For his latest creation as artist-director of the Festival d’Avignon, Olivier Py returns to epic form. My Exalted Youth mirrors The servant who, in 1995, inaugurated his adventure with this exceptional event. Theater and opera director, director but also actor and author, Olivier Py anchors his work in the heart of youth and the concerns of his contemporaries to open a poetic and political dialogue with them.
“Something is coming! Something always comes. What if nothing comes? This sums up the expectation and feverishness of a youth lacking recognition, love and values - the presence of God, the dream of a social revolution, the powers of art, of love and friendship, against the economic and financial powers of the all globalized and all digitized.
Alcandre is an old forgotten poet, almost disillusioned but alert enough to detect poetic genius when he meets him. Xavier Gallais in the role is indescribable, a sort of Oblomov constantly stretched out on his bed, dreaming of the world and “true” literature, a fanatic of Rimbaud. He is dressed in a dressing gown whose inner lining recalls the colors of Harlequin – a repetition, an earlier, seemingly unfinished replica of the action to come from Harlequin.
This is what the old poet perceives in a pizza delivery man the insolence of a new Harlequin. – beauty, existential energy, mystical depth which seduce him and make him love her irresistibly. He reveals the young madman to his contemporaries, elevating him to the skies. The image of a triumphant Harlequin gives a glimpse of the revenge of poetry on the ambient materialism.
The old poet and the young Harlequin will launch their saving hoaxes against all the powerful.
A wild farce composed of the humanity of delirious characters who struggle with their unfulfilled desires, the hopes of transcendence or their simple hopes. As the old Pygmalion says to his creature: “I give you the world; I turn the gaze of the world to you. I make you the spark in the night of the world. And you give me back what I lost.
In this both burlesque and serious comedy, Olivier Py takes pleasure in mocking the institutions which see in culture an object of speculation, intended to further increase their power and their financial interests. Harlequin compensates for this degradation by rekindling the joy and the fires of love:
“Reopening the spiritual path, fighting against the disappearance of meaning, making the possible possible, quixotic battles or the dignity of a generation? “(Fourth cover).
Olivier Py’s favorite themes in the theater are immediately identifiable: nostalgia for lost youth, mysticism, the quest for the poem, the gift of oneself to a sacred theater – the truth of life. Movements, effervescence of a present that we would like to build better, the staging is faithful to the sovereign idea of a beautiful presence in the world that every conscious being should serve.
Accompanied by a quartet of young actors, the actor and his mentor prepare pranks that will be the cornerstones of an epic tetralogy. And, mythical figure of comedy, fragmented, patched and multicolored, Harlequin is the flamboyant hero of a quest for the sublime beyond oneself.
Bertrand de Roffignac excels in the art of Harlequin, mobile and alive, comic and resistant. He brings his successive iconic costumes to life with radiant brilliance and casualness.
Alongside the old ones, Olivier Balazuc, Damien Bigourdan, Céline Chéenne, Xavier Gallais…, a new generation of interpreters animates the whimsical epic. The excellent Pauline Dehons, Émilien Diard-Detœuf, Geert van Herwijnen and Eva Rami are the young heirs of all the memory of the theater for an epic between manifesto, celebration and pilgrimage. On stage, the performers are convincing in their admirable declamations – pieces of verbal bravery.
At the Aubanel gymnasium, the author-director reinstalls the decor imagined twenty-seven years earlier for La Servante. Mobile wooden structures for My Exalted Youth are constantly moved and readjusted thanks to the physical efforts of the technicians and actors.
Also from the promontory, the characters address the public from the heights. The proscenium is structured like a playing machine for ten actors and two musicians, launched into the mad tragi-comic fresco, a precious piece of transmission and handover that wins people over.
A theatrical performance, a great comic farce whose generous pleasure we do not shy away from.
My Exalted Youthtext (edited by Actes Sud-Papiers) and direction by Olivier Py.
With Olivier Balazuc, Damien Bigourdan, Céline Chéenne, Pauline Dehons, Émilien Diard-Detœuf, Xavier Gallais, Geert van Herwijnen, Julien Jolly, Flannan Obé, Eva Rami, Bertrand de Roffignac, Antoni Sykopoulos. Scenography, costumes and make-up Pierre-André Weitz, light Bertrand Killy, Composition and percussion Julien Jolly, Original songs (lyrics and compositions) Olivier Py, arrangements Antoni Sykopoulos. July 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14 and 15, 2022 at 2 p.m., Lycée Aubanel Avignon Gymnasium.
Photo credit: Christophe Raynaud de Lage