ARCHIVES 2016 / Ludwig, a King on the Moon

A mad and legendary king, a king who never really wanted to be king, Ludwig II of Bavaria is as admired today as he was despised and misunderstood during his reign. The man who wrote “I wish to remain an eternal enigma to myself and to others” succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. It is this mysterious and explosive character that Madeleine Louarn and her handicapped actors, with whom she has been working for over 20 years, have decided to put at the centre of their next show. With their faithful companions, writer Frédéric Vossier, composer Rodolphe Burger, and choreographers Loïc Touzé and Agnieszka Ryszkiewicz, they explore the fantasies and dreams of this most romantic of kings. A multi-faceted king, Ludwig II questioned the border between “normal” and “abnormal” and sought to live to the end the excessive lyricism of romanticism as a critique of modern life. The actors of the Catalyse workshop follow the slow disintegration of the monarch, his progressive withdrawal from real life and into a world of fiction. From this downfall, they create a journey into the mind of Ludwig II, and build a landscape-play in which nature, arts, and excess all lead to the fantastic.

Madeleine Louarn
It is as a special needs educator that Madeleine Louarn discovered theatre in a centre for the mentally handicapped in Morlaix. There, she created the Catalyse workshop, dedicated to amateur performance, before deciding to dedicate herself fully to her job as a director and to found in 1994 her professional company, the Théâtre de l'Entresort. Since then, she has been alternating creations with those two structures, sometimes bringing them together for specific projects. She's directed texts by authors as different as Lewis Caroll and Christophe Pellet, Shakespeare and Beckett, Daniil Harms and Frédéric Vossier, Armand Robin and Pushkin, Aristophanes and Horvath. For Madeleine Louarn, this atypical double path that has marked her surprising career is but self-evident. With the actors of the workshop, exemplary and unique, she puts herself in danger in order to question “the uncertainties and codes of representation” by choosing texts that always revolve around the performance of the actor, around his or her truth and presence. For the past few years now she has been working with musician and composer Rodolphe Bureger and, more recently, with choreographers Loïc Touzé and Agnieszka Ryszkiewicz, which has allowed her to offer her actors different possible ways of expression. Always avoiding the risk of condescension, she challenges her actors to lead them towards the greatest possible form of artistic expression.

Frédéric Vossier
In 2012, Frédéric Vossier worked for the first time with the company L'Entresort, adapting Aristophanes' The Birds for the actors of Catalyse. The holder of a doctorate degree in political philosophy and the author of books about Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Karl Marx, Frédéric Vossier is also interested in contemporary art, and has written for the theatre since 2004 (his texts are published by Théâtre Ouvert, Espaces 34, Quartett, and Les Solitaires Intempestifs). He has also written Lotissement (Housing Estate), directed by Tommy Milliot, which played at the 2016 edition of the Festival Impatience. In September 2015, he joined the Théâtre national de Strasbourg as artistic advisor, where he serves as director of the magazine Parages.