ARCHIVES 2016 / The Bank in the Dark

It all begins with a disappearance: that of a woman, Carlotta, who takes with her a movement we'll never see again, voices we'll never get to hear. This irreversible loss and the mounting sense of absence it causes lead to a new gesture: writing. The question “Where are you?” can no longer be uttered, so the writer decides to bare his soul to the one who can see through him: the priestess, the one who sings and dances, who lives outside of time. To appease the dead and soothe the living, they come together to the banks of shadows. There, animals and men congregate, songs become wild, the keys of a piano hoot like owls, and the gaze of a buzzard awakens a child's fear. Possessed and metamorphosed, Marie Vialle and Pascal Quignard keep trading places, and together they remember those that were lost, explore sorrows and primitive areas where language is no longer just articulated, music just made of sound, where day and night can no longer be used as points of reference. Through dreams and in darkness, writer and actress awaken senses that memory may have forgotten but that the heart recognises: they come from an alien place, from a time before there was light.

Pascal Quignard
Fascinated from a very young age by silence and muteness, Pascal Quignard found in writing a way to express himself while remaining quiet. His first essay, L'Être du balbutiement (The Being of Stammering), published in 1969, already betrayed his obsession with language, its sources, and the conditions of its apparition. Fragmented writings, biographies, novels, essays, fairy tales, treatises... his works take various forms but all are inhabited by music, from Carus, a novel published in 1980, to the ninth volume of Last Kingdom, Mourir de penser (To Die of Thinking), published in 2014. Although he has been writing for Marie Vialle's shows since 2003, Pascal Quignard, who won the Prix Goncourt in 2002, didn't set foot onstage until 2011, for a butoh adaptation of Medea. Now addicted to stage fright and to the unpredictability of the theatre, he seems to have resolved never to leave the stage again.

Marie Vialle
A graduate of the Ecole de la rue Blanche – now known as the ENSATT – and of the Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique, Marie Vialle has worked with many directors, including Jean-Michel Rabeux, André Engel, Alain Françon, Luc Bondy, and Jean-François Sivadier. She has also appeared in films directed by Thomas Bardinet, Christine Dory, Frédéric Videau, or Vincent Dietschy. In 2003, armed with nothing but her cello, she makes hers Pascal Quignard's The Name on the Tip of the Tongue. It's the beginning of a long collaboration between the writer and the actress – between language and silence, music and singing. In 2006, she directs and acts in Triumph of Time, along with Lam Truong, then in Olivia Rosenthal's Les Lois de l'hospitalité (The Laws of Hospitality) in 2011. In the fall of 2015, she once again clothed herself in Pascal Quignard's words with Princesse vieille reine (Princess Old Queen), which played at the Théâtre du Rond-Point.