READING
WEDNESDAY 20 APR 2011, 19H
49 NORD 6 EST - FRAC LORRAINE - METZ (57)
De tant en temps
Co-created by Noëlle Renaude (author)
& Nicolas Maury (actor)
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Noëlle Renaude. Photo : Kraemer
The playwright Noëlle Renaude has taken up Roman Opalka’s work in order to inscribe it within a fictional, humorous story, performed by Nicolas Maury. Since 1965, the Polish artist residing in France has been counting down time which binds him to infinity and to his own disappearance. As a continuation of that systematic, codified, and obsessive research, Noëlle Renaude transforms the study of time into a story that intersects historical, sociological, anthropological, and metaphysical reflections.
De tant en temps (MIX editions, 2010) has been published as part of “Fiction à l’œuvre,” an editorial project by FRAC Aquitaine.
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Noëlle Renaude
(Born in 1949 in Boulogne-sur-Seine)
She studied art history and then Japanese at the École des Langues Orientales in Paris. Her first texts for theatre were published in 1987, first by Théâtre Ouvert, then by Éditions Théâtrales.
At the same time, she published, over a period of ten years, a number of books of popular fiction under various pseudonyms, and contributed to the fine arts journal Canal, then to Théâtre/Public until the early 1990s. She was a member of the editorial committee of the Cahiers de Prospero.
In 1993, Théâtre Ouvert organized a “Gros Plan” (Close-up) devoted to her texts.
In 1994 Renaude started writing Ma Solange, comment t’écrire mon désastre (My Solange, how to write to you about my disaster) for the actor Christophe Brault. It added a literary and theatrical adventure spanning four years, and which occasioned Renaude’s return to the stage. The complete text, eighteen hours long, was republished by Éditions Théâtrales in 2004.
Today, Renaude’s works for theatre comprise over twenty texts, published, for the most part, by Editions Théâtrales. Translated into a number of languages, they have often been performed both in France and abroad.
In 2006, she was a guest author at Théâtre Ouvert for a semester, marked by the production of Par les routes (On the road, staged by Frédéric Maragnani), published in the collection Enjeux T/O; reruns of several other plays; and Marie Rémond’s adaptation of Promenades, created in the same theatre in March 2009.
In 2007, she contributed “Archimbaud, Portait of François Raffinot” to the choreographer François Raffinot’s book Trace/ecarT; she was also invited by Raffinot to participate in a cycle of performances. She began working with other choreographers, including Daniel Larrieu and Faizal Zeghoudi.
États du lieu (State of things), a script for a short film commissioned by Robert Cantarella, was shot in June 2008, for and on the location at 104 (Paris). The DVD 104 rue d’Aubervilliers has been published by Éditions Montparnasse.
In June 2010, Éditions Théâtrales published two of her books: Atlas alphabétique d’un nouveau monde (Prophetic atlas of a new world)—a critical work devoted to Renaude’s writing and edited by Michel Corvin, and eight new plays collected under the title Sans carte sans boussole sans équipement (No map, no compass, no gear). De tant en temps (From time immemorial), a work commissioned by the FRAC Aquitaine and based on a work in their collections, was co-edited by FRAC Aquitaine and Editions MIX (2010). In August 2010, Renaude created the first part of Vues d’ici aux Chantiers de Blaye (Points of View at Chantiers de Blaye) which was staged by Frédéric Maragnani.
Nicolas Maury
(Born on October 14, 1980)
He graduated from Conservatoire Régional in Bordeau, then from Conservatoire National Supérieur in Paris (2004). He worked in cinema with such film makers as Mikaël Buch, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Garrel, Eva Ionesco, Rebecca Zlotowski, Riad Sattouf, Nicolas Klotz, Noémie Lvovsky, Emmanuelle Bercot, and Patrice Chéreau. He performed on stage with many stage directors, including Guillaume Vincent, Pierre Huyghe, Robert Cantarella, Frédéric Fisbach, Marie Remond, and Florence Giorgetti.
The author’s intentions
“On the occasion of the production of one of my plays, Promenades, performed by Nicolas Maury at the Théâtre Ouvert, in March 2009, I wrote a series of reflections around the idea of walking, entitled La Promenade.
Nicolas Maury and I decided to try something with this text which was not apparently suited for stage. In October of the same year, we proposed a “spectacular” version of this text to ActOral Montevideo in Marseille, and then to Lieu Unique in Nantes. This was the beginning of an adventure which we intend to pursue, as an author/actor duo making the most of every text, and in which roles would not be definitively fixed. De tant en temps, text commissioned by the FRAC Aquitaine and published by Editions MIX, will be performed at the Théâtre Ouvert in Paris in May 2011. The text was not intended for the stage. It consists of a number of chapters, reflections and accounts turned somehow, surreptitiously, into bodies and fictions. Bodies being but details, and fictions—minimal images.
The reading at the FRAC Lorraine in Metz is the first stage of the work we have undertaken on this text, before revising it for the stage.
Similarly, as in La Promenade, the actor is not just the carrier of the narrative word, but also the one who reveals an orality and a theatricality that are evidently absent and subject to reinterpretation and displacement.
To read aloud is not simply to make words heard; it also means to turn this act into a theatrical gesture in its own right.
Afterthe FRAC Lorraine and Théâtre Ouvert, we intend to continue this adventure for two by seeking forms of play acting, of transforming text into a reading, a spectacle, images, sounds, while relying on the texts already written, those yet to be written, whether for theatre or not, to overturn codes, to transform the stage into a place of porosity and freedom, a place where writing is ever renewed and instantaneous.”
Noëlle Renaude
Quote from Roman Opalka
“I would like to present time, its changes in duration, but in a way particular to man who is a subject conscious of the presence of time as defined by death: the sensation of life in irreversible duration.”
