13 NOVEMBER - 29 NOVEMBER 2009

Bruno Meyssat

Observer

THEATRE

Conception and production Bruno Meyssat / With Gaël Baron, Elisabeth Doll, Marion Casabianca, Frédéric Leidgens, Jean-Christophe Vermot-Gauchy, Pierre-Yves Boutrand / Staging, lighting and sound Bruno Meyssat, Pierre-Yves Boutrand, Franck Besson, Laurent Driss, Olivier Mortbontemps, David Moccelin, Patrick Portella / Costumes Gisèle Madelaine / Staging assistant Josée Schuller / Artistic collaboration Diane Scott / Production Philippe Puigserver and Magali Fasula

When the cherry blossoms fall,
the temple belongs
to the bare branches.

Buson

Bruno Meyssat's "quantum theatre" sees through the illusion of reality, tearing it asunder. Reality absents itself to make way, paradoxically, for an examination of what has really taken place: that which we refuse to acknowledge.  
Observer is an investigation of what happens when reality is tested – by unprecedented catastrophe, the irruption of a ghost, or an object's ability to act upon time itself. It also offers a singular vision of Japan: a country open to the impossible,  a unique territory that challenges our Western concepts and ideas.

The irruption, the catastrophe, is the destruction of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, closely followed by the annihilation of Nagasaki. It is the impossible coexistence of a plane flying into the distance in a clear blue sky, and the towering cyclone of ash and cadavers left in its wake. It is the chasm that opens between "before and after" – the lively, bustling city and the razed, charred bomb site.

Disconnected images flash past, supercede one another, pile up: an accumulation of revulsion. Black holes gape, demanding to be filled with our own resources, our own lives. These imagined connections haunt the fringes of reality, like the ghosts of existence; our consciousness forges links between irreconcilable but authentic spaces.

Observer is a confrontation with an irreconcilable reality. As in Japanese No theatre, worlds collide, ghosts become part of the action, intervening, speaking, forging new pathways, making things happen. The space of the visible world is inhabited by presences known in Shinto as kami. Through the horrific brutality of recent history, the Théâtres du Shaman explore Japanese culture's unique, intimate relationship with the world of fantasy, its emphasis on uncertainty at the heart of existence, the continuity between with the worlds of the dead and the living, between the mineral and vegetable kingdoms and the kingdom of our own human souls.

Observer is a radical enactment of the "obsolescence of Man", following in the footsteps of the philosopher Günther Anders and examining our modern capacity, under certain conditions, to destroy the world and the images that bear witness to it.

Faced with our own inability to represent the reality we have conspired to create, our inhibitions fall away and we become "the guiltless guilty". We should no longer trust our ability to represent the world; rather, we should remember (in the words of Anders, the author of Hiroshima ist Überall), that "nothing of what you see is real; that the only real thing is the fact that you can no longer see what is real, that you can no longer see reality itself. Close your eyes and unleash your imagination. Because today, only the indolent still trust their own eyes."

Production Théâtres du Shaman / Co-production Espace Malraux – Chambery, Théâtre de Gennevilliers Centre Dramatique National de Création Contemporaine, CulturesFrance, with the artistic collaboration of Ensatt.