Here, a discovery! Finally, the exhibition in the “in” of a theatrical signature whose work does not travel at regular intervals to various subsidized stages – Elise Vigier, Christophe Rauck, Anne Théron – or whose invitation is not a repetition of a previous edition of the Festival d’Avignon. The Belgian company Still Life has never been programmed in France except for a raw subject in 2015, and we can hope that the four short plays – as we say short film – which are shown until July 25 will make people want to programmers to take an interest in it. These are four mute and concise pieces around the embrace, flashes one might say, so striking that they speak without words – the spectator takes over, the words race through his mind in the face of madly everyday and banally terrible situations. that the instigators, inventors, directors, Sophie Linsmaux and Aurelio Mergola, put before his eyes.
The four surprises emerge from a large box which opens and closes to reveal a totally different decor and atmosphere each time – we can imagine the challenge in management, to develop a hospital room so quickly, the interior of a palace, a kind of cloakroom, a bar room. The four situations have in common to point to a crucial moment that relates to the body. A couple, for example, in a hotel room. She sports an ostentatiously redone face, wears the mask of an expression that can only be happy, her mouth blissful, her eyes wide from having had her eyelids planed. The man’s head is covered with a bandage. They dance. She slowly pulls the bands off him. The new face is revealed, which appears, like a cake, just soft. They get ready to celebrate the event, kiss and, curse, the features decompose before our eyes, they melt on contact with the woman, dissolve in her. Panic in the face of this flesh that slips away. One thinks of Rilke and his description of faces that fall and reveal their interior at the very beginning of the Cahiers de Malte Laurids Brigge.
Sharp guiding thread
We run to meet these two old people who are perhaps the interpreters. Impossible after the performance to recognize Sophie Linsmaux and Aurelio Mergola whose skin now seems strangely bare, unadorned, incredibly youthful. How can these two people who are so friendly and sociable invent stories whose common point is the cumbersome, disastrous body, the impossibility of entering into a relationship with others without causing a catastrophe? Where does their metamorphosis come from? Sophie Linsmaux smiles: “I am never recognized on stage. I love prostheses.
Both met during an internship, in Avignon, twenty years ago. We calculate: twenty years? So they were 5 years old? Then they went to a school for actors, not the same, he at the Brussels Conservatory, she at the Institute of Broadcasting Arts. They have been working together for about ten years, more recently created their company Still Life, which has the particularity of including actors as well as a screenwriter (Thomas Van Zuylen) and a “space and movement director” (Sophie Leso) . It is at the Théâtre les Tanneurs in Brussels that they write their horrifying realistic fantasy plays at the table for a long time and without any dialogue. They throw away most of their stories, but sometimes, miraculously, one sticks out, usually thanks to a sharp guiding thread that unfolds in a particular place.
No, they are not particularly attached to the absence of words, moreover their first pieces were not devoid of them, simply, they had a particular function, they fell aside, like an object awkwardly held, or else it was necessary strain your ears to hear them. Thus they had chosen the roof of a theater where they fought against a fake rain which poured real icy water while the spectators watched them warm inside a small apartment – the aftershocks were therefore deliberately inaudible . The mute character of their theater became evident with Keep Going, a play where they played people of 140, 150 years old! Impossible to imagine their voice. No, they don’t think that the absence of verbal explanations obliges them to have a brief form, with few characters on the set. On the other hand, the mute character forces them to carve visually clear situations as if from a block, which grab the attention while setting the viewer’s imagination in motion.
Maggot Breeders
Also they have in their bag the long form No One, created in 2019 at the Théâtre des Tanneurs, on the designation of a scapegoat by a group in a gas station. “The decor remained warm”, thinks Sophie Linsmaux, and both would love to show this play with performances interrupted due to Covid. Do you have to have special availability to become a scapegoat? The question plunges them into an abyss of reflection. Sophie Linsmaux remembers that when she was a young actress – their appearances are decidedly deceptive, as they are 40 and 38 years old respectively – the directors would sadden certain students and everyone would put up with it, “we even thought that there was no other way to manifest his genius and his authority, she says, whereas it is so much more joyful to work in peace and confidence”. They love calling on people who have nothing to do with the theater world to design their props: forming an alliance with dental technicians to Flesh, maggot breeders for a room that required thousands of flies flying over a very small space, or a butcher who promised them every day to keep them “the most beautiful heart of beef so that it plays well” in Keep Going.