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| Ma Foi (FIMFA Lx13, São Luiz Teatro Municipal, 2013) |
If I like so much the so called “object” theatre, it’s because it allows me to fully approach every possible theme with a security distance.
This distance, materialized by the play between objects, creates a poetic lag, sometimes even burlesque, that fades the didactic aspect of these objects and their realism, without ever denying it or omitting the reality in question. Like a game of shadows and lights, it detaches the theme, giving it a bigger density.
I like to work with small objects, because I have the feeling that generally humans also feel quite small in their surrounding world, as if sometimes they were dressing oversized clothes, or were inside a badly proportioned scenography.
The relation of scale between an actor’s body and the size of an object creates a burlesque and poetic distance that talks about humanity, and about our inability to adapt to the environment that surrounds us, or to our unfulfillable desires. It speaks also about our littleness, our absurd, our incapacity to sometimes let ourselves being manipulated…
Among “Compagnie à” we particularly like to work with “manufactured” objects, or so to say, objects that were not specifically created for theatre purposes, because these objects definitely talk about human beings.
Manufactured by humans and for humans, these objects talk about our society, our needs, our time, our desire to own, our futilities and about the times we currently are going through. They are witnesses, traces, traveling companions.
To bring these objects to life on stage, it is in a certain way to listen to their story, to present another point of view of our society and about ourselves. It is to agree to laugh a little about our own condition, to dare to look from a distance, to go a little further…
The object theatre allows us to speak about humans, in their grandness and their weaknesses, using humor, to better accept the cruelness of our timed existence.
Laughter definitely has the immense virtue of bringing mankind to a world where the human issue and the bodies are less and less present.
Laughter takes us to the verge of abyss, of failure and fall.
Laughter is the reincarnation of a frame of mind in a body; it is the thought turned body.
I think we are allowed to laugh about everything, and that is what makes it scandalous. I am talking about the kind of laughter we share, the one that brings dialogue, and not the one that mocks, excludes and humiliates. To laugh along, makes us break the barriers in our minds and it claims a certain form of innocence.
Humour is for me a real weapon of resilence that humans have against what is unhuman. Thanks to humour, reality, even the most dreadful reality, is transcended, sublimated, allowing us the opportunity to evade during the time we are laughing. By masking the real, humour is revealed. By taking a situation to the absurd, laughter underlines the profound stupidity, the indignation, the discouragement.
Laughter disarms us and makes us free.
Facing the unbearable, we have always the possibility of laughing. What a relief!
BIO
Dorothée Saysombat (FR): Actress and director. Co-artistic director of “Compagnie à”.
She played in FIMFA with La Chambre 26 (CAMa – Centro de Artes da Marioneta, 2009) and Ma Foi (São Luiz Teatro Municipal, 2013).
