Permutation #13

As part of a joint project, Marc Planceon asked Marion Rothhaar, a German Olympic gymnast in the late 80s who has since become a stage director, to bring her story to the stage, using video footage of the Olympic Games at the time. He invited each of the participants to ‘become Marion Rothhaar’ and to write a fragment of her story in the first person singular and to act out the words of a child trained for gymnastics in West Germany, which at the time was facing the GDR. Marion was able to discover the relevance of the project and the impact of its story on everyone.

Laurence de La Fuente recently wrote Chambres à dessins / chambres d’écriture as part of a project with visual artist Bruno Lahontâa for patients at the Saint-André-CHU hospital in Bordeaux. She invited the ‘permutants’ to read these singular portraits and to take them up again in relation to the drawings – also produced for this project – which were video-projected. She also suggested that the text Si les bouches se ferment by Alban Lefranc, which she is preparing for 2017, be staged and voiced, questioning the position and role of a choir.

Gilone Brun sketched out a work on grief, using extracts from Roland Barthes’ Journal deuil and Le Bonheur by Emmanuel Darley, with whom she had collaborated and who died earlier this year. She also proposed a plastic work, with each participant creating an ink portrait of another participant in 8 parts – without seeing the previous ones – on the model of an exquisite corpse. In the end, each participant was free to combine these materials to create his or her own self-portrait, with the addition of personal words.

For his latest text, Ses Singularités, Clyde Chabot worked on both the relevance of a montage of a few extracts and the place in the space and dramaturgy of a sound creator in relation to a performer. Various staging options were also explored for this project, using extracts from videos previously produced with performers or performer duos.