Avignon: "Pure present", Olivier Py in all its fervor – Arts and scenes

The patron of the Avignon festival stages, in the style of a caf 'con' minimalist, the confused violence faced by a jailed prisoner, a chaplain, a king and the executioner of finance. Dare and febrile.

He has a brave courage Olivier Py. Impose against and against all his poetic and mystical universe in a society that is hardly any more poetic nor mystical. And who apparently does not care about the sacred, the redemption and transcendence … Unless the tremendous and incredible national fervor that we have just experienced around the victory of France at the World Cup football is the sign a need for ritual communion that is ignored

The happy patron of the Avignon festival – a 72nd edition of the year 2018 courageous and of quality even if a little quiet and curiously without real reaction of the public – so recidivates. In a new and beautiful place, La Scierie, he stages his last triology, Pure Present (1), constantly accompanied on the upright piano; a kind of tragedy caf 'conc' on trestles of wood, where Guilhem Fabre égrenne Ravel or Wagner (among others). From the theater of intervention to the minimalist scenography imagined by Pierre-André Weitz and suitable to be played everywhere, light lit in the Brechtian tradition, or the fairground and committed to the Baraca Federico Garcia Lorca in the 1930s, or of Dario Fo and his companion Franca Rame in 1960s Italy … Except that in these three short pieces where a trinity of magnificent and daring actors – Dali Benssalah, Najim Boudjenah Joseph Fourez – enchain the characters and say with astonishing simplicity, a radical truth, the feverish verb of the tormented poet who often knows to be Olivier Py.

To say the present socio-economic-political badbadin of the years 2020 and the guilt no less badbadins that it generates and transmits in all the society, the patron of the Avignon festival has remembered here his translations and staged of the tragic Greek Aeschylus, by the villages of Prov and his theater workshops with prisoners. His ever flamboyant writing is less fretwork, more effective, acute than usual.

Pure Present is a cry – or a prayer? – in three autonomous acts, possibly independent. Three men – a jailed captive, a chaplain, a king and executioner of finance – wildly tear down the violence and distress of our today.

Olivier Py has documented, informed. Between two spiritually inspired dialogues, he delivers us a precise statement of our Western finances, our international economies … And this tragedy always recommenced, especially, fathers and sons who haunts from the beginning all his theater. and blood of torture Paul Claudel as thug Jean Genet, his characters sulphurous, dangerous, poisonous yet questioned leitmotiv on this generous question: "how to live worthily? "

Prisoner, chaplain, banker, masked rebel, all want to overtake, transcend, sublimate this reality in rout that never ceases to hurt us, to attack us. The theater of Olivier Py dares to ask these big and broad questions that one hardly dares to formulate. Often for fear of ridicule. His theater raises thought, nourishes it. And even if certain dialogues would flirt with the grandiloquence and the excess of a reflection very marked by a dolorous Christianity, one is happy, always and always, that such ambition exists, such madness, such an ethical requirement on our scenes. 19659003] (1) Pure Present is published by Actes Sud-Papiers.