tout semblait immobile

The audience comes to attend a storytelling conference. There are three speakers, they speak, they explain, then everything begins to slip towards the forest. These speakers enter into their own narrative, and become the characters of their literary research. Every event, produced by falls, opens the door of the imagination and invites us to enter little by little into another space.
For years, I have been building my plays like tales, with chapters, going from reality to the dream state. All the mythology, the relationship to childhood, which emerges from these stories interests me. I focus more on the imagery and symbolism of the tale than on its narrative form. For this new play, I wanted to start from a tale. Reading dozens of tales from different eras and countries, I realized that I was reducing what I wanted to say if I dwelt on one and the same tale. What I liked were some of the themes I was sensitive to and which were found in several stories: siblings, abandonment of children, forest, ogres, transition to adulthood, spaces, Hansel and Gretel and other fairytale characters....
The changes of spaces, the crossings, the journey to go from one place to another, the ways to escape... So I created my own story. I want to deconstruct the tale, transform it, exchange roles. The burlesque is there in this view: why would not it be the ogre who would leave stones? Who tells the tale? Who is it told to? We will disrupt the codes of narration. The narrator will also be at the center of my research. I want to deepen this link with the public with the oral, with the public address.

why tout semblait immobile?
This title came after seeing a video (of the same title) of a sound poet, Philippe Poirier, who has been following me since the creation of wonderful world. Just before the catastrophe, people, smoke, stones falling, a woman, a man, a neighborhood, a mountain. This poem is very visual and filled with mineral matter, it resonates very strongly in relation to my work, to what I wanted to say. We work above all on the organic, everything starts from the body, and from what surrounds it.
Never believe only what you see, there is something else behind the images....
This creation is once more produced by a set of questions about the human being, his space of life, his relation to the other. With the means of the stage, we try to make these questions resonate, without ever imposing answers, but to make our perception vibrate.
Can we laugh at our fears? What is behind the forest? Who is the ogre? Why pebbles?...


Nathalie Béasse