Meeting yesterday at the Generator for inventory and technical update on the project needs.

What we have; what we're missing

With Amandine managing the administration but also the production issues and two team members, Jérôme and Guillaume, respectively at the lighting and video-sound departments on this project, it's a breath of fresh air for me to find them again.

I've been loving the technique since I started working on the sets. By that I don't mean the equipment, although it can be exciting to be interested in it and it's a big part of the wonder of the stage, but rather the people who manage it. When things go well, which is particularly the case for me with them, the stage managers are a bit like the wise men, the good geniuses, those who bring the solutions and accept, not obediently, but with complicit intelligence, to serve the project and resolve situations that seem to have reached an impasse. Those with whom I get along the best are obviously personalities who like to take on the role of Santa Claus magician beyond the difficult moments and physical trials and despite financial conditions that are not completely crazy. They exist in all trades, but where I have most often come across this type of quality is certainly in technical positions, in a first assistant in a movie theatre and in production managers, in my case, women, who all had this taste for "benevolent efficiency".

Like good parents, they go out of their way to satisfy your desires and their own, since they all converge in the same direction of creation, know how to be firm without abuse if a request seems inadequate to them in view of their skills, but they also have a taste for risk and often leave their ego aside or do not put it there, and thus know how to recognize in a creator the vibration that must be heard and not let it fade away through abandonment or neglect. Thus, there is little or no jealousy among good and noble technicians in the broadest sense, whereas, since the matter at stake is not the same, it can be found, including between men and women and in very different registers, among performers. Few actors or actresses do not feel at one time or another that they are in danger. The fragility in them often expresses itself through apprehension or the a priori fantasy of "rape". There is nothing like this in a balanced production. You don't panic for nothing. It's a command post where the slightest ripple must not throw the ship off balance. There's also a big risk, you might say, in this case, of ending up in a room full of badly dressed assholes. That is, of course, quite common. But this is what makes the rare elegance of some people even more precious. Humanist technical artists, who far from considering their profession as a simple job, devote themselves to it with a measured but very real passion, knowing their place and not suffering from it. There is therefore no error, nor any apparent identity disorder among solid technicians, which in no way implies that ambivalence or confusion of genres deserts them. On the contrary, a mental and refined sexual approach to the world is decisive in obtaining these beautiful adult specimens. I talk about them here like beasts of burden as it is true that we sometimes come across behind the consoles and at the controls of the management, permanently problematic of a project, representatives of a distinguished aristocracy, both dedicated to the race and its performance as well as persevering and enduring. In this article, I am in no way denigrating the interpreters - far from it, with whom I spent memorable moments. I simply bear witness to those moments, also very vivid in my sensory memory, when the director, designer, director... whatever, finds refuge with these companions when the tensions prove to be too stormy and inextricable otherwise. There, somewhere, often high up, in the privileged heights of a control room or at the top of a ladder, people, looking like nothing, make you understand by a gesture, a deep or curling eye, a play on words or a contained smile that they feel and understand you at moments when you only meet walls. It is nevertheless quite obvious that image and body are not put to the same test on the same planes depending on whether you are on the set or behind the consoles which sometimes bear their name well. But the people of the techniques would be just as likely to suffer from belonging only to the order of the éminences grises; from never being in full light, even though they manipulate it. Some of them sometimes combine these two aspects and are also actors or actresses. This is the case of Guillaume who - how does he manage it? - knows how to make the most of the characteristic skills needed in both professions. The actor in him knows how to take the lead and how to play a delicate situation to rescue the director who is in trouble, just as much as he can use the director's faculties of appreciation to manage his presence and his relationship with the others on the set. A skillful mix that I find in Jérôme's work, which evolves between dandyism and sharp pop cultural references. In his hand, a 20kg cut will always seem to weigh 20 grams. Active magic on the lightening of the heaviness of things and situations for one as for the other, humor and healthy spirit work much more miracles through the prism of their know-how than physical strength alone could ever do. Thank you to them, therefore, for once again supporting me in moving this ship forward.

End of the day and unexpected evening with a few moments of hilarity and charm alongside Jérôme and his 10-year-old daughter, Rose, at the President's; a great landmark of kitsch Chinese gastronomy in Belleville where we sometimes spend a moment. Rose has always naturally enchanted me, by the simple contact that we have and the fact that she has always been from far and wide, by her parents and from the uterine pouch, in the vicinity of my shows. Thank you to her for these beautiful rap songs that we improvised together, almost dying of starvation, waiting for the hypothetical arrival of our ribs. It's with such nice and free complicities that a crew binds together ... even if we know that it's not necessarily for eternity.