SINGSPIELE

Concept Maguy Marin

Performer David Mambouch

Set Design Benjamin Lebreton

Lighting Alexandre Bénéteaud

Sound Design David Mambouch

Sound Antoine Garry

Costume Production Support Nelly Geyres Executive

Production Extrapole

Duration 1 hour

“Every person's story is shaped by their boundless need to be recognised; friendship represents this infinite capacity for recognition. To imagine that this constant need also belongs to the other, that the other, like ourselves, is at the mercy of this demand and striving for a response, that they consume themselves and become like an animal if no response comes — this is what we must compel ourselves to imagine, and therein lies the hell of life when we fail to do so. The path of recognition is infinite: we take two steps, ‘one-cannot-do-everything’, yet no one dares justify, except with a little cynicism, retreating from such a task…” (1)

It was from this fragment of a text by Robert Antelme that, in this work, we sought to give space and attention to faces, whether anonymous or recognisable, which, as they appear, capture our gaze with the strangeness of a perception that is immediately intelligible.

An exercise in listening to what these faces tell us, clearly or indistinctly, about their absent bodies, and to the particular stories these silent faces carry, which will always elude us. They speak to us from a place that Jean-Luc Nancy describes as “the speech of the absence of words”, a place “before or after speech”. (2)

What irreducible mysteries lie behind this constellation of sensations that arise when we encounter another person? When we encounter their face? An epiphany that transcends their expressions, revealing the invisible dimension of the singular individual standing before us.

Maguy Marin

(1) Robert Antelme, Les principes à l’épreuve, article published on 14 July 1958 in the journal Le 14 juillet, founded by Dionys Mascolo and Jean Schuster, included in Robert Antelme – textes inédits sur « L’espèce humaine », essais et témoignages, Éditions Gallimard.

(2) Nancy, J.-L., Penser l’image, Paris, Les Presses du réel, 2010, pp. 68–69.

Who is this figure of a thousand faces, embodying a multitude of people and gazes as he moves slowly from right to left across the stage? The enigma remains intact, for each face he assumes is immediately followed by another.

Before our eyes unfolds the captivating spectacle of an individual who takes shape and loses it again, successively donning all manner of clothes and accessories at a relentlessly calculated pace. In his solitude, the man who brings these new features to life combines them with gestures and attitudes that reveal, each time, a new meaning, a previously overlooked perspective, an unexpected narrative.

Yet there is also a constant subversion of the codes and roles associated with them. The masculine slips into the feminine, the statue of an ancient warrior becomes a Pietà, and the ordinary man, bowed down, rises as a media beast.

David Mambouch, the extraordinary performer at the heart of this work, is utterly mesmerising in his transformations before our very eyes.

Agnès Izrine