with Lumîr Brabant, Vincent Dissez, Théo Oliveira Machado, Cécile Péricone and the dog Mésa

Noëmie Ksicova’s theatrical work unfolds, with modesty, in the area of memory, loss, and trace. In her third show, the young director adapts a novel by Stig Dagerman, A Burnt Child. When his mother dies, a twenty-year old son turns his pain into violence and directs it towards the world, with a very adolescent bad faith and restlessness. In the letters he writes to himself, he unloads his fantasies of purity. In his everyday life, he engages in a love-hate fight with his father, and slowly materializes his incestuous impulses. Without judging or indulging, but with much tenderness, Noëmie Ksicova finds her balance on the crest of an unfathomable rupture — or burn. The father, the son, his girlfriend and a fourth character joining them later go around each other in circles in a touching ballet of bodies. Inspired by Bergman’s films, the show orchestrates the weight of absence in the hollow of unsaid things and of gestures choreographed with a musical specificity. It thereby conjures up, on stage and through sound, the dead next to the living.

Cast

adaptation Noëmie Ksicova
set design Anouk Dell’ Aiera
lighting Nathalie Perrier
musical composition, sound design Bruno Maman
sound, sound design collaboration Mélissa Jouvin
costumes Caroline Tavernier
dramaturgy Aurélien Patouillard
translation Élisabeth Backlund
training, accompanying the dog Victorine Reinewald
assistant director Antoine Hirel
collaborators Jean-Philippe Bocquet, Marine Mussillon, Carole Willemot

production Compagnie Ex-Oblique

coproduction Comédie de Reims - centre dramatique national, Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, Maison de la Culture d'Amiens - pôle européen de création et production, Le Phénix - scène nationale Valenciennes pôle européen de création, Théâtre du Beauvaisis - scène nationale

with the help of the Hauts-de-France region the Ex-Oblique company is supported by the Ministry of Culture - Hauts-de-France regional directorate of cultural affairs

L'Enfant brûlé is published by Gallimard

creation in November 2023

Biography of Noëmie Ksicova

Trained at INSAS in Brussels, Noëmie Ksicova first worked as an actress, and began writing and directing in 2013. In 2014 she founded the company Ex-Oblique, based in Picardy. Her intimate theatre examines the way in which our ghosts constantly and absolutely beckon to us from the other side of the river. Also a violinist, she maintains a strong relationship with music in her dramaturgy. Rapture, created in 2017 and partly inspired by Ravissement de Lol. V. Stein by Marguerite Duras, questions the question of memory. Loss, which she wrote and directed in 2020, focuses on the question of mourning. At the same time, she created Saturne with disabled actors from the Compagnie de l'Oiseau-Mouche in Roubaix.