What choices can we make to change our lives ? Can theatrical representation accommodate, activate, and work with these decisions ? The proposal is simple yet bold: in nine short plays, the performers must seize the opportunity and/or find a path of learning to open up possibilities for conscious change in daily life. The search for "points of rupture" happens here and now, supported by a vivid desire for transformation. But this ardor isn't about inflation: it's simple, though unusual, tasks that give rise to thought. From contemplation ("I'm trying to have an idea"; "I'm deciding to see a few trees"), to introspection ("I'm trying to access my emotions"), to the invocation of a humanity finally free ("I'm letting myself speak a communist utopia"), the stage serves as a revealing prism for new possibilities.

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Noëmie Charrié for La Commune CDN d'Aubervilliers, 2015

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Short Plays 1-9 is titled after its very structure and content: 9 plays, each lasting from 3 to 25 minutes, whose order produces the show. The goal in each of these plays is to invent and organize situations that alter or modify the existence of the performers. This is formalized, like a loose inheritance from "task performances," through a series of simple tasks to be executed with the help of the theater and its artificial machinery.

The majority of the actions undertaken refer to gestural elements from daily life or, more specifically, from spectacle, which are a priori not aesthetically calibrated and thus have varying, if not opposite, levels of theatricality. A dramaturgy that would lead to the sequence of plays 1 through 9 could therefore consist of glimpsing as many different (and no doubt individually insufficient) hypotheses for the theatrical device. This research, which takes the theater stage as its starting context—a place of infinite representations of the world—is not about self-transcendence per se. Rather, more modestly, it's about organizing actions one wouldn't have thought to undertake here, and presenting them as potential avenues for conscious changes in daily life. Avenues that the theater activates performatively.

Manfred Wekwerth, who was Bertolt Brecht's assistant from 1951 to 1956, had already formulated for a "Brechtian," and thus Marxist, type of staging, the theory that a play can be broken down into small, isolated pieces. For him, it was about identifying, in the tension between a micro and a macro structure, what he called a "point of rupture" or "turning point" (Drehpunkt), designating that precise moment when a situation transforms; when one divides into two.

Imagining such devices for oneself would require a method, which one would have to try, one would have to show... And theater, if we limit its staging to the creation of situations, can certainly serve this purpose.

 

Maxime Kurvers, April 8, 2015​

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