Zitto!

Director’s note

Zitto! This production gives me the opportunity to pass on in my own way all the adventures (moving, funny and absurd) experienced in all the schools I worked with for more than 20 years. They still keep amazing me. Stories that have to be reinvented, of course and where the teacher is not always the one you might expect to be.

To pass on, means evaluating the other and imaging that there is a void that you can fill up, operating the necessary transformation work to make the person better. It’s the will to help in a very short period of time the other to become happier, to blossom and to be able to face all the vicissitudes of life! Teaching, also means in some way to exercise a certain power -tacit or evident-, the power of the one who knows over the one who is not supposed to know. It’s the alliance of all sorts of authorities from the most brutal one to the most mischievous or insidious exerted with more or less affection and goodwill ……..That’s life!
I would like to present these stories with a group of comedians, adults and children and other elderly to create a more dynamical and heteroclite relationship between the characters. Each partner, whatever his age, will be in turn teacher or pupil, talking in a language more or less understood by the others, requiring at times the intervention of interpreters which are not particularly talented. I will think of all my travels, all my encounters through the world or just next door and of all the places where someone is talking without being heard, and, on the contrary, where someone is being listened to with great enthusiasm.

Christiane Véricel

"Pieces of schools, snippets of classes make up this production full of invention and often burlesque: Christiane Véricel doesn’t need any framework. She just had to follow the red thread that binds the characters together, children, teenagers and young adults that cling on to reading newspapers or books like lost castaways without papers. The message is obvious. On the road, childhood is torn, jolted, mistreated and exploited until the day when it meets, at the end of its solitude, fraternity and solidarity. Like the conjugation’s chorus, fraternity declines itself in every language. But who is teaching who, the child or the adult? (…) Everything takes place in a kind of half-light with sky and waves as a horizon of hope. Horde of kids on a chariot, just like boat people hooked on an overloaded embarkation, but never becoming the Radeau de la Méduse: Christiane Véricel’s « kids » cross the ages of childhood according to their geographic destinies.

Gilbert Jean
, Dauphiné Libéré, 14 janvier 2006

Distribution: Conception and production: Christiane Vérice. Light engineer: Michel Theui. Original music: Louis Sclavis.  General Manager: Bruno Corona. With: Rohi Ayadi, Franck Kayap, Larissa Sienni, Laurent Brechet and young comedians from France and Sicily.

Coproduction: The Théâtre de l'Union-Centre Dramatique National of the Limousin, with the support of the Théâtre of Privas and of the Célestins-Théâtre in Lyon.