Festival des Francophonies en Limousin. International francophone theatre in all its diversity.

 

This new international festival in Limoges  created in  1984 by Pierre DeBauche after the Avignon Festival refused to accept a production of  Shakespeare  proposed by Martinique, put in place a  new  relationship with international Francophone  theatre. One could  say that Aimé Césaire’s first decision in Martinique, to create the Théâtre de la Soif nouvelle in  1982, giving voice to the Negritude in companies around the world,  gave a serious impetus to the creation of the festival in Limoges.

 

Monique Blin became the director of the new Festival in France with the support of director Patrick Le Muff who returned again this year (2018) to present a play by Nathalie Sarraute- Pour un oui ou un non, in a production with a  creole-speaking cast of   mixed ethnicity  from Martinique, the sign that times have  certainly changed.

The festival has become an enormous international event which  receives  not only former French colonies who are now independent but all countries where French is one of the official vehicular languages. Coproductions are developed among all the countries involved and some of the most important names in contemporary theatre have resulted from the collaborations established within the festivals. Artists such as Denis Marleau, Carole Frechette, Wajdi Mouawad and Robert Lepage  from Quebec;  as well as  Slimane Ben Aïssa, Mohamed Kacimi,  from Algeria,  Jean-Luc Raharimanana from Madagascar,   and many many others  were recognized by the festival. .

This year’s  director  Marie –Agnès  Sylvestre whose mandate comes to an end, will be replaced in 2019 by Hassane Kassi  Kouyaté .  Originally from  Burkina Faso,  Kouyaté is an established actor, director, dancer, musician,  theatre manager, a griot and story teller and artistic director of a company  Deux Temps Trois Mouvements ,  who has worked with African theatre companies and was acting for the Tarmac and  other companies in France .    Since 2014 he has been artistic director of Tropiques Atrium, the ,’National  Theatre ’  in Fort de France where he has reestablished  actor training across the Caribbean  by local professionals and individuals invited from Europe, ,and directed many plays which were also shown in France-Europe  at the Theatre du Tarmac in Paris. http://capitalcriticscircle.com/quatre-heures-du-matin-theatre-martiniquais-au-tarmac.

Kouyaté’s  new presence this year in Limoges is an  important sign because it is the first time an artist of African origin has been selected to direct the festival,  showing how that event is  finally  the real voice of all cultural origins which brings together  many languages including French as the defining one .

This year’s festival featured among others,  a striking  work by Haitian writer Faubert Bolivar ,  representing a sample of the multiply sponsored coproductions  that are emerging from  the festival:  Sainte Dérivée des Trottoirs.  (the Holy Spirit from the  sidewalks– a personal  translation ).  An  extraordinary actor (Vladimir Delva) who performed the 50 minute  monologue,  also worked on added portions in créole with director Alice Leclerc who imagines the presence of a grotesquely exciting creature drowned in garbage, whose physical  and  visual existence is apparently not indicated in much detail  by stage directions  thus the  staging team had almost as much  input as the writer.

The result  is  a ritual and a breathtaking performance based on the syncretic origins of Haitian culture.   The choice of the performance space,  the Bishop’s garden behind  the Cathedral,  becomes a place of wild transgression and the meeting of figures from the Voodoo Pantheon with the Catholic traditions of Europe.  The Vévés, figures drawn in the sand  defining the presence of the Loa  Erzulie, incarnated by Delva as he emerges from an ominous  pile of leftovers behind the  Cathedral. Garbage, bits of wire, tin cans, papers, dirt, plastic and all manner of left overs, suddenly glow with a strange  ethereal light. .   And then “it” appears screaming, spitting howling, screeching,  a creature performing its  delirium, its rage. As it calls out to the audience   in French and Creole  damning  her/his mother, her  father , vomiting outrage against the world,  screaming against the stupidity, the poverty, the cruelty  in the world in his search for identity which is incarnated by his ambiguous gender presence on the stage.  A highly disturbing and surprising first  contact  which becomes  a form of syncretic  resurrection as this holy woman in all her raging splendor splashed with  filth, a Christ-like figure associated with Erzulie, the Loa of love  and seduction  who protects children, the leading figure of the Voodoo  pantheon drags her  long veil of clunking  garbage behind her as she rises out of her “alter” and starts to move across the garden, following  the paths of the glowing alters and all the Haitian symbols drawn in  the sand.

The performance thus becomes a ritual of self-immolation  that refers constantly to the  ‘rara’  where this ambivalent figure  representing all the ‘damned of the earth’ loses her saintly garb and becomes an almost naked male figure, exposing the real body of the actor, a Haitian Saint Genêt,  devoid of its religious hypocrisy and horror .  The final moment is expected because not even a Loa could survive this world of  violence where  biblical passages,  Christian sermons, and the seductive words of Erzulie are insufficient to denounce  the obscenity of our current reality.  The figure leading the procession takes on the allures of a fallen prophet, denouncing corruption, guiding the public towards its disturbing destiny in a magnificent poetry of destitution, sending us forward to an unavoidably tragic ending.

Faubert Bolivar, of Haitian origin, is an author who is quickly making a name for himself in the region.  Recently he won the prize for a new play awarded by  the Guadeloupe based group “Textes en paroles”;  he also obtained  the SACD  prize in France  (Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques ) which often insures the future of a playwright.

The rara, a voodoo  ritual in  the middle of the  night,  also transforms  the author’s rage into a  demonstration of political theatre founded on forms proposed by Piscator  (agit-prop 1930s ) turning  the  procession into a site of political  agitation and propaganda  that was especially  important in the USA during the anti-Viet-Nam war demonstrations  in the 1960’s  and 70’s .The author’s rage could even be equated with a current  political rage that is polarizing the country. The result is all the more fascinating because this director was able to bring together multiple cultural and political visions that renew all the references usually associated with those events.  Keep your  eye on this playwright!

Limoges, October  2018