Jeanne Candel

Tailcoat-clad musicians whizzing round on skis, a wacky expedition across the human body, opera scenes stranded somewhere between Monty Python, Henry Purcell and Virgil’s Aeneid... With its ability to slalom between lyrical sequences and absurd goings on, Le Crocodile trompeur/ Didon et Énée, co-devised by Jeanne Candel and Samuel Achache, ranked amongst the most potent theatrical UFO’s on the young theatre scene in 2013. The piece allowed audiences to discover the work of a band of actors and musicians that had come together as the La vie brève artists’ collective (also behind Robert Plankett in 2011). The collective comprises a generation of artists who are particularly at home in the art of hybrid forms. With Jeanne Candel once again at the helm, their latest project, Le Goût du faux et autres chansons, developed through improvisation work with twelve actor-musicians, is likely to be just as bewildering as the preceding piece. The reason being that, on the one hand, the work is split, in enigmatic fashion, into two distinct, complementary parts which mirror each other. On the other hand, the mythical, the sublime, and the trivial are scattered into a myriad of short pieces or sketches, built up from musings on Botticelli, the painter and Borges, the writer. To complicate matters even further, these sketches are fitted into Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which are in turn combined with snatches of scientific texts on the construction of the universe. Thus, we are presented with the components of a far-fetched and limitless exquisite corpse, which seeks to look again, via the association of images and the ricochet of ideas, at the unsolvable question of the origin of the world.