ARCHIVES 2015 / No World / FPLL

No World / FPLL is a documentary play based on texts, gestures, images, postures, noises, and archetypes taken from reality. The Winter Family duo paint the picture of the democratic, wired, white, and “so-called multicultural” world that surrounds us, and in which we take part. A world in which the overabundance of information, food, images, and sounds can lead to an embarrassing and exhausting feeling of numbness. Winter Family zooms in on our daily banalities with an optimistic irony that highlights our discomfort when faced with this never-ending and blinding flow, and the void it creates. Mimicking TED Talks, Ruth Rosenthal and her accomplices—English performer Johanna Allitt, French b-boy Mamadou Gassama, and Lotharingian lecturer Guy-Marc Hinant—take us on a poetic-documentary journey, with numerous pauses to reflect on those anecdotal images we cannot zap away from. No heavy-handed message, no indoctrination, but a desire to share this world by diving deep into the circles of a new purgatory, like a modern Dante. 

Israeli artist Ruth Rosenthal and musician Xavier Klaine met in Jaffa in 2004. Since then, they've been wandering the world, from New York to Paris, from Jerusalem to Lotharingia, and composing music. They have recorded three albums since 2008, but they also like to work with other artists, performers, composers, choreographers, videographers, or photographers. Their first documentary play, Jerusalem Cast Lead, won the Festival Impatience award in Paris in 2011, before being shown at the Festival d'Avignon in 2012 and elsewhere. In 2010, they were awarded a grant by the Villa Médicis-Hors les murs, and left for New York to begin their research inspired by Jean Gottmann's “Iconography and Circulation”. They decided to settle there and ended up spending two years in Brooklyn's Caribbean neighbourhood. Active in the life of the local community, they collected images, texts, and sounds. At the Festival d'Avignon in 2012, they composed the music for Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, directed by Arthur Nauzyciel, and came up with the idea for a concert they called Brothers, with texts in Hebrew and in English read over an organ in the temple Saint-Martial. They now live in Tel-Aviv.