“ Theatre is life in a more concentrated form” P. Brook
To assist a theatrical performance means trying to represent life, to perceive it, in its greatest intensity, to tender in both a realistic and poetic form the milieu where life is taking place.
This performance needs a space.
Today in our workshops, the surrounding in which the plays will take place will be at the same time the set and the auditorium, following the Elizabethan idea to have only one space with the play right in middle of the social life, receiving all contradictory energies. The point of performing is for everyone to feel that they are in a living space and that they feel better. If you go into a theatre and afterwards feel worse, then the performance has not had its only possible benefit, which is to make you feel better, consoled, relieved, or, ideally, more courageous, given new vitality. Beyond that, a very rare case can give one more insight, more understanding. The movement of the performance must be from something less to something more.
In theatre, that which favours concentration is right, that which hinders it is not. The space should be generous, neutral enough, a source of energy, an active crucible with a poetic dimension favourable of imagination of the audience. At a time when the traditional venue of theatrical work is responds less and less, when new venues at the same time, turn out to be difficult to work with for young directors who experiment other relationships; we have to ask ourselves: which space can encourage the right relationship with the actors and an encounter with the performance which allows for pleasure and education? The whole of theatrical space today is concerned with a new freedom, a new field of movement, purified from artistic conventions that were obstacles to its revelation. Should those who occupy the space, who use it and give it life, understand and develop their own space? In this context of continual movement, what is the role of the architect?
What one does today depend on one’s understanding of the past, seeing that today is different, and intuitively sensing something of the future. Although architecture roots man in space and time, theatre architecture remains an alive presence, as long as it stays subject to continuous modifications, its meaning changes constantly, because the present time is constantly changing. If not, it becomes very quickly a dead shell, a historical building very distant from its initial vocation: to be a tool. The great danger comes when the architect proceeds either from practical considerations or from purely abstract ones. One has to say that a theatre cannot be and must not be considered as a temple; a theatre is a temporary, practical space. For an architect to be carried away and so try to build a theatre as noble and as permanent as a temple is going too far in one way.
Harmony in space, who will receive plays, is difficult; there is duality between on one side “the techniques” and the sensation that we are missing some thing essential: the architecture of theatre should be built on what is going to provoke the best alive relations between human beings? How could we organize it and make the art and techniques go together?
Theatre practitioners permanently research and invent work that projects it into the future, even if they don’t know the limits of this future. Theatre architects, decorators and technicians are confronted in their creative work by their knowledge; and by the unknown of this constantly renewed adventure. How can the technical risks, which are necessary in the creative process, be taken without jeopardizing the production that is about to be born?
One of the main justifications for the theatre is that it reminds us something fundamental, which is that in human life nothing lasts. This is something obvious, but it is easily forgotten, and human beings try to go against reality by holding on, fixing, blocking something, rather than accepting that the whole of life is a coming and going, that everything is in flux and everything is changing.
There is no art without risk;
There is no art without to get rid out all the certainty agreed;
There is no art without to not be open to the doubt and the disquiet.
To work together, to hear each other, to help the others in a group to stepping over certain thresholds, don’t remain motionless so that you escape, or not to use techniques that could be used to mask this fact that we have no thing to say is an other aspect of this workshop. It should light up virtues and richness lie in shared work as well as a mutual strengthening who give to theatre a bigger sense and more intensity.
Following this principle: Every single part of a human body concourse to make it beautiful and the entire body make every single part beautiful.
The idea of this workshop is also to discover that one’s story is not to tell it only with words but also with costumes, lightings, videos and sounds where also walls have a role to play. Nothing should be there without a reason; we have to take away those things that create distance, in simplicity anything has an importance, than we can see with more intensity things that other wise cannot be seen.
Jean-Guy Lecat
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