An uncharacteristic progression

Albert Camus considered theatre as being a refuge of innocence. That’s what I feel about Christiane Véricel who started in 1983 to produce performances off the beaten track. Before starting her own Company, known as the Compagnie Image Aiguë, she used to organise theatre workshops in the quarters of immigrates in Saint Etienne putting together children and adults coming form different countries. This experience helped her to realise that theatre could be the right place to meet people coming from the most different horizons and speaking different languages. In those times of identity withdrawal, this project seemed to be a tremendous utopia. Christiane Véricel, a personality hiding behind a rather shy appearance, is in fact a stage director with a strong determination who doesn’t care about these apprehensions. On the contrary, her artistic approach aims at giving a polyphonic vision of the world. Each comedian expresses himself in his native language and everybody ends up understanding snippets of other languages. 

It’s in Nazareth, that Christiane Véricel started her untypical artistic approach. There, she let Jewish and Arab children act on stage together. Later she put up similar workshops in India and Brazil. Some of the children, she has met in the course of her peregrinations, seduced by the militant humanism of this lady, will join from time to time the Company she has created in France, for the period of one or two creations. But they are not all passing birds. One of them, Rohi Ayadi, Israeli Arab of Nazareth, has been participating during fifteen years in this authentic theatre adventure. And this doesn’t prevent him from going back quite often to his country, where he has created his own company. It’s the same experience for Franck Kayap, a Cameroonian boy, who has been working with the Company for nineteen years. In 2000, after many years of criss-crossing around the planet, the company has decided to concentrate its work more on the European continent. Among other important event, the Company had the pleasure to be invited in a Gipsy camp in Macedonia. Today, Christiane Véricel works on the creation of “Ici là-bas” and is invited for the first production by Claudia Stavisky in her so beautiful and smart “Théatre des Célestins” in Lyon, the city where the Company has its seat.

Like all productions by Christiane Véricel, this one is a mix of different disciplines such as circus, dance, singing and drama, a theatre that has nothing to do with narrative conventions.

In the production Ici là-bas one is carried away in a swirl of twists and turns. With its toning simplicity, the performance sparkles with striking sequences. One knows for sure that the adults smothering the little ones with kisses express more the desire to devour them than their affection. As difficult situations rise, some musicians, specially two Turkish brothers and a young Polish girl, who sings lullabies from her country, do everything they can to put some magic touch in a reality that is not always very rosy. Although the actors come from different cultural backgrounds, Christiane Véricel has managed to create a fantastic cohesion between them all. But the freedom they seem to enjoy is the fruit of a long and hard work: every afternoon, the comedians have to rehearse under the direction of the stage director. The performance keeps on changing and developing. And it’s probably due to all these efforts that the production turns up to be one of the most precious moments.

Joseph Schidlow