ARCHIVES 2014 / 2014 comme possible

2014 as possibilities is the second part of a cycle that began in 2013 with youths from Paris and its suburbs around the theme “Adolescence and Territory(-ies)” that Olivier Py and Paul Rondin asked Didier Ruiz to explore. Working with teenagers on the stage of the Ateliers Berthier confirmed what Didier Ruiz had intuited: the territories that are at stake in teenagers' words are much more often intimate rather than geographic. Transposing this experiment from Paris and its periphery to Avignon and its southern neighbourhoods means going beyond the simple dichotomy between interior and exterior. The battlements on which stand the fifteen teenagers from Avignon participating in the show are not made out of stone. They are the walls that cause one's mental space to shrink, that let prejudices take over one's mind, that lead to believing that the questions of youth aren't shared by everyone regardless of age, or aren't worth being heard. By questioning on stage their relationship to one another, but also to themselves, to their bodies, to love, and to their own mortality, they become at once actors and witnesses of what makes them unique individuals. A group arises from this shared realisation of the unique characteristics of those that make it up, of the worth of each individual, and of the fact that they all deserve to be heard. From then on, self-affirmation stops to be a struggle to become a way to simply and fully exist in the world.

In 1999, Didier Ruiz was standing on the stage of the Théâtre Ouvert in Paris, when he suddenly decided to go outside and see if the stories that unfolded there weren't more interesting than the ones he told as an actor. Leaving the stage, he brought back something that you usually won't find there: the word of the real. He then began a first series of shows, Dale Recuerdos (I Think About You), which reaches this year its twenty-sixth chapter, and which calls on the memories of the old. In the tales thus brought to light, Didier Ruiz finds what is sacred in the theatre: the truth of the present as it is being told. For for the artistic director of the Compagnie des Hommes, the mission of the theatre, whether it deals with the real or with fiction, is always the same: to give to see and hear our shared humanity. The theatre is where we turn off the lights, put someone under the spotlight, and listen to him or her. With those he calls “the innocents” as well as with the “professional liars” that are actors, Didiez Ruiz is a director in the strictest sense of the word; he accompanies the voices and bodies of those he brought together on stage, adjusting the frame around them so that the landscapes each of them holds within can unfold properly. Like those of a portrait painter, the works of Didier Ruiz cause a double discovery: the subject of the painting is surprised by the extent of what it reveals, and the one looking at it is moved to see his own interiority reflected in it.

Marion Canelas, avril 2014