ARCHIVES 2016 / Interview

There's no way to escape the journalistic exercise that is the interview in our world oversaturated with media. Politicians and artists, athletes and anonymous people all have to subject themselves to it, in a never-ending whirlwind of information. Whether it be intrusive or complaisant, combative or friendly, posthumous or imaginary, solemn or burlesque, the interview is all about playing a role. It is a theatre stage and a dancefloor on which two subjectivities meet. But at a time when everything is but chatter, what matters is to allow truths to arise, words that can break away from conformism and banality thanks to that unique art Plato called maieutics. It is those diverse styles, that interrogation about questioning itself that Nicolas Truong, himself a journalist well-versed in the exercise, wants us to hear. From Foucault to Duras, from Pasolini to Deleuze, but also from Bernard Pivot to Thierry Ardisson and from Florence Aubenas to Svetlana Alexievitch, it is an entire universe of interviewers and interviewees that are made to speak again, those who are used to asking the questions now asked about their successful interviews and failed encounters. On the stage of the Tinel of the Charterhouse, the audience will get to hear how what often starts as standardised language can shift into embodied dialogue. Unconcerned with naturalism and uninterested in reconstitution, Interview is all about playing and struggling, about deconstruction and reconstruction, about our imagination. From shameless lies to uncontrollable confusion, from complicity to aggressiveness, it is as much our collective memory as our very concept of modernity that are dramatised in this theatre of words.

Nicolas Truong
Director of the Ideas & Debates section of the newspaper Le Monde, Nicolas Truong is a specialist in the history of contemporary ideas. His extensive knowledge of 20^th- and 21^st-century philosophy made him the perfect choice to organize the Theatre of Ideas at the Festival d'Avignon from 2004 to 2013, before he joined the team behind the Workshops of Thought in 2014. Those encounters have led to the publication of several works like Résistances intellectuelles (Intellectual Resistances, 2013) or Éloge du théâtre (An Apology of Theatre, 2016), co-written with Alain Badiou. Working on the relationship between the stage and ideas, he directed in 2003 La Vie sur terre (Life on Earth), an adaptation of critical texts. Since then, he has defended his vision of the theatre as philosophical, erudite, and playful, aiming to “allow emotions of thought to arise.” Thus was born the Projet Luciole (Firefly Project), presented in Avignon in 2013, in collaboration with Judith Henry and Nicolas Bouchaud, who are now working with him on his new project, Interview.