BEING HUMAN WITHOUT FUSS

Profession 2 times

Realistically atheistic | Mystically human

To you who will visit

"The Amor camps

Hello, good evening,

I'm not going to tell you what it says, because I sincerely hope it doesn't will tell nothing, nothing of what is being said; that it will be sufficient in itself for those who wish to take it that way.

Usually, shows and audiences like to tell stories to each other. Stories, big or small, that bring people together or divide them, that teach, uplift, make them think, move them or deflate them. This may be all very well; it may be what we are still asking for, but as far as I am concerned, and this is not from a week ago, not even from the week that has just passed for us in horror and consternation, I find it useless, even harmful, to tell stories forever; to waste time on them, to indulge one's mind in them, to escape from one's prison in dreams. Dreams of this kind are, unfortunately for me, little holiday egos and I have nothing of the sort to sell in my boxes. The same goes for advertising. I would just like to inform you here, but not advertise. Just to say that if you want to be here, you are welcome.

It's an announcement, an invitation, nothing more. To say that there is this event and that we'll be there, my team and that of the Générateur. Now, I don't want to boast about what we'll be doing there, Christophe Imbs on the musical side and me for the rest, nor do I want to make it sound attractive.

This does not exclude explaining my approach.

This "live show", let's call it that, as cultural institutions ask us to call it, strangely - or perhaps not - found itself echoing the dramas that occurred from 7 to 9 January and the demonstrations and statements of position that followed and still follow. I discovered there, jumping in my face, the essence of what has made me committed to the stage for the past 15 years, the spring, the ejector seat that makes me jump out of the place where I should be, that of an author - director - performer who tells, who says by way of tales and mysteries heard and marvellous, "marvellous" because it is agreed in advance between spectators and actors that this is what must happen.

No more than uneducated or non-acculturated kids who don't understand why they should respect an imposed minute's silence out of duty, the conscious and necessary evidence of which is supposed to be carried by emotions they don't feel, I am no more capable today of living my condition of spectator in a healthy way when I still happen to be one. The comparison is inappropriate, derisory, but for the time being, I maintain it anyway. I live as a pensum to be forced to sit religiously in respect of what is more or less skillfully spouted in my ears. Religious feeling: yes, when I want it and if I want it. You see, despite the comparison, I am not really on the side of the prophet.

No, I need to put my faith in the performance in a different way. As I and surely a few others are trying to propose, I want to be able to walk around those who are playing, pretending to play, singing, moving, thinking, reading, without necessarily disturbing them; I want to walk around the stage as if it were a hall of lost steps, as if one were visiting a gallery, a museum or a zoo; I want to taste, immersed in my thoughts, Hamlet's prosopopoeia, sitting right next to him, my feet dangling in the pit dug for Ophelia. This is my place, as close as possible to the breath that generates speech and movement. In short, I want to be free not to switch off my mobile phone, any more than we do in life now in public places, and why should it be different in front of a stage than in life? Isn't theatre life? Is it not up to what happens to captivate me enough to create my awe or interest? Am I not old enough to grant myself the prohibitions of circumstances if I deem it necessary? My job as a man is therefore to be as human as possible and atheist most of the time. That's all I can offer, representations of my atheism. I do atheist shows with a mysticism that is all that is ordinarily human.

I am not making history because I have nothing to tell you, nor to teach you. I wouldn't want to, because I believe that the conviction that was necessary for the author not so long ago, in order to create a work, is now in line with an obsolete, totalitarian and definitely dangerous power grab. Sacrificing to the desire to show is not necessarily to convince. I have nothing and no one to convince. I do, I say, I show and that's it. There is nothing a priori to do about it, except to react to it, to be there, to preserve or erase the memory of it. This is how I define myself the beautiful.

I like the use of the verb "to assist" in this case. Of course the public is attendingbut it can also assist at all. This means help by their presence, their action, their interest, their listening. Even without an ostensible invitation to do so, as I have sometimes done, the space of time and action that I propose is nourished by the relaxation of each person and by what freely follows. You can do nothing, dance, have a drink, talk, improvise, get naked, kiss, get angry ... who knows, it's up to you to find your place. Is it my business? As long as it is not forced, the responsibility for each person's body is not mine. I am only interested in the fact that we live these moments as much as possible in parallel, like destinies that look at each other out of the corner of their eyes and sometimes cross each other in the sole need to extend their routes in personal directions. As in the zoo, the show is as much on your side as on mine.

I experience my best intimate moments in public, which is why I perform. I like the "writing" of it, that is to say the times when things happen, the multiplication of spaces, the fortuitous and deliberate resonances, the collisions of materials. Everything that contributes to giving a sense of relief to our three-dimensional lives (emotion, thought, action) and which we often obliterate, through a cold habitual use, the one of these dimensions that gives depth to the links. It is not a novelty that we are all interdependent.

What is it, then - and here I come to my "subject", since, if it has no stories to tell, it nevertheless exists as a feeling of being - that this puppet "Love" that is constantly praised and that is so reduced and imprisoned on the scale of each individual? If this pseudo deity did not have an existence just as dubious and smoky as the others, would it not have to give more frequent proof of its reality as simply as the winds blow and the water falls from the sky? But no, its miracles are too rare and too questionable to encourage belief in its true tangibility. Didn't Freud, on the one hand, and biology and chemistry on the other, teach us how random this feeling we pride ourselves on was, and how it originated in transference from the history of each individual, in habits contracted by filiation and the guilt of duty, in odoriferous and hormonal fluctuations, in narcissistic illusions, in sadistic and masochistic games of power and lack, in neurotic and sometimes even suicidal obsessions? Self, self, self ... love, like all our perceptions, feelings, thoughts and actions, invariably speaks only of self. And yet there are sometimes attachments between us that penetrate our flesh to such a degree that we could only live in pain if they were to be broken. It can just as easily be reduced to a terrible anguish of discomfort, but we think it's nice all the same.

Love, which we sometimes glorify in our own eyes in the idealised form of the absolute sacrifice of our person for the benefit of another, often has little resistance to fear and circumstantial changes. It is treachery then, but let's move on.

So no story, no, because we don't deserve to believe in it, but only the natural beauty of the creatures that we sometimes feverishly let come to the surface, when they simply express themselves through our melancholic joys and euphoric distress. It is there, when man, shattered in his illusions, sees his pride brought down to its lowest point, that he concedes, as if in a renewal, a little space to the animal nature that he never stops fleeing. Neither beautiful nor good. Sometimes sublime, sometimes pitiful. Cruel as our state of affairs leads us to be, but sometimes capable, oh surprise, of a burst of immoderate tenderness, this intimate nature subjugates us. We reject it for its unbearable excess of frankness, which is so uncomfortable for us, in the reserve where we park ourselves. For my part, it is too late for me to be a wild animal. Everyone is free to try. Even if I have a taste for the arts, even if this is the only possible faith for me, the only admissible way to give our ancestral violence the space to exhale, I would like never to immolate my humbly domestic nature to it, for it is this that made me be civilized. I am happy with that. I get the privilege of my mental space.

So I love the love of dogs, who despite their powerful jaws spare themselves - and us - from becoming wolves again, even if a tiny incentive at the moment of possible tipping would force them to do so. For their immoderate trust, their absolute kindness, their incomparable look of bewilderment at our incoherent behaviour, I thank the canine race for still believing in games and affection, certainly not without interest, but almost totally deprived of malice. As far as love is concerned, in my eyes, only the love of dogs is worthwhile as a model of behaviour. To be there, to be silent, to growl only rarely, to live in impatient expectation of walks, whether of the spirit or of the sensitive body; to bet nothing on the hypothetical, shamefully calculating reward of a beyond and to want everything immediately as soon as the opportunity arises. But if it is really necessary to defend oneself, bite even if it means mutilating all one's rage once and for all, and run away in fear in search of a better haven and the oblivion of mistreatment. The bad masters will take it as read.