaux, Boris Gibé/Lucas Manganelli, Gilles Ostrowsky, Julie Pilod, Guillaume Rannou, Delphine Simon
Executive Producer Cie Les Cambrioleurs
Coproduction Le Quartz, scène nationale de Brest – Le Carreau, scène nationale de Forbach et de l’Est Mosellan – L’Espace des Arts, scène nationale de Chalon-sur-Saône – Le Théâtre Romain Rolland, Villejuif – L’Arc-en-Ciel, théâtre de Rungis – SN61, Alençon-Flers-Mortagne – L’Onde, espace culturel de Vélizy-Villacoublay – La Comédie de Reims – TnBA, théâtre national de Bordeaux en Aquitaine – Arcadi (Regional Action for creation and touring in Île-de-France).
With a creation grant from Centre National du Théâtre – Conseil général du Finistère – Conseil général du Val-de-Marne
With maquette support from Dicream. With support from de la Chartreuse de Villeneuve-lez-Avignon – La Ferme du Buisson- scène nationale de Marne-la-Vallée – La Métive en Creuse – l’Arcal
How exactly does the media and its like — influence those looking at it? A woman, having experienced a significant life event – being fired – finds herself spiraling down into poverty and worse. In time she loses all hope of getting back to a more stable situation. This reality she attempts to flee by looking obsessively at screens, beginning to live only in the virtual world. Like a new Alice, she steps through the looking glass, beyond reality and into excess, the implausible and fantasy. With “strong images instead of long speeches,” (Télérama), using sets which can be differently spaced, a piece which is constantly being twisted around and cracked, and as a running background, the sounds of distorted voices speaking about HR issues and ultimate profitability, Sous les visages “scrolls by like a film highlighting a number of surrealistic situations, where the nightmare twists into something burlesque.” (Mouvement).
DATES
“Julie Berès lays out for us a modern, disembodied, gaudy hell. With strong images instead of long speeches.”
Télérama, Cathy Blisson, October 22, 2008
“Below the faces, a brilliant architecture, the moving landscape of an upside-down world, as well as the screens which serve as a kind of façade.”
Mouvement, Jean-Marc Adolphe, November 20, 2008
“Now that each fiber of our existence can be quantified in the generalized merchandizing of the body and the mind […] what remains is the dream space, a twin brother to the theatre, both of them creators of the possible. Underlying the faces: dreams.”
Les inrockuptibles, Fabienne Arvers, May 19-25, 2010
