In your remarkable essay Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama, published in 2015, you approach theatre as an experience that can only take place once, rejecting theatre where everything has been planned in advance. Is that how you still view theatre?
It’s the driving force behind my work. I make theatre because of the essential power that comes from anything that is very much alive in the present moment. Something truly live, something for which the outcome is not predetermined, is always something bordering on failure–or success. But failure generates unique moments that reveal our humanity.
Failure is not something that I confine to the rehearsal hall, with the idea that inevitable accidents and delightful cock-ups will be integrated into the final product. On the contrary, it is something that I’m looking for as a constituent element of liveness in the performances I offer to an audience.
The very nature of Declarations leans toward failure, for it is impossible to take into account all the sensations, images and impressions of a human life, even with hundreds of declarative phrases serving as the foundation of the piece, such as « This is the colour yellow / This is a bully / This is Abraham and Isaac / This is the smell of my mother lingering in a closet / This is the last sentence in a long book« .
There is also a constant possibility of failure at another level, as every evening the actors must improvise gestures or movements for each of these declarations. In this way, Declarations is a piece which changes substantially from night to night, always responding to the present moment in the theatre, and the impulses of the performers.
The actors have performed Declarations hundreds of times. How do you ensure that risk is a constant presence, that they don’t repeat movements or gestures that have previously proved successful?
It’s quite difficult to maintain that essential freshness. To answer the question, consider the very nature of the piece, which is fundamentally non-narrative, even though certain fragments have a narrative line: a mother-son relationship, becoming an adult, a mother who is dying.
The first question we asked in rehearsal focused on the nature of the text I’d written at one go during a transatlantic flight. I was flying back home after learning that my mother had less than three years to live.
We soon saw that this theatrical device was musical in nature, with three movements–the senseless abundance of existence, the death of the mother and love–and that it called for solos, duets, counterpoint. Rhythms gradually emerged, then more rhythms, then song.
All these elements combined to form a musical suite. It was with that process and in that spirit that we developed the movement and gestures. We eventually established certain rules for maintaining creativity in those gestures. For example: aim for simplicity, avoid illustrative mime or dance, avoid all facial expressions and familiar hand symbols (the peace sign, a pistol, raising the middle finger), no imitating butterflies or birds.
The most important thing is that during the performance spectators feel the difficulty of what the actors must accomplish; that they experience along with them the failures as well as the moments of grace. The audience becomes an active participant.
You describe Declarations as a ritual. In what sense?
Ritual is a word I do not use lightly. Declarations may be playful and often joyful, but it does ask some fundamental questions.
What is it to live? What is it to die? What is it like to lose a loved one? These are essential questions that are part of everyone’s lives, but they are impossible to answer. Trying to do so leads sooner or later to failure.
Nonetheless, because of those questions, for thousands of years and in all cultures people have gone to the temple. I may be an atheist, but I do have a temple. And it is theatre.
