ARCHIVES 2015 / Hacia la alegría

An inner marathon. Built like a god of foundries, Pedro Casablanc turns out to be a long-distance runner, taking on the introspective and yet dazzling test of endurance to which Olivier Py challenges him. A race towards oblivion, which begins inside an apartment and ends among the rubbish that litters the periphery of the city. The man thus running, an architect at the height of his career, wanders the streets, questions his own professional success, lets go of what both makes and impedes him. If his trajectory is that of an exile or of a fall, his journey ends up being more of a recovery, an ascent. The political questioning about the social segregation of the city, the various forms recognition takes, and the place of art in the public space lead to a mystical and existential experience, the discovery of a primitive and rough energy. Olivier Py has found in Pedro Casablanc the manly and earthly strength necessary to anchor the first chapter of his novel Excelsior in the materiality of the stage. This opening chapter was translated for the stage into Spanish, a language whose percussion offers a concrete rhythm, accompanied by a string quartet, for the poetic race of a man towards joy.

Actor, singer, writer-poet and smuggler of poems, translating Shakespeare, director for the theatre and the opera: Olivier Py's research follows all possible paths, both inner and concrete, looking for a presence to the world, a fleeting answer to a latent anxiety. In this adventure language is the vehicle that takes him from trestles to stages, or the deck of cards from which he draws; he likes it to be both lyrical and crude, mysterious and shared. He calls on that of Aeschylus, of Claudel, of Shakespeare, or on his own, in plays that are about the theatre, about transmission, about the times, about faith. His experience as director of the Centre dramatique national d'Orléans, of the Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, then of the Festival d'Avignon, have fed and enriched his reflection about politics, power, and the world as humanity. Questions that are at the heart of his two latest creations, King Lear and Hacia la alegría.

From the glitter of Miss Knife, shimmering in cabarets, to the monumental convent of the Dialogues of the Carmelites for the opera, Pierre-André Weitz works on different scales but with the same care on the costumes and sets he designs.
Trained at the Strasbourg conservatory, where he specialised in lyrical arts, and at architecture school, he soon falls in love with scenography. He has worked with Olivier Py since 1993. Like the architect of Hacia la alegría, he refuses and challenges the immobility of matter, creating moving devices that play with space and height. Floors to inhabit, stairs to climb, facades to graffiti: Pierre-André Weitz's scenographies often allow both the actors and the audience's gaze to rise.

The project Villes en Scène/Cities on Stage, sponsored by the European Commission, mobilises seven dramatic institutions and twelve directors around the question of how to live together in big European cities. Within this framework, the Festival d'Avignon presented in 2014 Antônio Araújo's Say what you don't mean, in a language you don't speak, Emma Dante's Le sorelle Macaluso, and Gianina Cărbunariu's Solitaritate. Hacia la alegría was created at the Teatro de La Abadía in Madrid in November 2014.