Waves festival – Play the Game (2013)

Production assistant (Intern)

Waves festival – Play the Game edition 2013 (Vordinborg – DK)

Waves Festival takes place in Vordingborg and is an international forum for experimental theater and stage art. Performing artists from all over the world presents their work and see the newest directions in the world of theater, dance and visual art.

http://www.wavesfestival.dk/

Phaedra (2004)

Project Coordinator

Company Theatre du Point Aveugle (Marseille – FR)

A Project of 3 versions (japanese, syrian and slovenian) of the piece “Phaedra” of Jean Racine with the:

Slovenian National Theatre Ljubljana, Slovenia

Seinendan Company, Fudjimi – Tokyo, Japan

Damascus Opera, Syria

artistic director: Francois-Michel Pesenti

French director Francois-Michel Pesenti puts on Phaedra, the quintessential piece of classical French theatre about a stepmother’s love for her stepson, which raises questions about the fairness of moral laws, family and society, when faced with such a powerful passion. The texture and trigger of Jean Racine’s tragedy, lie in a series of admissions, be they deliberate, accidental, indirect, faked, shameful… entailing the most severe punishments before leading to a resigned calm-down.
In the poetics of Pesenti’s theatre, characters in a drama are as a rule tied in knots of mental symptoms and complexes – obsessions, neuroses or instincts.
The director’s technique reveals similarities between actors’ personalities and the form of a character in a drama. The actor does not necessarily show his private being, but a cluster of all the tools that make up a dramatic character, which render visible the life experience of a private person, the motivation of the interpreter, the acquired skill, the character’s intention, in voids of a character portrayal. The Slovenian staging of Racine’s Phedra — put on by one of Europe’s best theatre directors, who tests the classical tragedy’s artificiality in creating a show for the new cultural milieu and its language – represents an intriguing viewing experience.

article in french and english about the dramaturgy of F.M. Pesenti interviewed by Jacqueline Caux (ART PRESS magazine):

Click to access les_monstres_fantasmatiques_francois_michel_pesenti_art_press_juill_2005_n314.pdf

The Paesinae: We used to know how to sing (2003-2004)

Project Coordinator

Théâtre du point Aveugle (Marseille – FR)

Performed at : Chapter Arts Center (Cardiff – Wales), Cankarjev Dom (Ljubljana – SLO), C.D.N. Théâtre de Gennevilliers (FR), Kampnagel Fabrik (Hamburg- GER), MIMI Festival (Marseille – FR)

“….the audience works towards asking itself about the performance, as in the position of an enemy or ally in a battle.”

François-Michel-Pesenti (Artistic Director)

An extremely challenging piece, not for the faint hearted.

Playing cards scatter themselves onto the brilliant shining blood-red floor that covers the whole length of the studio. There’s a King and a Queen, two Jacks and three Jokers. The audience sits close in, like gamblers around the red table. We quickly realise this is no ordinary piece of theatre, no ordinary piece of performance art.

It’s an hour of skilfully improvised sex and violence, bodies being pushed seemingly to the edge of endurance. The audience is being pushed to the edge of their sensibilities. The violence is underlined with sharp piercing banging noises as people are slapped against a wooden wall designed to echo the sound.

Men appear half-naked, then completely naked, there is some simulation of sexual activity but this is not so much for any erotic reason or to satisfy any desire. A demand is being made of us, if not quite to accept our bodies and all their functions with a new openness but to acknowledge our own unease.

The power and commitment of each performer is exceptionally high. The energy and the bravery with which they embrace the challenges of the performance is enriching, once one is able to cast off ones ingrained unease. There is little to raise the spirit here and if one argues that that is the purpose of art, then this work is to be classed as a failure.

It is the artist’s right and duty to push away the barriers; this may be one way of doing it.

Théâtre du Point Aveugle succeeds in “making a claim for theatre as a territory for an amoral rebellion of the flesh that liberates and condemns.” Liberation can only come when barriers are broken down.