Mohamed El Khatib Alain Cavalier

Conversation

Archive 2018
Theatre

A proposition by Mohamed El Khatib and Alain Cavalier

A Zirlib production
A coproduction with La Bâtie – Festival de Genève
In association with Nanterre-Amandiers, centre dramatique national ; and Festival d’Automne à Paris
In partnership with Théâtre de la Ville-Paris, ActOral – festival international des arts et des écritures contemporaines (Marseille), Centre dramatique national de Tours – Théâtre Olympia
First performed on 11 November 2017 at TNB – Théâtre National de Bretagne – Centre Européen Théâtral et Chorégraphique (Rennes)

The film-maker Alain Cavalier and the author and director Mohamed El Khatib have put the art of conversation on a pedestal, in the literary sense of the term. They have chosen to invite the public to a series of rendez-vous taking place on four separate occasions over the course of the Autumn.

What can we say about this most unlikely encounter, occasioned by the purchase of a camera bought in error? Was it made to be? Alain Cavalier, a successful film-maker during the period 1960-1970 – Le Combat dans l’île with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Romy Schneider, L’Insoumis with Alain Delon, and La Chamade with Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli – has dedicated himself, camera in hand, to documentary film making, or the cinema of the real. Mohamed El Khatib, for his part, has a penchant for inviting real life onstage. He confronts theatre with different mediums – cinéma, installations, newspapers – in order to observe the friction that comes from the way they interact with each other. Together, in this hour-long performance, they open themselves up to a methodical auscultation of the various dreams that they have had, and which still play upon their minds. This conversation, from both sides of the Mediterranean, deals with subjects as wide and varied as desire, politics, colonial relations and... football. It forms a micro-history of two very different paths in life that cross each other.
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Running time: 1h