Myth and Theatre Festival

Qui cache son fou meurt sans voix
Hide your fool and you’ll die voiceless

The English “fool” is not as mad as the French “fou”, though both can put on the costumes of buffoon, clown and jester (“professional entertainer or an amusing lunatic on the payroll”), who mock king and court, usually from a ‘deformance’ position: insane, hunchback, dwarf, red-nosed.

These figures are welcome but our main task will be to call on our own particular craziness in order to escape from the prison of our “selves”, escape the tyranny of our self-composed dignities. In a very peculiar way : to make a fool of our king/queen-selves…

Extravaganza – O.E.Dictionary : “1754, with reference to peculiar behaviour, 1794 of a fantastic type of performance or writing”.

Folie à Deux

Since 2007, I have directed a yeary series of soli by artists who trained with PANTHEATRE ACTS. 2011 saw a record of five new productions! The methodogical reference is "folie a deux" - which I define in the program of Maryline Guiton’s Une Etrange Demoiselle (An Odd Young Lady), 2007:

Folie a deux means devising a performance on the basis of openly fusional exchanges, appropriating and dreaming each other’s ideas along, so that in the end fantasies become autonomous. Two historians of psychoanalysis, Mikkael Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani wrote a book of merciless criticism against Freud’s methods. They speak of "folie a deux": how Freud "planted" his ideas in patients in order to then "discover" scientific evidence of his hypothesis. In reading their fierce dismantling of Freud's famous clinical cases, I thought: "this is exactly how I proceed with artistic creation"! Influences, suggestions, appropriations, transfers, projections - but with enough "contractual" detachment and humorous complicity for each one to play his or her role in devising the final result.