2023-09-12 03:56:00
Built around a song repeated endlessly, the piece “One Song” hammers home with a riot of energy the need to express oneself beyond pain.
The gesture is strong, immediately legible, chosen by the new management to sign the opening of the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris: One Song by Flemish Miet Warlop – a huge success acclaimed at its creation at the 2022 Avignon Festival – gives the kick-off to a season that had better keep the pace. One Song, a single pop rock song, sung and played in a loop at full blast by a team of performers-musicians-athletes, all in swimsuits.
Back of the stage, facing the audience, a platform of wild supporters. At their side, a referee-judge comments, without us ever understanding what she is yelling, the hypercardio concert-match which is played out on this stage, a veritable plastic installation, with microphone stands, musical instruments and recording machines. gym. The violinist balances on a gym beam, the singer who looks like Michael Hutchence from INXS gives it his all and at full speed on a treadmill, the drummer runs from one drum kit to another, and then there’s this guy who jumps to play his keyboard placed at the top of an espalier. Dying.
And this is not yet another artistic-sporting metaphor one year before the Olympic Games. Nor is it the expected denunciation of a mechanism of exhaustion for a theater running out of steam. It’s more direct than that, up to the height of the device: a single repeated song, which speaks of pain, because the pain never ends. For those who like the biographical link, Miet Warlop lost his older brother a few years ago; a death which could, as she herself says, “stop everything, and the opposite happened with the need to construct a first requiem piece in 2005, Sportband /Afgetrainde Klanke. Before his death, my shows were silent, no texts, no music, installation pieces. Grief made me realize that I had something to say, that something could be said. One Song shows where I am today in my theater history. My collaborators brought me the music, I tried playing a few instruments, and the words came.”
Lots of words in this extreme piece which is never talkative: the words of this “one song”, the cries of supporters, the supposed directives of the referee, and then these word-sculptures on plaques carried around by a pomp pom boy who doesn’t try to arrange them to create sentences. There is what we hear, and what we read: disconnected words, “Do”, “Will”, “Never”, powerful like impulses. What are they saying? But nothing precisely, they are worth for their materiality, their weight, serious and engraved like those found on tombs when there is nothing more to say. Because death had the last word.
“One Song” by Miet Warlop, Irene Wool & NTGentHistoire(s) at Théâtre IV Salle Renaud-Barrault. Until September 29
#Miet #Warlop #noise #sweat #Liberation