ARCHIVES 2010 / L'Orchestre perdu

The orchestra is the ideal place in which the breath of the group and individual talent blend so that, beyond the score of each instrumentalist, the collective work can be heard. In The Lost Orchestra, Christophe Huysman's idea is to bring together interpreters who, using the most diverse forms imaginable, crossing decomposed and recomposed universes, recount the difficulty of living in a world "where everyone has a hard time getting together", as he says. From tragedy to vaudeville, from musical melodrama to burlesque, everything is grist for the mill to multiply the accesses to a show universe, which recalls how urgent it is to talk about humanity in a society in which it has increasingly less of a legitimate place. A theatre of excess, a theatre of freedom but also a theatre of reflection, Christophe Huysman's work orders disorder, separates speech and the body, looks for all the possible ways to name and to express. It is this searching theatre that the author-director proposes to us, to go beyond the trompe-l'œil and assert the original paradox of the theatre, which must lie to reach the greatest truth. Present on the stage, he imagines, with the other interpreters, the how-to-do and the how-to-say, encourages them to take risks, to go beyond themselves, to accept imbalance, following the example of his texts made up of fragments, alternating dialogues and monologues. He is a poet who speaks about the world, who attempts to describe the indescribable without wanting to simplify it or make it acceptable, who invites us on a journey with, for guides, the characters of this "lost orchestra" with its many bodies and interchangeable roles. Mother, daughter, friend, banker, politician, solider, survivor, assassin and victims: they are all brought together to be the thousand faces of "unlikely" humanity in which "the hope of the collective nevertheless subsists". JFP