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The bus where the adventure and life of Christopher McCandless ended in solitude in 1992, brought to the screen in the film "Into the wild".

Journal des Parques J-24

Loneliness of bodies | Loneliness of minds

Into the mind

There are, I believe, two main conditions, the nature of which must be known, which are likely to influence the success of any undertaking: either you see precisely the outlines of what you are producing or aiming to obtain, action, creation, behaviour... or the "object" created is too vast for your vision to encompass it, or its design is blurred or undetermined.

In my opinion, both options have the potential to achieve an objective in an equally decisive way. However, it depends on how you respond to it. It must be understood, or at least accepted, that my current work is comparable to preparations for a trip to the moon. Or perhaps it would be better to leave our satellite to Cyrano, who has already reached it, and look elsewhere for a lesser known star as a symbol of a new land to set foot on. To tell the truth, I don't care about the destination or the name given to it; which doesn't mean that I cultivate the fantasy of 'leaving' without ever worrying about taking off. It's not a question of leaving for the sake of leaving, nor of any kind of initiation quest, a too mystical genre for which I have never felt inclined. No; although mysterious in certain respects, the poetic adventure is Adventure itself in essence, and its trajectory does not have to be totally reinvented because of this. Whatever form it takes, it is not possible to know nothing about it. There are 'maps', peregrinations of the past that are related to us, until recently and certainly happen every day somewhere; all sorts of experiences and experiments in all possible fields that enrich the baggage of preparations. I am not going for the unfathomable. Nevertheless, I don't want to add too much to my already substantial baggage. I know what I am looking for when I venture into the nature I am exploring. Here it is summed up in a few words: the text or object "book" has never satisfied me as such. While some people swoon over literature, I have read all kinds of literature, but in the end, no matter how elaborate the arrangement, I have only seen a sum of information, sometimes of course, expressed with impressive brilliance. What has left me dissatisfied for quite some time now (I was already working on this before the advent of new technologies) is the physical linearity of the narrative, whatever poetic form it chooses to have. It is the same thing in cinema, despite the invention, early in its history, of the alternating montage that we are now used to. Of course, the form can be complex, the thought fascinating, taking surprising side roads, or losing us along the way; my taste for the simultaneity of events is rarely satisfied. If I compare the works of art to my observation of the 'real', once the emotional shock of discovery has passed, I am disappointed to be so little used. It is said that we only use our cerebral capacities to a very limited extent, and I would like to be called upon to diversify my sources of interest at the same time, in order to feel the multiple and varied sensory aptitudes of my psyche. By this I mean that, of course, both sound and visual information are multiple and simultaneous in any film or musical work, but they are conveyed by one and the same conduit to me: the eternal fiction or writing line. In spite of the marvels that are still intact since their appearance and easy to find again, in front of all kinds of works that I have encountered since I exist, I don't really find matter to be "renovated", "renewed", "re-found" - I don't know how to say it - by what I read, see, hear. Having sometimes discussed this with people of my generation, I know that I am not alone in this and it is easy to blame age and too much "déjà vu", to lament the wear and tear on our potential to be shaken up or at least dragged somewhere, away from "home". I am not at all convinced by the argument that the reluctance to 'go and see', to take 'risks', is a kind of common and unavoidable degeneration of declining curiosity. I feel ready to grasp, catch, ride, capture, feel and discover everything that comes to my attention, perhaps even more than before. The problem is not a matter of energy, even if physical fatigue sometimes becomes hard to fight, but of demand and importance given to details. The most critical critics of me will say that I am manic. However, one would not dream of accusing scientists of this, as they try to approach their objectives by relying on ever more rigorous calculations and experimental conditions. But there is a sleepy scientist in every poet or inventor. The mere smell of the dust raised in the air by his own footsteps is enough to wake him up to indicate not the way, but the method to follow. Art is therefore like anything else that is seriously conducted; a significant technical component is its very essence. No painting without pigments, no rock'n'roll without the invention of the electric guitar and its monumentally amplified descendants etc.

There is no need to give similar details, of course, concerning photography or cinema, which are non-existent without their mechanics implicitly associated with the art they generate. The same applies to the dissemination and therefore the potential success of this art, also linked to the invention of one or more very concrete techniques: printing and reprography of all types for illustrated or simply written works, plurality of media as sound recordings evolved... Here too, the list would be endless if we wanted to express in an exhaustive way the perfect symbiosis between subjects, styles and technologies which, in each case, contributed to the development, progress and diversification of an art.

What about the poor relation of all in my eyes from this point of view, which is the theatre and its small avatars of live performance?

Its strong point: the living, the unique moment. It happens there, at that moment and not elsewhere. Those who were not there will never know what really happened.

We are operating here in the real, not the delayed, experience. Every second counts, which makes it very different from the exhibition, which is also a living event, but where life is brought exclusively by the visitors. Neither the sculptures nor the paintings on the walls do anything of themselves, except to be where they are placed. The same is true of a video installation or even of cinema viewed in the most traditional way. It is not its mechanical and repetitive animation that creates the sensation of the moment passing. For there to be "sensation", there must be a human presence. Therefore, don't all art forms belong to the category of "live performance"? The book is not read in itself, it is read; just as music is 'heard' when it is only recorded.

It is clear that, as in an engraving by M. C. Escher, such reasoning leads to an impossible construction. The snake no longer even bites its own tail, it is itself its own tail as much as its own mouth that would swallow it. The snake is not a snake at all; it has neither tail nor head; it is the movement of the snake, continuous, infinite, which would pass again and again in front of the camera in a fixed close-up of an observer. Only the gaze counts. And in the gaze, we must of course include listening, touching... the perceptions provided by all our senses. This means that only interpretationIn the most primitive sense, the result of our brain's analysis of a perception counts. If, therefore, it is only our interpretation of the information that we gather or that reaches us in spite of ourselves that is at the origin of our reactivity to things, it would be interesting to ask ourselves what technological tool has yet to be invented that would be capable of capturing the liveliness of the scene in order to render the myriad of events that occur there and that make up all its quality.

In the show, we are in front of a world in itself. We are an integral part of it; we are, much more than in the cinema, a decisive component because we breathe in it in the same way as the actors. Whether he is an explorer who has come to discover new shores or a holidaymaker returning to a well-known place of relaxation, the spectator can also be considered as a pollution brought from outside to the virginity of the ambient spectacle which, unlike inanimate objects, does not need to be seen to live. Is the spectator himself the sought-after and uncontrollable technical tool that divulges and retransmits information to his fellow human beings? Yes and no, because the famous "word of mouth" is a noise whose amplification contributes greatly to the success of a certain aspect of the work, but it is neither a notation, nor a faithful and exact reproduction of what happened. The memory that each person will keep of the event can, on the other hand, be considered as a poetically reliable tool for oneself. But does the living representation we perceive really exist for anyone else but ourselves? There will have been only one performance for one spectator and yet there will have been fifty or a hundred others.

So I question this planet. I analyse its atmosphere every day. This has been my work for several years. I pursue it in order to know, on this planet that I am tempted to inhabit full time, what my place can really be and how I can forge a habitat for myself there for good. I have made a thousand trips there, but have always returned to my home port to dissect the specimens I have captured. This time I'm moving my entire laboratory. Does that mean I'm moving in? I don't really know. What I do know is that I'm going with my crew "into spectator country". They are not the ones who will come, whatever it looks like. It is their spectator state that we are going to visit on board our ships. For me, these are not empty words or simple metaphors to express the idea of what inhabits me through this project. There is a real displacement to be done to whoever passes by. They are not invited to a good dinner, as is always the case in the theatre. No. They are only invited to populate the void with what they are, so that we move within their molecules. They are matter. That is why we have nothing to communicate to them. We only have to bethrough what I propose since I am the initiator of the journey and this is the cabin I built for us to survive for 5 days in public country. How will we look at ourselves and, above all, through which prism, which lens, the inevitable translator of our behaviour, words and gestures? Impossible to know completely in advance. We will never stop trying things. Five days of expedition is not much to bring back the primordial elements of a world. But it is adequate to keep up with the pace of the experiments to be conducted and the analyses to be made. This is the true definition of improvisation for me and therefore, by extension, of the art of the stage because everything is constant improvisation, due to the unpredictable nature of life in the process of happening. An actor can stammer, a spectator can die; or the opposite. So for me, improvisation, or simply acting, is the precipitate obtained by putting unknown elements in the presence of each other, but for which the preparation of the conditions of experience has been carefully studied and, as far as possible, tested.

Last night I happened to see the last few sequences of a film on TV, as per my habit described in a previous post, to relax and rinse my mind while having dinner after school. In this case, it was "Into the Wild" (based on the biographical story "Journey to the End of Loneliness"), directed by Sean Penn in 2007, based on the tragic adventure of a young man, Christopher McCandlessThe film is about a boy who went off to experience the pantheistic wilderness, alone and unassisted, in Alaska. Was it intended to prepare me for a similar ending, having once confided to me that I had thought of myself when I discovered this boy through the film's romanticised script? That would be both exceptional and unglamorous, but isn't that how all deaths are? I don't have his courage, nor his temerity, but I am able to understand his stubbornness to go towards the choice he made, without thinking of giving it up.

"The happiness is only worthwhile if it is shared". he is said to have written, if the film is to be believed, as a conclusion to his own experience of a life too short. Yes, of course. Sharing seems to be more the issue than 'happiness', which is only an abstract idea. It does not exist in itself and is not necessarily dependent on the idyllic living conditions that are attached to it. It is sometimes only the colour of a few moments, which in some cases seem to be enough to colour a whole life. Does the sharing of a quest, or of a neurosis, depending on how one wishes to see the phenomenon, require an aptitude for a less 'ordinary' happiness than that sometimes referred to as the peace of mind ? Or does the pursuit of a demanding goal condemn one to loneliness? Or are this goal and this requirement only there as decoys, to screen the natural solitude that we feel more than we can bear? Or finally, is it this famous success that is so random, this momentary and partial endorsement offered by the collective, that decides the credibility of an individual goal with a benefit suddenly credited to all: the famous work that speaks to the universal collective unconscious and, estimated in this sense, superior to any other more singular? Perhaps the general public, but only the general public, still experiences art and artistic paths in the light of the colonial spirit, which is eternally in search of universalism?

Clapping loudly in chorus is still a very fashionable testimony of our tribality. It is human to have to be constantly reassured about one's membership of a community, about the relative state of one's solitary condition.

Another sentence at the end of the Wikipedia article on the subject expresses the matter in an interesting way, and probably more profoundly than the film: "He was looking for difficulty, but in the end he came up against his lack of preparation. A topographical map of the area would probably have saved him, but it didn't fit the adventure he wanted to have."

Although the risks seem incomparably less, apart from the time scale, I will try to avoid the mistake of thinking myself too well prepared for the possible violence of the coming confrontation. Visiting the world of 'the other' is never easy. As for the map of the region... don't we set up expeditions with the aim, precisely, of tracing a possible and plausible representation of the countries we have crossed?

David Noir

David Noir, performer, actor, author, director, singer, visual artist, video maker, sound designer, teacher... carries his polymorphous nudity and his costumed childhood under the eyes and ears of anyone who wants to see and hear.

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