Théâtre National de Bretagne
Direction Arthur Nauzyciel
Text by Joëlle Gayot / Translation by Jonas Parson
On 19th November at 21:00, at the Aire Libre theatre in Saint-Jacques-de-la-Lande, Yoann Bourgeois’ Paroles impossibles (Impossible voices) would have led you from deception to deception.
The long parade of your disillusions and frustrations would have slowly driven you to a paradoxical state of inner delight. It might even have given a small taste of vengeance to your other self, hidden inside you and forced to silence, but who can’t stand obeying yet another of our modern world’s injunctions, summed up with the following 3 words: efficacy, assurance, performance. Those are the keys to individual and social success in today’s world, as we are reminded at every waking moment of our life.
But are they really? Is that what our dreams are made of? If the show doesn’t hand us any answers, it has the merit of asking the questions while drawing out the following hypothesis on the booby-trapped chessboard of a defeated art-form: to fail is not to fall but to take flight. It is not the end of anything but the promise of things yet to come. It isn’t mute but eloquent, not sad but jubilant. It isn’t empty but full.
Yoann Bourgeois, creator and actor of Paroles impossibles would have demonstrated an old intuition: “There is truth only in relation to failure”. Never faltering in the face of sacrifice, he would have turned his body into the (purposefully altered) instrument with which he would have proven such a belief. A demonstration on a stage where our failing hero would have accumulated failures: a hampered show, thwarted speeches, a wobbly set, an unstable acrobat. Accidents and mishaps would have forged a poetics of catastrophe developed with such frivolity that it could only have provoked laughter. Hysterical laughter.
Caught behind the wheel of his car as he was driving back from the Jura, Yoann Bourgeois quotes Valère Novarina: “We must precisely try to say that which we cannot talk about”. We mention Samuel Becket and his famous "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." Caught between these two aporias, our interlocutor suddenly fades into nothingness. No more signal, lost contact.
Decidedly, naming a show promised to invisibility by COVID-19 and to (temporary) silence by the incidents of a hazardous 4G phone network Impossible voices is to take your subject matter quite literally and to flesh it out in ways reality can’t rival. Truly, better to laugh of what eludes us, as at the moment just about everything eludes us. Such is probably the similar (and salutary) conclusion that this show – that you will not have seen as planned on 19th November at 21:00 – should and would have led you to.