ARCHIVES 2016 / Those who wander aren’t wrong

When most of the population decides to vote blank, the government, amazed, is thrown into a panic. They were convinced they would be easily reelected, but instead have to face the apocalypse. The ministers meet to try to understand what happened. Is it a conspiracy? Who would have planned it? What exactly is a blank vote anyway, and what does it mean? How should they react? Panic-stricken, they declare a stage of exception and task the director of the department of Truth with investigating the situation. Meanwhile, a maverick journalist films the private consequences of this political cataclysm. Watching characters trapped both within the disorder of their own conscience and within a system about to topple, Maëlle Poésy asks the audience whether democracy still allows for dialogue. In order to delve into that question while keeping a certain distance, she has imagined, along with writer and playwright Kevin Keiss, a fantastic comedy that plays on the absurdity and the inner logics of the democratic system. A revolution through the ballot box that allows us to gauge the ever-increasing gap between the two Greek roots of the word democracy, power on the one hand, and the people supposed to hold it on the other. Thanks to, or because of, the consequences of a single vote, the young director studies, in this all-too-realistic fiction, the notions of representation, incarnation, and dialogue. Because to continue to dialogue is already to refuse to be robbed of one's power.

Maëlle Poésy
As a child, Maëlle Poésy already loved climbing onstage to take part in shows directed by her father, who founded the Théâtre du Sable. After studying at the Conservatoire de Paris and at the Sorbonne, the actress, born in 1984, finished her training by participating in masterclasses in modern dance. She then followed her passion at university by analysis the formation of emotion in the work of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and James Thierrée. In 2007, she was accepted into the London Academy of Drama and Music and the École supérieure d'art dramatique du Théâtre national de Strasbourg, and joined the latter. In 2008, she appeared in Hanoch Levin's Winter Funeral, which she put on with part of her class. Since then, she has created numerous shows with the company Crossroad (Marieluise Fleisser's Purgatory in Ingolstadt, Candide Si c'est ça le meilleur des mondes... (Candide, If that's the best of all possible worlds...) based on Voltaire, Anton Chekhov's The Bear and Swansong at the Comédie Française), laying the foundations of her “theatre of the confrontation,” fascinated by movement, a true “rhythm factory” that questions society, its individual components and collective mechanisms.

Kevin Keiss
A postdoctoral researcher in classical literature and a specialist in ancient theatre, Kevin Keiss —author, translator, teacher, director, and playwright— met Maëlle Poésy at the École supérieure d'art dramatique du Théâtre national de Strasbourg, where he studied from 2008 to 2011. Since then, he has collaborated on all her projects, most notably writing Candide Si c'est ça le meilleur des mondes..., adapted from Voltaire. In 2015, for that creation, Kevin Keiss became artist-in-residence at the Centre national des écritures du spectacle (CNES) at the Chartreuse of Villeneuve lez Avignon.

José Saramago
An autodidact hailing from a humble family, José Saramago (1922-2010) published his first novel, Land of Sin, in 1947. His talent wasn't recognised until the publication in 1980 of Raised from the Ground, forcing him to work various jobs in the publishing and print media industries. A member of the Communist Party who played an active role in the Carnation Revolution, his political positions transpire in a body of work that includes prose, poetry, essays, and plays. He is the only Portuguese writer to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1988.