Gwenaël Morin

In line with the importance it attaches to the transmission of experience and sharing of inter-generational knowledge, the Festival is a partner of the “Talents Adami Paroles d’acteurs” programme. This season, following a series of auditions, ten performers under the age of thirty years old, have been selected to work with Gwenaël Morin. With a background in architecture, this director, for whom coming into contact with the major works of the dramatic repertoire was instrumental in his training as a director, has learnt much simply by the act of doing. Likening himself to a “practician” rather than someone with ”know-how”, in this production he places himself in a unique situation in terms of staging and writing, and overturns all expected norms in the process. Rehearsing scenes over and over again, minimal staging under bare lighting minus any décor or costumes, and an egalitarian distribution of roles done at random prior to each performance, are the characteristic elements of his brand of theatre, in which body and spoken word come together on the bare boards of the stage. In his various productions, with programmatic titles ranging from Le Théâtre permanent, and Antithéâtre to Les Molières de Vitez –, Gwenaël Morin brings together actors who possess the qualities of « freedom, simplicity and silence», and then rehearses over and over again, to the point of exhaustion, honing the piece down until its essence appears. What, in this instance, will the tragedy be? Working on The Suppliants by Aeschylus and the four deaths of Sophocles – Ajax, Oedipus, Antigone, and Heracles –, it might be one, or all of them at the same time.