ARCHIVES 2011 / SUN

They are six and seven years old, a boy and girl brought together by chance in a blended family. They love each other, they want to get married, they have a witness: their little five-year-old sister. That's settled, they'll fly to Africa on January 1st to fulfil their dream, in the sun. On the morning of December 31st, leaving their parents asleep in bed, they leave the suburbs of Hanover for the airport... This is a true story that happened in Germany two years ago. It is what the journalists call "a short news item". In the theatre, it can become a tale because the news item not only reveals the private side of a life, but also the state of a whole society. Cyril Teste and his companions from the Collectif MxM seize upon this incredible attempt at a love journey, this desire for new horizons, to build a show that questions one of our most secret personal territories: that of childhood. Mixing journalistic documents, literary texts and interviews, film materials and visual elements, they organize a space in which, through a happy tale without danger or fear, a universe springs out from the deepest part of our memories. Words and images contributing to make a poem in which the children are the heroes. A theatre poem that describes the world from a child's viewpoint, without innocence but with complete freedom. A documentary poem that does not reject the most contemporary technologies, those that enable the space-time of the stage to open up in an attempt to recover the buried part of these moments when everything seemed possible, between dreams and reality. Here, art listens to the children's words. It does not seek sensationalism but the truth of a story, its undeniable character and its sincerity. An atypical love story, of dazzling and disquieting simplicity that skilfully invites us to rethink what we are and what makes us what we are. JFP