Sylvain Creuzevault Les Tourmentes

In Les Tourmentes, Construire un feu (To Build a Fire) based on the short story by Jack London, Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard based on the poem by Stéphane Mallarmé and Au désert, Les Tourmentes form a sequence of short pieces focussing on the work of the actors involved. Onstage we see individuals pitting themselves against hostile, natural spaces. Under Sylvain Creuzevault’s direction, the various trajectories we see before us on the stage are representations of pain - in all its various shapes and sizes.

In the Les Tourmentes series, Sylvain Creuzevault inaugurates a period of work based on short pieces, presented to us as “animated paintings” or “living nature” (similar to quicklime), using two, three or four actors. The origins of this project, in which we witness men and women “confronting nature as a form of punishment”, stem from a need to expose, using a minimum of words, what we inflict upon ourselves and what we go through in the process. I am guilty and Les Tourmentes are my judges. Here, the stormy seas portrayed in Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous poem Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard become the basis for an opera libretto, composed by Pierre-Yves Macé. Nature is also presented in its frozen, glacial-like state, of the kind we encounter in Jack London’s To Build a Fire. Or we might encounter a parched desert, waiting to be crossed... These natural phenomena become allegories for our intimate combats, from which we hope to emerge fully restored. Paradoxically, through the means of theatre the director seeks to render these allegories “as mild and gentle as possible”... and in doing so, perhaps, to revive theatre’s capacity for collective consolation.