Ici là-bas/ Here There

Director’s note

There are sparkling voices bursting everywhere, talking about character’s little acts of folly in search of everything, about love or violence by means of unexpected real or imaginary links that bind them one another. Small or big manipulations, each with his puppet or with its powers: who is pulling the threads?
At that point, everything is perfectly orchestrated by Lilli’s little hands directing her world with the rhythm of a frenzied music played by a Turkish violinist in order to realise her dreams of being a Vietnamese dancer: An oriental tune that fatally plunges Rohi in a deep melancholy making him totally unable to brutalise little Luca. He tries once more to pull small crumbs out of his waistcoat that he immediately devours with voracious kisses.
Here, everything is an excuse to tangle up the other after having woven a net of absurd threads around him that trap him definitely to the point that he can’t even think anymore, losing the thread of his own thoughts. Fortunately an angel is on watch here. Fred, armed with his rusty scissors and goods feelings, also tied up in his own contradictions, tries awkwardly to untie everything and to cut to the quick the famous Gordian knot. In vane!
Over there, even the beautiful Olga, all dressed in red, tries to send the world a sleep singing a Polish lullaby with her tiny voice and an diatonic accordion, all this to undo  calmly  the thread of the story, the famous Ariadne’s thread.
It’s a story of threads, with plenty of happy laughter in the background. However, these stories are very similar to life, the real one, the violent one. Threads that ought to be urgently or ingenuously undone to put some kind of order in this tangled frenzy. Before looking after one’s garden it’s necessary to cut off the plumb line in favour of the lightness of the virgin thread (white spider thread) aiming at an uncertain reconciliation with the world.

Ici et là-bas. Here and there

Christiane Véricel

The 16th of September 2008

At the beginning, there is always someone too much on stage. Too much: because too small, too big, too much chid, too black, too much musician, too much woman, too incomprehensible, that kind of “too much” that the group tries to exclude. But then the group ends up accepting him in a way, playing with him, making fun of him, the group manipulates him and is finally manipulated by him. Christiane Véricel’s troupe, in representing all the colours and diversity of the world, offers us a metaphoric and poetical mirror, that, if it deforms our most disgraceful features, lets us have a fake smile, black and white. »

Vincent Raymond, Tribune de Lyon

 
Distribution: Conception and direction: Christiane Véricel. Light engineer: Michel Theuil. Image Aiguë’s comedians and artists: Rohi Ayadi, Franck Kayap, Frédéric Périgaud, Sandrine De Rosa, Buhran Taskiran, Servan Taskiran and Olga Konik. Comedian children in turn: Luca D'Haussy, Armelle Bunos, Liliane Ly, Mbariki Mdahoma, Zina Mériouli and Maciej Pelka. Dancer: Violaine Véricel. Accordionists in turn: Simon Leterrier and Tomasz Drabina. General stage manager: Bruno Corona.

The distribution of Ici là-bas might be changing during the tour in Prague and Stockholm


Coproductions: Les Célestins, Théâtre of Lyon, le Trident-National stage of Cherbourg, the Théâtre des 2 Rives, regional drama centre of Haute-Normandie. With the support of the Euroglobe program of the European Commission.