What are you both playing at? Can’t you see that we have no way of being heard, nobody will listen to us, nobody cares. Is this not violence? If we open our mouths, we are not taken seriously, we are seen as kids who know nothing about anything, does all this silence not equate to violence?
Joachim, 19, has just lost his brother Samuel in an accident. Shadows hover over the circumstances of this death. To find out the truth, he decides to meet Samuel's group of friends. A group of friends very politically involved. Marked by the economic crises currently shaking Europe, they question the heritage of their seniors and their uncertain future. Joachim faces three boys and three girls, six pieces of himself, six mirrors, six reasons to think that he is surely responsible for this death. For William, Mona, Chloe, Isaac, Fausto, Linda, how to get the clan’s, this pack’s balance back, there are only six of them? For Joachim, how to glue together the pieces of a spirit that has been utterly decimated?
Like the number 7 with its head cut off, everything is set in motion to reinvent the magic, to restore the perfect circle, to finally find the number seven and start again as before. Because, some like William and Mona only see Joachim as Samuel’s ghost, which pushes our hero through his blindness to completely mistake him for his missing brother. A grief difficult to come to terms with, because Joachim looks terribly like his brother. A world steeped in the shadows of the past, an initiatory quest, between dream and reality, during which Joachim will have to fight to finally become himself.
We live in a time in which we face increasingly difficult grief. With the depletion of funeral rites, death no longer seems like an event that punctuates the life of the community, but just an individual drama.
This artistic adventure is in my head because it is full of complexities and different challenges. First this period of floating when building a young person, it is riddled with questions, paradoxes and misunderstandings: Making for a wealth of theatrical material ... Then, although within them there exists a huge portion of vulnerability, of fragility, there is nonetheless this incredible feeling of immortality, eternity, even invincibility. With such a serious subject, I also wanted to have fun, allowing me to develop a gallery of characters all equally exciting and who will accompany the hero in his quest towards a border between adolescence and the adult world, a gaping hole where madness and excess still play a part.
This text would not be what it is today without the help of Natacha Diet who assisted me for ten years on the dramaturgy of my stories. Finally, I would also like to pay tribute to the work and the investment of the performers: Brice Carrois, Marion Lubat, Julie Roux, Clemence Azincourt, Florent Dorin, Jean-Christophe Legendre and Etienne Durot who, over the course of the rehearsals, enabled this text to find its precision and poetry.
Text and staging Nasser Djemaï | Playwriting Natacha Diet | With Brice Carrois | Marion Lubat | Julie Roux | Clémence Azincourt | Florent Dorin | Jean-Christophe Legendre | Etienne Durot | Stage assistant Manuel Ulloa Colonia | Staging Michel Gueldry | Set (building) Ateliers du Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne | Choreography Manuel Chabanis | Object handling Luis Enrique Gomez Bastias | Video design Olivier Garouste | Lighting design Renaud Lagier | Music Frédéric Minière and Alexandre Meyer | Costume Marion Mercier | Location manager and sound director François Dupont | Lighting director Jean-Luc Mutrux | Video director Lise Couchet | Stage director Xavier de Marcellis | Production administration Élodie Couillard
Production: Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne | MC2: Grenoble | Cie Nasser Djemaï | With artistic participation of Jeune Théâtre National and the ENSAD of Montpellier | Creative residency at Domaine d'O - Montpellier (Departmental Domain of Art and Culture) | With the support of Théâtre Nanterre Amandiers and SPEDIDAM | Creation in Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, January 21st 2014 | The Nasser Djemaï troupe has been commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Communication - D.R.A.C. Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and subsidised by the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region, the Departmental Council of Isère and the City of Grenoble.
Creation January 21 to February 2, 2014, Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne
Shown from 2013 to 2014 – 38 shows
Domaine d’Ô, Montpellier | Théâtre d’Angoulême, Scène nationale | MC2: Grenoble, Scène nationale | Théâtre 71, Scène nationale de Malakoff | Théâtre Liberté, Toulon | L’Apostrophe, Scène nationale de Cergy-Pontoise et du Val d’Oise
Press
All his characters are interesting, with their inner sufferings, their profound discontentment with life, which spans from disgust for their body to radical revolt. We like this other look, more tender, more meaningful at the contemporaries who cruelly discover society, its games and its stakes. Djemaï finds in his actors, and particularly in Florent Dorin, a fever and an excitability with a beautiful authenticity. POLITIS
After Invisibles, Nasser Djemaï once again affirms his talent in a poetic realism in the present, patiently fomented with tact, with an innate distrust for the pathos, that an emphatic final image disguised as a bright future seems strangely to deny. L'HUMANITÉ
Throughout, one feels an obvious empathy on the part of the playwright for his characters. And for the actors, directed with the perfect balance that makes them both very real and endearing. Nasser Djemaï finds the right tone, with modesty and at the same time precise enough to deal with this particular moment of life where the exhilarating feeling that everything is possible is coupled with a deep vulnerability. LES INROCKUPTIBLES