Rimbaud, Hemleb, Rothenberg, Kawamata
"Z" Je me crois en enfer donc j’y suis
Theatre-Music / First Production
16-24 September 2011 at 8.30pm (no performances on the 18th)

A return journey to meet Rimbaud, through movement and hearing, was Lukas Hemleb and Ned Rothenberg’s aim. The German theatre director and American musician will allow the audience to hear Rimbaud, the forever white-hot shining star of French poetry, in a different way.
How did they manage to create a show about Rimbaud, the “never-ending dazzling light”, the “thought that never concludes”, a “true incitement to identification"?
“Rimbaud defies any interpretation”, says Lukas Hemleb. “Let’s forget the sung poetry, the reciting of his poems over a jazz or classical music background. Let’s omit the adaptations in which actors play Rimbaud and Verlaine, Rimbaud’s family or the people in his life. Disregard any device in which Rimbaud speaks in the first person. Let’s imagine instead a game with no rules, where everything breaks up and fragments, in order to rebuild itself through music. Let’s not talk about Rimbaud. Let’s imagine an alternate universe. Five people are present - two musicians and three actors who form something like a trio of travellers, spiritual jesters, smugglers, explorers [...]. We will aim to retrace Rimbaud’s impulses, his surges towards the exit door, his tendency to project towards the outside - outside society, outside Europe, outside the world itself."
Director Lukas Hemleb has worked in the theatre and opera on every major European stage. For this journey with Rimbaud, he has invited Ned Rothenberg to join him. This impossibly talented free jazz musician from New York has mapped out new roads in the study of wind instruments. Also with them is Kazuhisa Uchihashi, a Japanese guitarist producing extraordinary sounds. This will be a mad venture, an intense tour entirely dedicated to the discovery of Rimbaud’s language, its melody, its imagery: “Comme je descendais des fleuves impassibles… ”. This return trip will carry risks for those who dare give themselves body and soul to poetry.