La parole ventriloque
Conferences directed by Jérôme Mauche. Writer Stéphane Bouquet, and stage director and author Robert Cantarella, are the guests of this new edition of Poetry Platform.
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What happens when speech turns out to be the literal repetition through the voice of another and goes through his body? What does this system of echo and listening (for it takes place on a stage) bring to or teach its performer and its audience?
This experience of a deterritorialized speech is offered by Robert Cantarella in “Faire le Gilles,” a performance in which he represents and repeats (thanks to an earpiece) a 1981 seminar given by Gilles Deleuze at the University of Vincennes.
This troubling reconstitution of an inventive, erudite, funny speech and of its contexts of enunciation is the starting point of this edition of Poetry Platform, which brings together poet, translator, and scriptwriter Stéphane Bouquet, and author and director Robert Cantarella.
This process of “sound copy” and “ventriloquist speech” will be compared to other regimes of the voice—and of writing—in the wide spectrum of practices these two authors have in common. In fact, they do occasionally collaborate.
Reading, performance, theatrical or choreographic interpretation, script, translation, poem: what would be the continuities of the voice, of voices thus borrowed and embodied, or conveying the earlier bodies of poets, of concepts, and of loved ones?
Stéphane Bouquet is a poet. He is the author of five books, all published by Champ Vallon: Dans l’année de cet âge, 2001; Un monde existe, 2002; Le Mot frère, 2005; Un peuple, 2007; Nos Amériques, 2010. He is also a former resident of the Villa Médicis in Rome and has translated American poets Robert Creeley (Le Sortilège, Nous, 2006), Paul Blackburn (Villes, followed by Journaux, Corti, 2011), and Peter Gizzi (L’Externationale, Corti, forthcoming).
Bouquet has written a number of screenplays, notably for Valérie Mréjen, Robert Cantarella, and Sébastien Lifshitz (whose feature film La Traversée is based on autobiographical material by Bouquet, who plays his own part in the film). He has also written and performed for choreographer Mathilde Monnier (Frère & sœur, presented at the Festival d’Avignon in 2005).
A former film critic for Cahiers du cinéma and literary critic for Libération, Bouquet has authored several essays on cinema, specifically on Pasolini’s The Gospel according to St. Matthew (2003), Eisenstein (2008), Gus Van Sant (2009), all published by the editions of Cahiers du cinéma, and more recently, Clint Fucking Eastwood (Capricci, 2012).
Robert Cantarella is an actor, a director, a writer, and a filmmaker. After studying with Antoine Vitez he founded the Théâtre du Quai de la Gare, an alternative place, in Paris in 1983 before founding the Compagnie des Ours to get audiences to discover or rediscover twentieth-century authors. He directed the Théâtre Dijon-Bourgogne, and was more recently at the helm of Le 104 with Frédéric Fisbach. Cantarella has directed many contemporary texts on stage (Philippe Minyana, Michel Vinaver, Noëlle Renaude, Jean-Luc Lagarce, Jean Magnan, Christophe Huysman) as well as plays by Cervantès, Strindberg, Artaud, Bernstein, Brecht, Broch, O’Neill…
His thought on theater and its practices has taken the form of interventions (the writing and publication of the manifesto Pour une formation à la mise en scène with Jean-Pierre Han in 1997) and essays, some of which have appeared in Lignes. He is the author of a novel, Le Chalet (Léo Scheer, 2004), as well as several films and documentaries (Carrosserie, 2004; Chantiers, 2009). Cantarella regularly teaches in France as well as overseas, at CalArts in Los Angeles for example.
Since the mid-2000s he has been developing performance work, alone or in collaboration with writers (Liliane Giraudon, Olivia Rosenthal), questioning memory, speech, and repetition, as with “Les Classiques par temps de crises.” He also works on the invention of new forms such as the Musée vivant, inaugurated at the Centre Pompidou Metz last year. In 2012 Robert Cantarella presented “Faire le Gilles” and directed Christophe Honoré’s play Un jeune se tue at the Festival d’Avignon.
