Felix, dancing in silence, rappel

Maître,

C'est depuis le Japon, ou je suis « en résidence » jusqu'à la fin de l'année, que je t'écris.

On n'a toujours pas terminé la documentation du projet pilote berlinois, Gisela et moi. Pourtant le temps presse car c'est une obligation et les sponsors commencent à s'impatienter (je les comprends...)

On a déjà préparé un rapport assez exhaustif. Mais ce serait bien, et souhaitable, que d'autres voix y soient à entendre, de ceux qui, d'une manière ou d'une autre, ont collaboré le long de cette aventure.
Donc, toi !

Je voulais donc te demander l'autorisation d'utiliser la lettre que tu avais écrite après ton intervention, assez turbulente, en automne 2008. Je te mets en pièce jointe la version traduite, légèrement raccourcie, qu'on avait envoyée aux étudiants à l'époque.

Dis-moi qu'est-ce que t'en penses !

Bien cordialement,
fa






Mais bien sûr. Il n'est pas mal, ce texte que je relis dans ta traduction. Peut-être le name-dropping Nureyev, Callas, Picasso mériterait un peu de précision... Ou, au moins, supprimer Picasso de la liste... Bien qu'après tout, j'y pense, Philippe Katerine dans la chanson Mort-vivant de son dernier album ne m'associe-t-il pas à ces divinités, à ces idoles ? (Avec Michael Jackson aussi et Marcel Duchamp...) Ou alors on rajoute Rimbaud (tant qu'à faire) :



Vis et laisse au feu
L'obscure infortune.



J'étais à Berlin il y a dix jours pour voir le nouveau travail de Laurent Chétouane, lui, vraiment, pour moi, au niveau des étoiles... c'est-à-dire de la vraie vie. (Le monde est vicieux ; / Si cela t'étonne !) Je pourrais aussi dire pourquoi...

T'embrasse de Marseille où je présente un spectacle sur le cinéma qui flirte aussi avec l'absolu Walter Benjamin : Haschich à Marseille

Yvno






Letter form Y-N G to the HÜZ-STudente, October 2008
Das nachfolgend in Auszügen zitierte Schreiben geht auf eine ausführliche Email-Korrespondenz zwischen Genod und der Studiengangsleitung zurück und wurde nach Abschluß des Projekts an die Teilnehmenden versandt:



« […] the experience has been very conclusive. On 17 October, at the 2nd and last performance, the students have shown a great calmness, concentration, an absence of panic and something which can be called joy – maybe not for each and every one of them, but still. […] This success, this opening now allows me to put some principles on the table which I have always incurred during the rehearsal work, and whose full meaning I now see glaringly apparent. For instance Anna: She played the out of tune piano. On the general, it just didn’t work (horrible); on the last night outstandingly gracious, even unforgettable. Same instrument (out of tune), same person (somehow out of tune as well), and still a difference of day and night. […] Terror on the first night, confidence during the second. And the world has changed all over. […] Of course for each case, each person, for each scene, each moment the good solution needs to be found, and this will always have to be the empirical one, the intuitive one, the one which works and helps to overcome difficulties and dead ends. For it is all about making theatre something easy, an art to get into (otherwise why should you present it in public?). But there are some principles without which I could not even imagine to do anything in this métier. To bring into being something – and I am now speaking strictly of theatre – motor and fuel will always be pleasure, and nothing but pleasure. Pleasure and opening up rooms for pleasure. Pleasure to a point the students will hardly be able to even imagine (even though the last night was something like a glimpse into this possible pleasure …). The pleasure of Rudolf Nureyev, of Maria Callas, of Pablo Picasso. It is all the same. Confidence. Forgetting about the idea « to take a risk » and even any kind of « confrontation » and « difficulty ». « Only do what you know to do », is what I keep saying to my actors. And this is what I asked the students as well. Most of which, in the beginning, told me that they didn’t know to do anything. Which of course is not true. […]
I know my métier, I know like Klaus Michael Grüber, that « actors are capable of marvellous things, but they are so afraid. All the work consists of calming this fear. » All the work. Of a stage director. I know. No other work. […] Calming the actors, be they students, for them to be able to just “act” so as to invoke beauty; beauty which might also be invoked (and in the very same moment) by the spectators who might not even be aware of this.
[…] For Felix, dancing in silence, we had two very nice audiences, especially on the second night, when the spectators were younger, more open towards surprise, more curious. The students gave proof that they know how to seize such circumstances to come into being. Another step would be to learn and understand that in a certain sense all circumstances are in favour. That you can always bathe in confidence – in space, in air, as part of humankind. It is nothing but reality. This is what we would work on if I were to come back; it is what gave us the firm impression that work could now really get started … after such an incredibly slow beginning which made me think at times that we might never understand the fact that rather than dealing with slowness, with « form » and with resistance, it was all about swiftness and informal, which is to say with love, and it is this perspective, from the Greek amphitheatre of nature and sun which opens up a blessed path… »

Yves-Noël Genod, 19 October 2008 (translated 25 October 2008).



Franz Anton Cramer