For this piece, we have two themes of work and inspiration:
Death (in its symbolic dimension: the end of something, loss, radical change). More than physical death we are interested in the symbolism of death, what is lost, undone, disappears. For us improvisers, the ephemeral of the "here and now" is the main subject that we work on. We try to tame the moment by playing with time and space: living the present, making it visible, and letting it die. Beyond the improvisation technique, we reflect on all these "little deaths" that everyone lives in his life...
Mourning (of the one that disappears, but also the mourning of a relationship, an ideal, a belief, or a situation). We ask ourselves about the social dimension of mourning: what rituals exist in our cultures to deal with grief? Are they collective, festive, invisible, ...?
The street: public space/public, social mirror
We want to retrieve the street as a living, meeting and provocation area. We invite a collective and intimate reflection on the process of mourning and death, human, social, psychological events...
Characters and staging
Two figures, two archetypes of mourning: The widow and the bride
Two incarnations of mourning that are socially experienced in very different ways. Two forms of mourning associated with rituals both so different and so close at the same time...
Composition, staging
If we begin our intervention with two "common" characters from the street, the widow and the bride gradually take shape, and then we enter a symbolic world in the grip of the pre-defined urban space. We start from a definite space, closed (a circle of soil), a choreographed dance, to gradually enter the unknown space of the street, then the tale takes shape.
The play is a constant back and forth between choreographed movements, improvisation, characters' birth, text and music.
It's a traveling stage. The journey depends on where we perform, but the configuration is always the same: a starting point with a pre-defined scenography, a procession with "transformative" stops, and an end point (preferably a square) where our intervention ends. This movement is linked to the dynamic and temporal aspect of mourning. Moreover, we seek to open another public and particular space by the use of a radio station in our staging.
We offer a local radio station to interpret the theme of our play to their liking and we interact directly with this interpretation.
Scenic elements
The radio station
We collaborate with a local radio station that broadcasts a live radio show that echoes with our work on grief and death, and with which we interact. The work with the local radios represents another space of instantaneous composition fundamental in this play (and hopefully in the next ones) but also a meeting space with the specificity of each place, paramount for us. Thus, several weeks before the performance we contact local radio stations to offer them collaboration and to share our thoughts on this question of mourning and death...
The soil
At the beginning of the play, we use soil, referring to tradition, roots, the common, the "out of the walls-out of the town". We need 10 kg of soil for each presentation.
"The old clothes"
During each performance, we invite the audience to bring their "old" clothes. These clothes constitute part of our scenography and will be subject at the end of the show to extend the contact with a small clothes barter fair... Another analogy to mourning, what one loses, what one parts with, this skin-clothe that leaves for another one...
The place’s architecture represents our meeting space.
Urban furniture
We use the street structural elements (sidewalks, walls, benches, rubbish bins, cars) as scenic elements. We incorporate a pile of clothes (garbage) with which we will play at some point, and the use of a container from which we will come out at another time. We need a container with easy opening (to get in and out easily). We invite the public (in the performance's ad) to bring their old clothes that will integrate in our scenography. Thus, the "spectator" is actively involved in the staging and at the end of our dance, the tale continues when one appropriates the clothes of the other who sees leaving this "little piece of life" on an "unknown ".