ARCHIVES 2010 / Un mage en été

This text is a loop. It gives rise to memories and imposes itself as a return to origins, those of a trio that formed at the end of the 1990s. The writer Olivier Cadiot, the director Ludovic Lagarde and the actor Laurent Poitrenaux invented at the time The Colonel of the Zouaves. An incredible stage project in which the voice, the words, the gestures and the postures of a single immobile man are worth more than a thousand different characters and all the mad races throughout the world. With A Magus in Summer, after three shows broadened to the group, the Cadiot-Lagarde-Poitrenaux trio return to the form, solitary but peopled, of the monologue. "In this text," the author explains, "our hero Robinson no longer moves. He shuts himself up, he no longer builds huts in the trees. His island is interior, he becomes the archaeologist of his daily life." A life of a magus whose crystal ball is transformed into a tool of visions and sensations that are instantly effective: what he see, he experiences. Water flows onto his body, nature surrounds him, knowledge is within easy reach; he grasps the world, visualises it, understands it. What emerges from this is precious: a form of minimal survival through free evocations, a Proustian trip with a crumbled madeleine, a freeze-dried infusion of extreme lucidity. A show that is built on flashes of daily life, on tales of true facts. The modulated voice and the gestures that Laurent Poitrenaux deploys, the contrasting luminosity of Ludovic Lagarde's expression the writing in relief of Olivier Cadiot: the accumulation of data makes this magus one of the most dynamic and efficient tools of reflection ever. Like a machine that might have a body, a technology that might have a mind. ADB