ARCHIVES 2015 / Forbidden di sporgersi

Pierre Meunier takes his faithful teammates on a new adventure, in which they land on the banks of the great inner world unfolded by Babouillec in Algorithme éponyme (Eponymous Algorithm). Called “disoriented” ever since she was a child, this young autistic writer travels other paths than the ones society chooses for us. Her poem, untroubled, like her thinking, by social niceties, gleefully explores the relationship between the freedom of her neurons and the order necessary to any contact with the outside world, with the others and their norms. Struck by the vital energy it contains, Pierre Meunier, working with Marguerite Bordat, chose it to fuel an electric, mechanical, and acrobatic carnival of busted-up engines. Always more likely to find poetry in what's not quite right rather than in what runs smoothly and fascinated by what in the banal is astonishing, the director bravely defies the interdiction to lean outside the window and to leave the tracks. With Forbidden di sporgersi, we might just glimpse the end of the tunnel, and get a better look at what, within ourselves, whirls, boasts, and gallops. Composer, scenographer, dancer, actors, and guitarist all explore this inner cosmos, whose darkness turns out to be illuminating.

 Pierre Meunier began his career by a detour that took him through circus rings, where he first began negotiating with gravity. With lightness in mind, he was already looking for the balance between matter and laughter. Working with the greatest and most demanding clowns and directors, he came to consider the stage as a place to try to reach an active state of dreaming. Once he had the audacity to create his own shows, he therefore decided to increase the number of physical laws with which to play. 
Those laws of gravity, friction, resilience, order, and disorder change the way we think about other laws, those that preside over the world, our thoughts, and human relationships. Poetic in their rhythm, their action, and the surprises they create, they are at once different and inspired by the expert formulas and experimental processes of the scientific domain, with which Pierre Meunier is as familiar as he is mistrustful of them. Always on the lookout for norms and their dysfunctions, he likes to look at things with fresh eyes and be joyfully surprised by what at first glance seems inert.

A scenographer as well as a costume, puppet, and mask designer, Marguerite Bordat has worked with Joël Pommerat, Bérangère Vantusso, Éric Lacascade, Pierre-Yves Chapalain, and Lazare. After joining the Belle Meunière for the creation of Le Tas in 2001, she has become a precious member of the crew; as the look-out, she warns the others of reefs in their way and points to lanes that will allow for reinvention. She now forms with Pierre Meunier the dreamy duo in charge of the conception of their dramatic adventures.

If Hélène Nicolas chooses to add to her pen name, Babouillec, the title “autistic and wordless,” it might be to better highlight just how original her writing is, devoid of words that have already been heard and reused and have thus lost all meaning. Her inner life, which she preciously kept a secret until she turned twenty, manifested itself when Babouillec let slip that she could read and write. Thus began a game between her and the common code that is the alphabet. In her own incredible way, Babouillec expresses the risk and the pleasure the artist feels when a path, and a voice, finally open up...