Gisèle Vienne This is how you will disappear

[Theatre]

Premiered at the Festival d’Avignon in 2010, This is how you will disappear takes us increasingly deeper into the heart of a forest the atmosphere of which changes over the course of the play. Three figures appear – a young athlete, his coach and a rock star. An epic tableau which evokes the internalized struggle between our intimacy and society.

The experience – amongt those which leave their mark on the audience – begins with an immense forest of abounding naturalism. It is a landscape in which various metorlogical phenomena unfurl and subsequently overturn the playing space, as well as our perception and sensation of it, resulting in shifts from beauty linked to order towards that linked to chaos. The conflictual articulations of these two oppposites enter into resonance with the three characters: a coach represents authority, and is the guarantor of a form of order which serves the purposes of a domination-based system, and the abuses it engenders; a young female gymnast embodies beauty linked to culturally-constructed perfection; and a young rock star embodies that linked to ruin. This is how you will disappear evokes these cultural ideals and apparently contradictory canons of beauty rooted in our contemporary culture. The piece brings to the stage the internalized struggle between our intimacy and society's will to express itself via these representations.