Memento Mori
Pascal Rambert / Yves Godin
23/05/2013
, 
19:00
24/05/2013
, 21:00
in collaboration with Teatro Comunale Luciano Pavarotti of Modena
conception, direction Pascal Rambert
artistic collaboration, stage and light coneption Yves Godin
original music Alexandre Meyer
with Elmer Bäck, Rasmus Slatis, Anders Carlsson, Jakob Ohrman and Lorenzo De Angelis
assistant stage manager Tristan Mengin
production manager Pauline Roussille
Théâtre de Gennevilliers Centre Dramatique National de Création Contemporaine
co-production CDC – Les Hivernales en Avignon
Running time 1h 15'
National première
“Memento mori has no other subject than movement in itself. Or more precisely the moment which precedes movement. I mean the very start, the initial moment, just before any sign of something moving. One would listen; one would hear some deep remote rumbling rising, drawing near, and they would appear: naked. One would conjure up all the images one carries deep inside and which belong to each individual, but which also belong to the high Aurignacian or even to earlier times? to a prelapsary world. Naked. Before the fall. Before the fault. Do the pictures on the cave walls dance? Do the hands on the cave walls dance? Yes indeed. They dance under the light. What is movement but substance changing from an former shape to a new one?and light allows this transformation. Yes, light allows this when it enters into the cave. The obscure cave of the brain; disclosing primary forms of joy, of dazzling rapture, when the Dionysian world of fruit! Grapes! Bananas! Tomatoes and garden come out and join the bodies! Dionysius everywhere!... just before terror. Dead scared to be alive; or afraid of losing life. Before they start licking one another, again and again; all of them; licking every single part of their bodies clean. And licking, licking endlessly, licking clean, cleaning life, cleaning the pictures we have of ourselves.”
Pascal Rambert, paris, september 2011
You say that Memento Mori has no other subject than movement in itself, but there is always a starting point, something which urges you to create a play. What is it this time?
There are two things. First, I have been feeling for some time that I need to evolve from a ‘space of slowliness’ to a ‘space of swiftliness’. Libido Sciendi was rather slow, I tried to accelerate with Tamara Bacci in ‘Knocking on heaven’s door’, but it didn’t fit in with the state of extreme tension I expected her to play. I wanted to force myself to be faster, but also to show what comes before movement, and the very start from stillness to movement. I am a young choreographer, I am still in quest of what happens at the very beginning, even before bodies start moving. This is hardly possible, you cannot ask a body which has been shaped to forget completely its corporeal imprint, you cannot say”forget everything and move as if you had never moved before”, but I was dreaming of this moment every choreographer is craving for at some stage, I am sure. As I am of a slow nature and find it hard to see what is happening inside the bodies, I need to observe them calmly andat lenght to get to understand how they break into movement.
Once I have understood, I can proceed to the next step, from balbutiating movement to a quicker pace. I have just read again Nietzche and the pre-Socratic philosophers, I have seen Herzog’s documentary ‘la grotte des rêves’’(the cave of dreams), I have studied to the most remotely old times. With Gilgamesh’s epic poem, I had gone back to 5000BC. For Memento Mori, I want to go back to even more remote times,even as far as the The Aurignacian period, to the Paleolithic, and to conjure up naked bodies out of the light , as in Masaccio’s breathtaking fresco’ Adam and eve expelled from Eden ‘. It is a wonderful period, I am just discovering it but I am fascinated. When I worked with Antoine Vitez, I remember an exercise for which he said: ”Here, there is a bad king who says: since you are an actor, play Hamlet for me” we answered that we didn’t know the text, but what Antoine meant was that we all have this faculty , deep inside , to say “To be or not to be”, and this inner power is what attracts me. With Memento Mori, I want to dig up the ‘we’, our common roots dating back to 30or 40000 years , what our bodies and unconscious have retained of those times . Once I heard that if you make old vases, vases dating back to the bronze age, ,if you turn very fast, as on a record player, you can hear the potter’s hammer at work. It sounds mad, but it is like a record.sound particles are preserved in the raw material, which means that one can hear a sound which has been here for 10000years. If this is possible, I presume that I too, as an apprentice choreographer, can try to bring back this moment to life.
Memento Mori, ’ remember that you will die’, why have you chosen this title?
Like everyone, I have my territory. Before, I was not aware of it, but I am starting to realize it. There remain blank areas, I don’t understand everything yet, but I recently noticed that my plays are often related to time: After/before, ‘the beginning of Love’,’ When we were punk,’ ‘first anniversary’… fifty minutes… and also the performance I will stage for Kate Moran at the ‘hivernales’ and at ‘La menagerie de verre ‘ in 2012. All these titles are connected to important moments or in relation with an important moment. For Memento Mori, I want to focus on a time of Panick, the moment when one loses one’s balance, firm soil vanishing under one’s feet; four recent events, among them Fukushima, have made me feel the wing or the breath of death . It could have been me, and indeed this is something I have always lived with: ”Do not forget that you will die”and this will be one of the developments of the play.
Interview to Pascal Rambert by Mélanie Alves de Sousa
www.theatre2gennevilliers.com
Pascal Rambert / Yves Godin
It was in Nice, while he was still attending high school, that Pascal Rambert made its first staging. That was the beginning of an atypical artistic career that led him, step by step, to form his own company, Side One Posthume Théâtre, to publish his first play, Désir et Let Lits, and to begin the exploration of different art fields in France and abroad. He’s a curious traveller of the world and of the people who settle it, he got over United States, Syria and then Japan, to create shows inspired by what he discovers. During all these years, wherever he was, he never stopped teaching internship through the game, writing and dance, aimed at young professionals but also amateurs. Invited for the first time at the Festival d'Avignon in 1989, he wrote and directed Les Parisiens, before joining Jean-Pierre Vincent to the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers. In 1992, he presented two of his texts, John and Mary and De mes propres mains, which have a writing style that alternates privates part, duets and monologues to choral pieces, following the example of L’Épopée de Gilgamesh presented in 2000 at the Festival Avignon. Currently director of the Théâtre de Gennevilliers, National Drama Centre for Contemporary Art, carries out its main artistic activities as spokesman of a territory, without ever ceasing to travel the world, always eager for a confrontation between aesthetics and practice.
