David Noir and his company La Vie est Courte break down the formal framework of the stage, cleaning up our minds mired in prejudice by daring to paint a culturally incorrect picture of a world torn apart by its fears and frustrations.
A nous Paris! | Myriem Hajoui | All honesty!
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À NOUS PARIS ! L'HEBDO DU MÉTRO 

PLAY OF THE WEEK: THE PURITANS

ALL NAKED SHAME

Does theatre in charentaises give you unbearable allergy attacks? Try this uppercut show. With their naked shame, David Noir and his Compagnie La Vie est Courte smash the formal framework of the stage, and clear our minds of prejudices by daring to paint a culturally incorrect picture of a world torn apart by its fears and frustrations. Psy show or cathartic peep show?
You can judge for yourself.

Are you bored with so much depressing and standardised monotony? Beware of a strong earthquake! This neutron bomb about sexuality should wake up the most numb of consciences. Designer, video artist, author and director, David Noir, 37, takes to the stage of the Lavoir Moderne to take theatre by the throat, to return it to its primitive cruelty, to shake us up in our comfortable certainties as spectators in the course of a provocative, outrageous if not traumatic evening for some. No wonder: this man has the soul of a terrorist. So much the better for lovers of sulphurous anti-theatre, so much the worse for the right-thinking associations and all those who prefer to avoid this difficult confrontation with nudity, which is often banned from standard stages and sent back to the X-rated or to certain Pigalle cabarets.
To the gutter the law of silence surrounding sexuality, the latent oppression of gregarious consensus and the false certainties of majority common sense! On stage: eight men and one woman, black suits, ties, straight, severe, corseted in the diktat of ordinary propriety. Gathered around a work table, manuscript in hand, our nine lecturers decipher the text of an imaginary play (the one that... we won't see!) sharing chips, cigarettes and wine. For those of you who are a bit delicate, here we don't do well-behaved table drinks, but rather strong stemmed glasses.
Under the enlightened eye of psychoanalyst guru Harvey, First, Second, Slav, Adrien, Jean, Léa, Berta and Betty gradually reveal themselves, spelling out, in the course of a primer, impulses and repulsions. The principle: to play with the obvious, rarely treated in the theatre (sex, breasts, buttocks, anus...), in short with everything that is not done, not said, not shown. The mercury rises without warning and we understand that we are on a journey that will be like no other. On a stage transformed into a rock stage, the actors (who are astonishing) take on their roles, reading their lines, humming the music of this complete exposure of bodies and affects. It is impossible to forget Sonia Codhant. You have to see her inexpressive face suddenly come to life with a sneer: she is simply dazzling!

Plunged into chaos, they speak to us against the artistic clock, against the routine until they expose themselves, body and soul; they touch each other, kiss each other full on, brutalise each other, revealing behind the masks and singular gaps our own excesses, our frustrations, exposing our most extreme fantasies, our taboos forged since childhood. And this is only the beginning of this attack on morality, of this theatre of flesh and sense, because the fuse lit here lasts a long time before exploding in our faces. Noir is not the kind of person who blows up theatrical conventions by handing out instructions: he is content to light the firecrackers and cover his ears when the explosion occurs. What has been going on since the beginning swells like a curtain raiser: stupor, gang rape, beating, murder, incest, transvestism... until the final Allegro Cruello, the climax of a cry ejaculated from the depths of this orgiastic ritual.

A midwife of buried truths, a meticulous recorder of our repressions, but also of our renunciations, David Noir, with the help of his company La Vie est Courte, draws up a cadastre of amorous desires, an inventory of exhibition figures, the ethnology of our destructive impulses. His inspiration deliberately departs from the canvas of the intelligentsia to reach the most authentic sources of "the trick", closer to his sense of reality. Against the aseptization of our society, he opts for magnificent crudity, the kind that dismantles the moralising peat that surrounds us, digs into our prejudices with an open mouth in order to bring us face to face with ourselves. This thunderous cacophony is a reflection of our world: grandiloquent, superb, pathetic and derisory; it is sufficient in itself while offering the extra insolence and irreverence necessary for our mental survival.

Free work or provocative catch-all? Sickening baloney or salutary firebrand? Everyone will judge according to their mood and sensitivity.
The contemptuous of exhibition (an unsatisfied desire in many of us, according to the author) will see in it only shameless pornography. The others, including us, will see it as an unidentified dramatic object, a bus manifesto that draws its strength from the abyss of a defrocked puritanism, akin to Bataille or Barthes (see the series of his "Mythologies" published in 1957 on the petty bourgeois France of the late Fourth Republic, mired in Poujadism and cultural complacency).

Nine choreographies and four songs written by the pianist Jérôme Coulomb are a veritable valve for dizzying tension. They punctuate this troubling inquisition of the conscience with well-known tunes (Sylvie Vartan, Jonasz, a cult song from the film Titanic, etc.), Irish ballads and children's ritornello. In this skilful musical mishmash, like the bric-a-brac of Spanish inns where everyone is sure to find their share of visual and intimate emotions, the body releases its own poetry. The story inscribed in the very flesh of the characters and the one that David Noir draws with images as meticulously composed as calligrams are imprinted like a bite in our memories. And that is the magic of the theatre: a space where anything can happen: in a miraculous way, sensitivity and love find their place in this play that brings out the very meaning of life, which each of us tries to master in spite of everything.

At once discordant, tense and disturbing, this pagan festival will either bewitch or repel (some spectators leave the theatre in shock).
What remains is a scenic incandescence, a subterranean force and a real jubilation in this corrosive, wanton, instinctive and yet so masterful writing. At the heart of this disturbing malstrom, where childhood terrors mingle with adult anxieties, past, present and future, the audience is left free with its questions, never manipulated with ready-made answers or heavy intentions. L'ange Noir dismantles our naive ideals and gives this show a universal scope of revolt while avoiding edifying preaching (libertarians know: only gratuity is revolutionary). A real outrage against decency, this hard-hitting play inaugurates a new approach to dramatic art: iconoclastic, lively and wild. The theatre of tomorrow? In our opinion, it could well be one of the most necessary and disturbing shows of the moment.

MYRIEM HAJOUI 03/07/00

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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