Sophocles's Œdipus Rex is considered the tragedy of tragedies. It is one of the first instances of incest in European literature. A blind spot remains behind the founding myth of Western theatre: real incest and its millions of victims. What can art do in the face of incest? And what does incest, in turn, do to art, to images and to language? This question is all the more pressing given that silence is precisely what allows the ‘culture of incest’ to organise its impunity and perpetuate itself, generation after generation. Through a personal and historical investigation of great emotional power, combining the history of psychoanalysis and social sciences with a meditation on the art of theatre, Eddy D'aranjo continues his search for a renewed political theatre that blends performance and documentary – two regimes of truth serving an art determined to show reality as it is, for what it is.
Cast
dramaturgy
Volodia Piotrovitch d'Orlik
set design, costume designer
Clémence Delille
Five dates
13.8 billion years ago. Creation of the Universe (Big Bang).
3.8 billion years before present. First known traces of living organisms on Earth. Life is exclusively aquatic for 3.4 billion years.
1990 - 2000. Eddy D'aranjo grows up in Laon, Picardy. He discovers theater through a workshop at the Charlemagne secondary school, classified as a ZEP (REP+). He enrolled in his high school's theater option, which enabled him to see Edward Bond's Naître, directed by Alain Françon, at the Théâtre de la Colline - a hyper-violent show that left him shattered and transformed. The same year, he took part in a trip to the Avignon Festival, financed by the Picardie regional council. Amazed, he attended Valère Novarina's L'Acte inconnu in the Cour d'honneur, a pantheistic song dedicated to the beauty of the world and the enigma of language, and decided to become a stage director.
20 billion years from today. The Universe is torn apart. The rate of expansion of the Universe increases indefinitely. Expansion becomes so rapid that it overwhelms the electromagnetic forces holding atoms and molecules together. The electromagnetic force that holds things together no longer has any effect, and matter unbinds. Clusters of galaxies, galaxies, and eventually the solar system, are “torn apart”. Soon, even atomic nuclei decompose, and the Universe as we know it ends in an unusual gravitational singularity.
100 billion years from today. Final collapse of the Universe. In this other possible time, expansion reverses and the Universe contracts to a dense, hot “final” state.
