Share this article
The Just - Arts/Scenes - lesinrocks.com
lesInrocks.com
The cultural guide
Theatre
The Righteous
David Noir
After The PuritansDavid Noir and his team from the Cie La vie est courte (short life company), push the envelope with The RighteousA new 100% hate comedy". Before seeing it and giving our opinion, here is the director's presentation of his work (as is because the subject, the dramaturgy of the Just have, on paper, similarities with the unbearable Nexxt by Arpad Schilling, which will be presented at the Avignon Festival as part of the Magyar Season, analogies that are self-evident if one looks at the intellectual and sensitive underpinnings that lead David Noir to tackle the subject):
"The characters are physically stylized in a certain number of figures inspired by comics, mangas or others, and composing a very colourful and naive whole. A terrorist girl with an ambivalent look (machine gun, pigtails, trellis, and teddy bear), a playmobil pirate with a blindfolded eye, spitting out lungs and alcohol, an old socialite with an egret, disguised as a lascivious panther for erotic "nudies" from the 60's, a wise child tracking down paedophiles, a serial killer starring in a TV show, and many other friends from our current and cultural universe. From the very beginning, the subject matter is therefore rooted in this new childish aesthetic, full of violence and wandering, from which emanates, in my opinion, a form of romantic poetry that is very current, like another acceptance of the old gothic style, made up of crude words and scabrous situations where the fantastic is trivialized to symbolize a hostile and disturbing daily life. The "happy days" are behind us, far away, filed away in the happy memories of our parents' baby boom, at the bottom of the drawers of the formica tables. Money for money's sake, intellectual and artistic prostitution, openly brought up to date by television and its advertising, have become sure values. As for the theatre, it seems to have draped itself in prudish or falsely provocative veils, behind its timeless procession of institutional conventions, far from our mercantile society, cultivating the most academic "beautiful art". Between ludic-cynical compromise and cultural debates, the form of Just is deliberately set in the context of a radio and television programme, where a game is played, in which each person must save his or her skin and escape a humiliating death desired by the public. The fight is media-based, and is embodied in the arena of the theatre. The oppression of a now friendly and understanding power, the pressure of the veiled opinion of a brainless mass is exerted here on each protagonist, under the eyes of the complicit spectators, transforming little by little the characters into nice consensual personalities, smooth and clean, ready to undergo without flinching the most vehement sodomies, the most joyful debasements. This is the game of power and hierarchy; of image and of our personalities.
The scenic nature of the project is by no means linear, but appeals to the spectator's psychic capacities. Associations of ideas - editing - puns; the only creative will presiding over my work being the efficiency and the respect of my perspective. The team of PuritansThis performance, which I hope will be interactive with a concerned audience that has already followed us and got to know us through the first stage of this work, already named: The Puritans. The Righteous (as much in spirit as in mystical inspiration), thus already form the logical continuation. Direct address to the audience, provided soundtrack, and live music remain our tools to support the incarnations of each member of our group. Theatre has a long way to go to find a free and dynamic expression of its art, today far behind the discoveries of the plastic arts, the progress of current music, and the invention of new technological supports. I, and the Puritans we intend to trace a possible path, once again, through the Just. "
