This is what I wrote in one of my project presentations, The Fleece is sleeping, for its version created last year at the Générateur

This text was not written for the audience or my team, but was part of a funding application. I give this detail because knowing to whom it was addressed allows us to understand what I would have wanted complete strangers (who could be stranger to an author than the members of a commission?) to perceive of this adventure. It is thus a vision, distant, global and globalizing, as one can have of a star chosen among thousands of others, on which one would invite the ignorant observer to point his telescope.

Pure recycling you may say. Yes, indeed, because I am very proud of this aspect of my work, both organic and manufactured. Nothing is created, everything is transformed, it would seem, and it is in this way, through a constant kneading of materials, both physical and intellectual, that I have deliberately chosen to proceed for several years, with the aim of obtaining, better than a compost, a rich soil adapted to my own growth. This is not to say that I am self-sufficient; outside influences and inputs are welcome. But they must be able to survive in my environment, to flourish in this soil as well as in this atmosphere. Everything in life seems to me to be more or less a question of pH; too acidic for some or too basic for others; ill-adapted to its environment or an environment hostile to its development, in both cases, it dies. Hence the frank and prudent neutrality of some. In short, this is not the only aspect of the "recovery". I also want to use it to try to define more precisely what I think is going to be potentially different in these Attraction parks that are being prepared. Here is the text first, then comes the analysis:         

" ...The Fleece sleeps is above all addressed to the "Public", if it means anything to encompass under a generic term the diversity of individualities who have come to experience moments so differently shared in the same place. Nevertheless, it is indeed in its global strangeness that the sum of the spectators is approached here. Like a vast body that could possibly collide productively with our own; a distant planet sheltering an intriguing civilisation, at the very edge of the galaxy that has been set up. 

In the same way that in 1969, on board the Apollo XI spacecraft, then in 1972 on the Pioneer X space probe, NASA embarked on a message of peace accompanied by an illustration representing the human being and his position in the solar system for the benefit of potential extraterrestrial life, for us, the company, generating a living work is tantamount to trying to establish contact between a new expression and these multiple bearers of unfamiliar languages that are the spectators. It is interesting to note that in the subsequent Voyager 1 and 2 missions, a multimedia disc containing sounds and images of the Earth was added; an "interstellar bottle to the sea" according to its designers. What could be more similar to the media we frequently use today on stage to broadcast the codes of our personal civilisations? 

It is by using these notions of "bottle in the sea" and cosmic infinity that the concept of "The Sleeping Fleece" gradually imposed itself as being that of a journey through space - time towards my contemporaries; from the fantasized antique to the real of the present moment, from the prehistory of the human spirit to the most trivial word of our daily life. The stage would be the spaceship and Jason's mythical quest the logbook. Traces and itineraries, maps and memories of intimate places would constitute the journey. Chaos would also be summoned, as it should be, for each creation of origin, for each birth of a world. All that remained was to scientifically construct the poetic stages of its epic. First of all a text, a word. This came easily as being that of a character, this Jason I had in me, a hero of little faith, an avid explorer of souls and bodies standing in his way. It would be enough to let him speak, to set out his vision as an anxious and determined strategist like an animal seeking its food. The result would be a quest without concession to social precepts, a violent and desirous struggle on the scale of his thirst for existence.

Through numerous preliminary experiments, like so many preparatory tests, "La Toison dort" has questioned its format. Initially a micro-planet, an aggregate of dust compacted into a simple and direct address to the audience, then evolving into elaborate solos and finally accompanied by other presences, the entity "Toison / Jazon", now spelled with a sharper and more vivid "Z", has finished building its journey. Moving away from the obscure and isolated stage of theatres, its expanding form will encompass stage, hall and audience in a vast matrix where all molecular frictions will be possible. A gigantic test tube in which the forces involved are more likely to fuse, to magnetise or to repel each other. We therefore present a system in which text, music and sound, bodies and costumes are all within the visitor's reach. A river of an exhibition that unfolds at the pace of the visitor".

So here is a condensed version of what might have reflected the spirit of things for me a little over a year ago. This basis is still valid; it was a good little step for the man I was with my partners and a big leap for my humanity; and perhaps a certain leap for theirs, for them to witness or not.

What should change :

Once the village gates have been passed, the trinkets exchanged, the fear reduced, the language vaguely understood and the contacts initiated, I hope that we will be able to mumble less, both of us, about all this grammar and vocabulary. The aim cannot be summed up as 'going further', which would mean nothing, but rather that civilisations marry each other in the course of this adventure. We arrived as "conquerors-discoverers", a bit like Christopher Columbus; I would remind you that all this questioning and this process are based on really "going to meet" and not on inviting to be seen and consumed. How can we "go to meet" in an immobile journey where those we have set out to reach are required to make the journey in the first place? This is the strange paradox to which all artistic work invites. It is also in order to modify the situation a little that I use the Internet to establish contact with those who wish to do so. Sharing the desire not to transport the spectator/listener in an armchair, Queen Anne has given me and my crew the confidence to charter the flagship Generator in the form of a bathyscaphe device which would be our Santa Maria. Have we discovered new Americas when we thought we had reached India? For the time being, I do not know. It is during the coming expedition that we will see if the mixing of cultures can be done, one hopes, in a little less violence than the meeting of the Spanish with the Indians!

In concrete terms, in order to merge into a single people, one must either adopt the language and customs of the other, or accept to be crushed or reduced, or, and it is this method that I wish to implement, merge into an entity that is, if not totally new, at least different. Fatally, in such a process, egos take a hit. And it's not a question of resisting or else being hopelessly stuck on board. No, you have to take a deep breath, take your courage in both hands and go ashore in one go. Once you're there, don't delay in going to see in detail who they are, taking care not to be intrusive, nor naïve, nor bravado, nor... nothing, all in all, but with a certain know-how, which could be summed up in a politically emotional putsch tinged with humour. Just being a good actor. Just yourself, in disguise but knowing how to have fun as well as being seriously on the lookout, with involvement of bodies, looks, words and images. It's a bit like living together in the space of improvisation that precedes the show, but beware: who nevertheless is fine towards the show, moves towards it (without necessarily reaching it at all costs, this is one of the differences with the challenge of the theatre); which means that it is not atonic

To do this, I give the start, certainly; it is the rigid frame that makes the framework of the vessel:

Texts, aesthetics, thoughts on the walls, jokes, a range of songs, scenes and behaviours, ambivalence, outrageousness, nudity and various identities... but afterwards, God be praised and all hell breaks loose! What will be very different from the first session is if each evening, a new fringe of this mixed world appears, of which I am still unaware, where our proposals will be echoed and modified by the attitudes and actions in return. The final step would be for us to react and for the sources of the tributaries to be reversed. Giving up the "show" to make better ones seems to me a good way to go.

Today I avoid like the plague and cholera combined, performances that I can predict in advance.

Whether they take the form of books, plays, films, plastic works or even individuals, it doesn't matter, I don't enjoy being confirmed in my predictions. No doubt there is also a certain taste for failure or catastrophe that is equivalent to success; there is nothing to succeed or fail in my undertaking, I said 15 years ago to my partners who had just gathered for the first rehearsal session of "The Puritans". Conquest cannot exclude failure; it is its movement that matters and it is not free of fluctuation. One must try, get lost, marry, understand and above all, continue.

And to marry, it will be necessary to do it as many times as possible, even if it means betraying oneself at times, just for the pleasure of doing it, until one day, once everything has been swept away, once blood and sweat have been mixed together, there are finally no more rules that impose themselves and the origin is forgotten.