Théâtre National de Bretagne
Direction Arthur Nauzyciel
A CONDITIONAL APPARITION OF "MANUEL LITTÉRAIRE DU RETOUR EN FORÊT"
(THE LITERARY GUIDE TO RECONNECTING WITH THE WOODS)
Text by Joëlle Gayot / Translation by Jonas Parson
If you’d discovered – as planned on 20th November at 21:00 – the Literary guide to reconnecting with the woods, Nicolas Richard and Alexis Fichet would have teleported you from the enclosed space of the Triangle venue to deep into the forests surrounding Rennes.
It is in these spaces colonised by modernity (from planes overhead to passing joggers) that the two creators of this bucolic and rather animistic project chose to set their camera and film, season after season (summer being their favourite), the thrilling life of the woods and capture the intimacy of the life that thrives there, hidden from the hurried eye but obvious to those who take the time to let the microscopic come to them.
A huge sheet hangs as a backdrop to the stage. On this eco-certified screen, videos play one after the other. Images of the two actors filmed in the middle of the forest. In front of the sheet, on a stage scattered with books, you would have found the same actors, arguing with their on-screen alter-egos. They would have picked from the pages of the books the philosophical, sociological, anthropological and poetic matter of their reflexions, slaloming from Bruno Latour to Carlos Castaneda via Henry David Thoreau or Anna Tsing, a professor of anthropology who wrote an essay about “The mushroom at the end of the world”, in other words a mushroom growing in destroyed forests, letting the American thinker theorise the possible reconstruction of worlds in the ruins of capitalism.
Such was one of the radiant ambitions of the play: to remind us, through the comings and goings of a show which doesn’t go from a space of beauty towards disaster but follows the opposite path, that from the worst the best can grow. And to show the beauty too often hidden from our hurried senses. Take the following scene which you should have seen unfold on stage: Nicolas, perched in a jumble of branches, starts by only perceiving the obvious (the verticality of the tree trunks, the brown earth of the ground), before slowly discovering a multitude of subtle details: nuanced colours, the smells of the humus, bird songs, ephemeral shapes created by the capricious wind blowing through the branches.
It can feel as if, according to Alexis Fichet, we are “watched by a forest”. No need to believe that the forest has a soul. You only have to consider it as a thinking being which as such deserves our respect. It happened to this creator (in no way a gentle crackpot) to be charmed by a horse hanging from a tree. An optical illusion which lasts as long as it does but feels good as it occupies the mind. To do good was one of the main purposes of this Literary guide to reconnecting with the woods, which will have been, we will concede, impossible to describe in the conditional, so strongly does it fulfil our need for immersion in haunted, living, thinking forests.