About ogres and other insatiable people

Why did you decide to intervene in this suburban town of Lyon?

The Company Image Aiguë was asked by Jean Lacornerie, director of the Théâtre de la Renaissance of Oullins, to work in La Saulaie. After having attended one of our Impromptus*, at the Théâtre des Célestins, in Lyon, he asked us to work together with children of this district well known as difficult. As a matter of fact, this is the way our adventure as a company started more than 25 years ago: we used to organise theatre workshops in the inner city of the suburbs of Saint-Etienne, hosting a great number of emigrants.  So Jean Lacornerie suggested us to use an old church renovated by the city council of Oullins to set up stage activities. Later, we organised various public manifestations bringing together children from la Saulaie and children from other workshops held in the district of the Croix-Rousse in Lyon.

And this is the group that takes part today in the creation “Les Ogres”. What is the central idea of this new performance?

This new creation develops and deepens a topic underlined, in some ways, in my former shows, namely that of ogres, insatiable people and bulimics… I think that I have always worked on the confrontation between characters that either have enough to eat or not. I am pretty convinced that hunger is connected to all the big human conflicts and world crisis. In the same way, I have often worked on the topic of immigration and of people looking for some place to live in the world. My performances deals with topical issues deeply anchored in reality and based on concrete and simple things; they are like communicating vases, showing the empty and the full.

Do you think that “the Ogres” is the natural continuation of Ici Là-bas, your last creation?
Absolutely. Each new performance is, in a way, the continuation of the previous one. Even if you can’t always see, at first sight, all the threads connecting my different creations to one another, they do exist, in a more or less underlying way. To cultivate a lot of small different pleasures is to make the choice to act at the opposite of the ogres whose essential purpose in life is to stuff themselves and run endlessly after power and money. It’s true that the current events of the past years have put a very crude light on all the greedy drifting of some firm leaders. But, in fact, this voracious and rigid way of looking at life has always existed.

To follow very soon...