Installation theatre video

23.24.25.26 april 09

Thursday, Friday from 7pm / Saturday from 2pm / Sunday from 2pm

Democracy? Did someone say democracy? In a world where words are sometimes liberally served up to mask the progressive loss of their meaning, Pascale Henry takes us back to the source. She gives us the voice of Alexis de Tocqueville, a 170-year old revolutionary, in her ‘words box’, a cube placed on the front yard of Les Subsistances. A way to remind ourselves that the art of using our political voice is very far from the art of saying nothing.

’’Our contemporaries are ceaselessly attracted to two opposite passions: they feel the need to be directed and the desire to remain free.’’ Alexis de Tocqueville (1840)

See synopsis (pdf in french/48KB)

Extract

’’(...) I fear, I confess, that [citizens] let themselves be owned so entirely by their coward passion for instant gratification, that the interest they have for their own future and that of their descendants will eventually disappear, and that they would rather follow passively the course of their destiny than to make a sudden and vigorous effort to redress it. We seem to believe that new societies will each day change face, but I fear that they always end up being invariably fixed in the same institutions, the same prejudices.’’

Alexis de Tocqueville

Background

Before directing and writing, Pascale Henry worked for several years as a theatre actor and participated to various musical projects. She founded Les Voisins du dessous in 1989, and gave it a singular direction with alternative texts medleys, adaptations, original plays and her own written work for theatre. This singular background was built with time, thanks to the faithful support of theatres, institutions and individuals who liked her work, which was played abroad several times (Louis Calaferte’s Un Riche trois pauvres in Syria, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Patrick Kermann’s Les Tristes Champs d’Asphodèles in Spain, and Kressmann Taylor’s Inconnu à cette adresse in Quebec). In 2008, she has worked on an adaptation of a book by Haitian author Lyonel Trouillot, Thérèse en mille morceaux. Her last project in partnership with Les Subsistances, C’est pour rire, took place in April 2007 during the Ça Monstre! WeekEnd.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was a French thinker, politician, historian and writer, who was famous for his analyses of the French Revolution, American democracy and the evolution of Western democracies in general. Democracy in America (1835 & 1840) dissects 1830’s America, its strengths and weaknesses. Tocqueville makes a detailed study in which he confronts American democracy with its own stakes and contradictions - analysing, weighing and discussing the workings of the justice system, the part played by not-for-profit organisations in the democratic game, the decentralisation of organisations, the place of religion, arts, literature, work, the individual, and the common good - all means given to the reader of today to reconsider the foundations of a democratic State and what that implies.

___________________________________________________

Cast and crew installation theatre / video

Writing and Directed by Pascale Henry.

Video by Florent Tarrieux.

With Grégory Faive, Sylvie Jobert, Anne Rauturier, Dominique Laidet.

Scenography by Michel Rose.

Lighting by Léo Van Cutsem.

Sound by Frantz Parry.

Make-up by Cathy Kuhn.

Set manager and accesories: Lellia Chimento.

Production administration: Catherine Grisard.

Cast and crew Teaser / Video

Writing and Directed by Pascale Henry.

Realisation : Florent Tarrieux.

With: Grégory Faive, Sylvie Jobert, Cathy Kuhn, Frantz Parry, Léo van Cutsem.

Thanks to

Production: Compagnie du Singe Debout.

Co-production & Residence: Les Subsistances / Lyon / France, La Maison de la Culture de Bourges. With the support of L’Espace Marcel Carné in Saint Michel sur Orge and Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers.

Price

Free

Duration

45 min approx (on repeat).

Residence

2-14 february, 11-17 march, 20-26 april 09

Tour dates

8-10 May 09: MC2 Scène nationale de Grenoble / Forum La République des idées.