Solaire Macha Makeïeff, despite the raining raining outside the Liberté theater in Toulon. The director of La Criée, in Marseille, came to present La Nichée, a series of offbeat, humorous vignettes produced with twelve students from the TPM conservatory (1).
After Barre Phillips, André Gabriel, Rhys Chatham and Jean-François Zygel, it is therefore the author, director, visual artist, but also creator of sets and costumes, essential of the French scene who “played the game” of transmission, name of this singular time, this cycle of work desired by the TPM Conservatory of Toulon.
Bringing the absurd into the daily lives of popular characters, whose ignorance or narrow-mindedness turns to burlesque: this work recalls the Deschiens, a series you had co-created …
It is true that I have worked a lot on minimalism. It gives the sense of the period, as we do in the music hall. Ten too many seconds or five too few seconds doesn’t work.
By exploring the theme of the other, the questions that this can provide, I wanted the students to feel all the astonishment they can give to being there, on stage, with an economy of means.
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The other, for what reasons?
It is a fascinating complexity: in life, the other is at the same time a mystery, a promise, an astonishment. In the theater, being aware of the presence of others is essential, primordial. Just like an object on stage is not just decoration or an anecdote, but a playmate.
This cycle of work of the conservatory is called “Transmission”. Is it important to you?
It always has been. At La Criée, we also receive a lot of students. It is important, I believe, to get out of school to go to the playground of reality.
A very shaken reality for a year and a half.
And especially for the youngest among us… Protecting the body and health is important, but depriving beings of imagination and of this artistic contact will have terrible consequences, I think. We see many children who suffer psychically as a result of these confinements. Sociability, the gaze of the other, listening to the other, is both an enigma and a necessity for who we are. This is what the work we have done elsewhere is about.
You are one of the personalities from the cultural world who have signed up to block the RN. After the results of the first round in PACA, what message would you like to convey?
I don’t have a message, but I have a pipe. For art, culture, freedom of expression, we must join and support what is not on the side of the extremes. The program of the far-right in terms of culture is quite clear, it has not yet been revealed … We must know how to choose what is closest to the conception of democracy that we have and we defend.
After the Hadza of Tanzania (2), when will you return to directing?
I have been working for over a year for Tartuffe and I start rehearsals next September. It is a show from elsewhere that will come to Liberté. I am very happy to find there some faithful of my artistic family and to stage newcomers, whom I discover. Can’t wait to start rehearsing.
Note that Macha Makeïeff presents her exhibition Trouble-party, created in 2019 for the Festival d’Avignon, at the Musée des Tapisseries d’Aix-En Provence. A “still story” as defined by the designer who reinvented the scenography for this particular place. As will be the case next year in Villeurbanne.
1. In partnership with La Criée – National Theater of Marseille, Le Châteauvallon-Liberté, national stage and the TPM Conservatory.
2. This last part of the cycle “Offended souls”, four ethnographic shows imagined from the field notebooks of ethnologist Philippe Geslin, was created last March.
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