Gestures

Synopsis

It seems that Topazia has inherited a circular room in which she wants to open a bar. Well, what she really wants is to perform again, but it’s easier to bring people to a bar than to a theatre, which makes sense, as a beer never disappoints. So she will open the bar and put a stage in it.

It seems that Sergio will help her put together a tribute to the Italian singer Mina. He directs her gestures. It seems that he is her boyfriend, but it is not clear. A man with eyes of ancient terror seems to appear suddenly. It seems that this arrival is causing some concern for everyone. 

There also seems to be a young pianist. And an old dancer. They seem to come from another time and it seems that this time is jumping, flickering.

Something seems to be going on with the gestures. As if they were also jumping. -Are they blinking?- They have shifted, it seems, as in an earthquake that now shakes the senses. Nobody knows any more whether they do what they do because they want to or whether they just repeat what someone else has done before.

It seems that what went before is relative. That it cannot be determined whether what happens precedes or follows what follows. Or what things were lost in the blink of an eye.

It seems that someone has been in Rome. And that time there unfolds and folds back. And that after Rome, everything is not enough.

That seems to be all that can be said, for the moment, about this work.

Writer and director’s note

Each new play is an attempt to understand something more about the specificity of theatre. To provoke an experience that makes the most sense there. And as theatre is a laboratory of the world, each new play is an attempt to understand something more about life. Each new work is an attempt at the impossible. “We’re not going to make it, but we’re going to go.”

This attempt is about gestures. About what we do, what happens to us. 

The focus on gestures is also the focus on what cannot be written. In what the theatre has of the extra-literary. In what acquires meaning in incarnation, in presence. In the things the body does as a result of putting itself in relation to something else. 

The procedures that will form the backbone of the question will be repetition and displacement. Make the gesture. Return to the gesture. Repetition as superposition. Repetition as a tool for accessing knowledge of the body. Or, as Bazin wrote, repetition as an intensity, as an eternity.

To return to the gesture is to return to the place. A folding of time?  On Déjà vu as a dramatic procedure. “The gestures are already all repeated / There is nothing of today that is not an echo.”

But also the search – the desire – for an unattainable gesture. Newborn. As Didi Huberman wrote, a gesture that opens a night. That transcends the things of the day.

A mobile stillness, holding the future in the present? A suspension, like that of the body searching for the word it has forgotten?

Pablo Messiez