ARCHIVES 2019 / Lewis versus Alice

Who in the audience is entirely clear about Lewis? Who knows that Lewis Carroll was an eccentric clergyman from Oxford, a photographer, a logician, and a spiritualist? And who thinks they know Alice? With Lewis versus Alice, Macha Makeïeff dives into the fantastic universe of the great British writer to explore the psyche of this enigmatic poet who rebelled against Victorian conventions, a strange collector who would be celebrated by the Surrealists... His reverie shows us the contradictions of a troubled world where everything is in flux and can reverse itself with humour and fragility. Because “in Lewis Carroll's work everything is word, and only word, there's nothing dramatic about it, it's a like a conversation in a dream. It's 'said' and then it's gone...” Accompanied by gothic pop music, sounds and voices that seem to come from another world, the show makes the audience face the supernatural: a set and what sits behind, characters that disappear, half-light and shards of dreams, tongue twisters in French and English... Worlds atop worlds mirroring each other, like Lewis-Alice, who loved nothing more than to defy the cruelty of reality.

A writer, plastic artist, and director of La Criée, Centre dramatique national de Marseille, Macha Makeïeff loves to explore the pleasure of the eyes as much as that of words and bodies. At the theatre and the opera, and in museums, she creates sets and costumes, and acts as director. Lewis Carroll was the ideal author to venture into the pleasure brought by the contradictions of language and to explore dreams and the supernatural. During the Festival d'Avignon, Macha Makeïeff will present, at the Maison Jean Vilar, Spoilsport, Curious Collections and Disquieting Things, an echo to the creation of Lewis versus Alice. 

A garrulous writer with an enigmatic personality, Lewis Carroll was born in 1832 and grew up in a large family of 11 children, with an ecclesiastic for a father, during the strict time that was Victorian England. He dedicated his life to mathematics and to the writing of fantastic fictions, the most famous of which remains Alice in Wonderland.

The work of Lewis Carroll is published by Gallimard La Pléiade. Lewis Carroll's La Chasse au Snark, translated by Jacques Roubaud, is published by Gallimard.
Macha Makeïeff's Zone Céleste is published by Actes Sud