Le Peu du Monde - CREATION 2022 | letheatredelimprevu

Little of the World

Creation 2022
Greco-French/Franco-Greek Show

Poetry, music, animated images.

Two years after his death, the Greek composer Sophia Alexandrou, the Czech visual artist Vojtech Janyška and the Orleans director Éric Cénat are uniting their arts to celebrate this emblematic figure of Greek poetry. Winner of the European Prize for Literature, Kikí Dimoulá marked the poetic scene of her country. In his repertoire, Le peu du monde has a special place. Written in 1971, translated into several languages, this work brought him worldwide notoriety. She depicts the passage of time, daily life, loneliness in a bittersweet tone. His unique gaze still resonates today. To illustrate this timeless text, the 3 European artists intertwine, on stage, musical creation on the piano, spoken or sung French and Greek voices, and animated projections of watercolor paintings. A way for them to bring this work back to life and make it eternal.

artistic intentions

I inherited poetry… my grandfather, Lucien, was fond of it and I was the marvelous receptacle of his passion for words. The poets surrounded me with their benevolence, brought me breath and meaning to existence, gave me another look at the world, entrusted me with their healing balms …I owe them a lot. To express my gratitude to them, from the creation of the Théâtre de l'Imprévu, I wanted to put them in majesty, that they are at the heart of my artistic approach...

Robert Desnos and Blaise Cendrars, bedside poets, were very often honored in our repertoire. We traveled a bit with Jacques Prévert, Boris Vian and Max Jacob, took the road to Chile with Pablo Neruda. Our fruitful collaboration with the author Patrice Delbourg has led us to bring out of the shadows a few distraught poets without pedigree or chapel (Ghérasim Luca, Roger Kowalski, Francis Giauque…).

Since 2017, I have been working in collaboration with the French Institutes of Greece (Athens, Patras, Larissa, Thessaloniki) in particular to train French teachers in reading aloud. I rely on the writings of my favorite poets in reference to the Francophonie. My exchanges with the teachers have however allowed me, over the course of my stays, to understand Greek poetry: that surrealist of Odysseas Elytis, that half unusual-half insolent of Nanos Valaoritis, that between shadow and light of Georges Séféris … all nourished by a history of the 20th century where political chaos and societal/economic crises followed one another, where the founding myths are never far away...

Poetry and music often go hand in hand in Greece. The Elytis/Theodororakis duo is the perfect illustration of this. So it's notno coincidence that Kiki's workDimoulabeenscopeto myawarenessover theremusicianSophieAlexandrou.Sophia andMehaveworked induopiano-voiceat the French Instituteof Athens by relying on a French-speaking poetry of yesterday and today. But to renew ourselves, we were looking for another voice… Sophia then mentioned her favorite poet whose recent death leaves her with a great void: Kikí Dimoulá. There too, a force of transgenerational poetry: here is a young composer of 20 with a promising future touched by the words of a middle-aged poet, always balanced above the void, inspired by the wear and tear of the time…

The poems of Kikí Dimoulá reached me in this unprecedented period of successive confinements where time seems frozen where travels are only interior... my feeling was immediate: There is a match between his proseand our livesupset: Thisfeedbackonself,takingawareness of our flaws and othersfragilities, the need for memories, the bankruptcy of materialism, this feeling of presence-absence in everyday life. Everything that characterizes Le peu du monde will be, to use the title of our show and one of its collections.

Saying a poem by Kikí Dimoulá out loud is an intimate upheaval! Appropriate his word as if it were mine; let myself be carried away by his humanity; trusting one's snippets of life, one's snapshots… These are great challenges for the interpreter that I am. I also know that I won't be alone since Kiki's words through my voice will be enveloped by Sophia's creative musical universe...

“At the neighbors someone is learning the piano.

A beginner, mentally I teach him

The musical value of what is repeated.

This music we neglect to listen to

Just as we don't listen to bread

When it kneads our existence every day

And we never pay attention

On the day when leaving she tells us

I don't know if I will come tomorrow.

We don't listen to it,we forget

To say the slightest thank you

To this day come yet the next day

Despite all these reservations about us. »

Kiki Dimoula

Trust the words….

Trust the music that envelops these words...

It seems to me that we can bring another dimension to our creation…

Browsing through Kiki Dimoulá's work, I was struck by the recurring presence of photography:

“I talked a lot. To people,

To the lampposts. To the pictures. »

"Your hand is alone

In the square night of the photo. »

“No news from you.

Your photo, stationary.

change at least

From time to time the water of my photographs. »

Is it so surprising for a poet nourished by presence-absence? Isn't photography a frozen moment, the forever freezing of a snapshot of our lives? Therephotographyalso turns out to be acounterpoison tolack, a palliative for the loss… it can be part of a saving present.

"From the depths of a nostalgia

I get your news:

You have become a regular

From one of your old photographs

Prominent in the paper tension. »

I want the artistic universe of a plastic photographer to accompany us scenographically… It's almost obvious. I don't imagine it as a simple sensitive counterpoint to the imaginary…”

Éric Cénat, Director and actor

Next show

Who was Kiki Dimoula?

Kikí Dimoulá was the great voice, the major voice of Greek poetry. Born in 1931, she imposes her very personal universe, so detached from all hope after the visions of the luminous or fighting world of Ritsos, Elytis or Seferis.

Time, absence, death, nothingness are the constants of a very dark theme, but embodied in unexpected daily scenes, illuminated by an art of metaphor and an incredible verbal invention. Despite an often labyrinthine construction, a proliferation of ideas, a bold vocabulary juggling between the old, the chastened and the slang, this poetry remains incredibly close to the ordinary and even sometimes to the trivial. Thus this poetic thought, worked, manages to no longer belong exclusively to a particular cultural universe. Its emotional vibration gives it a universal resonance.

This poetry, in fact, resembles nothing known - except perhaps the Metaphysical Poets of the English seventeenth century. Like them, and like all lucid explorers of being, Kikí Dimoulá was not afraid to confess: “Yes, the impossible is enough for me”.

“Kikí Dimoulá's poems are unlike anything. Few poets give this impression of radical novelty. It begins with his subjects, so strange — strange by dint of not being so, most often minute, drawn from the most banal daily life. A landscape without history. The rain. The movement of waves on the shore. The wind in the leaves. A drop of blood. Indeed: each of his poems obsessively takes up the inventory of what is lost, what is no longer. The death of a beloved husband, which haunts the collections following this one, will only crystallize this obsession, make it even more vivid. Loss, death, nothingness, all perfectly true, but you could just as well say the opposite. Dimoulá's poems are teeming with life in their own way. A torrent of images irrigates them, most often unexpected, audacious, sometimes chasing each other at full speed. The humble reality they describe acquires an intense, almost agonizing life, seen through these magnifying glasses which, by metaphorizing it, metamorphose it”.

Michel Volkovitch, translator

Excerpts from some poems

love, noun,
very substantial,
singular name,
gender neither feminine nor masculine,
helpless kind.
In the plural
disarmed loves.

fear, noun,
singular at the beginning
then plural:
Fears.
Fears
in front of everything now.

Memory, proper name of sadness,
singular,
singular nothing else
and unchanging.
Memory, memory, memory.

night, noun,
female Gender,
singular.
Plural
the nights.
Nights now.

Little of the worldfollowed byI salute you Never Editions Gallimard 2010

I'm not sleeping, I'm not sleeping, _cc781905-9548bb18bad-35bad-3

I help the night to grow,

to widen, to erase the little lights, parasites.

I don't sleep, I don't sleep,

I exercise blacks it is excluded

I throw exercised it's excluded

that tear a few last stars

I don't sleep, I don't sleep,

I change sex, become midnight.

Where will you take me, depression,

I'll meet you somewhere

since I took an oath of insomnia.

My doses of sleeping pills

dorment comme des anges _cc781905 -5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_

and my brain that watches

rock them gently.

I don't sleep, I don't sleep,

I help the night to grow,

I write slogans on the walls of dreams

down with the sunrises of chicken farms,

down with the shenanigans of hopes

and we will build you houses

and we will make you roads

and we'll bring you rain

and wind, and wind.

I don't sleep, I don't sleep,

i'm waiting for one last old background of darkness

to enter the soothsayer Calchas.

I'm going to kill him.

He threw me into quite a sacrifice

for you to breathe.

But you, insomnia, you nestle on every prophecy

taking your time.

Little of the worldfollowed byI salute you NeverGallimard Editions 2010

Direction and editing: Daniel Marino.

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press side

"When poetry becomes spectacle"

An article by Bernard Cassat, published on December 15, 2022

"An original and profound show"

An article by Benjamin Oppert, published on December 16, 2022

An interview conducted by Bernard Cassat

Artistic team

Poems -Kiki Dimoula

Translation -Michael Volkovich

Direction and interpretation -Eric Cenat

Artistic collaboration -Claire Vidoni

Composition and interpretation -Sophia Alexandrou

Scenography, Animated images -Vojtech Janyska

Piano, Voice -Sophia Alexandrou

Light design -Vincent Mongourdin

Supporters

The City of Orléans / Centre-Val-de-Loire

The National Stage of Orléans / Centre-Val-de-Loire

The Czech Center of Paris /Participates in the Franco-Czech cultural and artistic dialogue andpromotes Czech culture in France.

The B&M Theocharakis Foundation /Cultural center and museum whose mission, among other things, is to introduce children and young people to fine arts and music.

The Hellenic Community of Paris /Association that works to develop Franco-Hellenic friendship, and promotes Hellenic culture to the French and Greek public.

Residence calendar history

From December 05, 2022 to December 16, 2022at the National Stage,Orleans(45)

From November 27, 2022 to December 02, 2022at the Czech Cultural Center,Paris(75)

From March 14, 2022 to March 19, 2022 at the National Stage,Orleans(45)

From February 21, 2022 to February 26, 2022at the National Stage,Orleans(45)

Friday, December 16, 2022 CREATION-2 performances

There National scene,Orleans (45)