Seeing through the night

Seeing through the night

≡ February 2018 ≡

Like many other things, February begins in the dark of night.
It is also the month in which Jardins d’hiver, the new literary festival at the Champs Libres (Rennes), comes into light and offers me and the actress Laure Werckmann a carte blanche that we have chosen to blacken, by entrusting it under the jo(w)lly aegis of night and by dunking it in the late-night ink of the words of Michaux, Jaccottet and Crevel, Flammarion, Blanqui and Novalis. Our entitled Hymnes à la nuit will plunge the audience into the depths of daydreams, eyes wide shut and all ears curled up in Morpheus’ arms.

In this very same garden, you might also hear what makes artists of tomorrow tick.
With the same Laure Werckmann, we have been enthroned, over the past few months, conductors of the project Ose le son: fourteen student actors from the École du TNB and fourteen student musicians of the Pont Supérieur de Rennes are gathered to form fourteen duets for fourteen texts of their own choice. Bingo! Mayakovsky, Rimbaud, Bradbury, Pennequin, Despentes, Baudelaire, Pennac, Senghor, Celestini, Shelley, Racine, Büchner, Freud and Tarkos. Choices which foresee the color and the crackling urgency, delicate, invested, unexpected, sweet and audacious of these musical lectures that will be seeded at the Champs Libres from 2 to 4.

Youth built up is also a treasure possessed by the choirs of elders that we -with Claire Ingrid Cottanceau- bring together for Nova-Oratorio. After Sierre, we will join again a new group of beautiful septuagenarians to radiate the main stage at the Théâtre d’Hérouville of the Comédie de Caen on the 6 and 7.

From time to time, I have the pleasure of being invited by Rodolphe Burger for sharing stage and tickling the dB meter during joyful electrical banquet. I will meet him again in Brest with the terrific Christophe Calpini and Sarah Murcia, at the Quartz on the 10.

And then for shelters to cook up future, while brotherhood plunges us in it with Ersatz, the newest science-fiction show by Julien Mellano, a brilliant genetic control between Black Mirror and Tati, smurfed by a few notes by muggins here. This month in Gorron, Allonnes, Craon, Ernée, Hédé, Chateau Gontier, Loiron, then elsewhere by tomorrow.
And the Fulmine mythology on the 9 and 10 in Kingersheim.
And Mirages & Miracles from Adrien M and Claire B go on enchanting the Lux in Valence up to the 25.
As for our Perceptions et illusions with Richard Dumas, Dan Ramaën and Alanté Kavaïté, they begin their last month at the Commanderie in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines.

Whether through the night, at the edge of ages, at the handover of time or the thresholds of our senses, the less sure we are of what we see, the closer we get to what is to be seen.

Olivier Mellano