Richard III – Loyaulté me lie # 06

Theatre is shared solitude. It is an art form where a community of performers sets itself a challenge: to meet a community of spectators. In this challenge, it becomes an enticing fancy to achieve what is impossible.

 

When we started laying the foundations of Richard III – Loyaulté me lie in 2012, our desires were aligned but we couldn’t have guessed the distance we were going to have to cover or the limitations we were going to encounter.

First of all, we were happy to see each other again, joyfully thinking about the new areas we had to explore and the good and bad surprises they hide, which were, depending on the case, more or less opportune to our interpretation of the play. The joy we have to work together towards an unknown ephemeral event is what guided our good fortune.

And then, we started doing, undoing, changing, here a fabric, there a colour, we made and unmade, we set things, only to alter and change them again and again and again… until we couldn’t bear to hear the word “again” anymore!

We laughed and got angry at the mishaps, the buzzing sounds, the hours that the computers need to do their calculations, a light that blows here, a bit of soldering needed over there, a prop that breaks, a lighting console that stops working, a voice that breaks, a muscle that suddenly relaxes… and, always, starting things all over again because we aren’t satisfied, because we aren’t precise enough. Thus, repeating a gesture, the harmony of an instant; thus, on a communal agreement, confronting the danger of doubt, putting great effort into unsuccessfully modelling chaos, talking for hours, in order to convince oneself and each other that we should trust the improbable nature of things.

An enormous amount of time and patience is required for a result that is often ephemeral.

To accept that one is blind in order to dream oneself as a clear-sighted individual is a delicate art form. At times, everything seems distant, complicated, awful; at other times, it all seems so close, so beautiful, so simple. One must leave a lot of room for chaos if one hopes to find light within it. 

To progress without fearing weariness, we must look for the glimpses of joy that can surreptitiously be seen in someone else’s eyes. We must save them and add them to the joy found in yet other eyes, and so on, until the sum of these glimmers of joy adds up to a result that convinces us to expose our solitude to the uncertainty of a vaster solitude, a solitude made of all our assembled gazes…

 

A state of solitude may not lead to the truth, but it is a land of wavering landscapes, irregular skies, days spent in confusion, nights spent in distrust. It is a land one must inhabit to come closer, little by little, to the measure of a promise that is outside ourselves.

Theatre is probably the best-equipped vehicle for this type of journey. It requires perseverance, and to constantly be searching and researching. Only when one has managed to detach oneself from superficial convictions can one’s deepest emotions emerge. 

All of us, technicians and artists, are the actors of this Richard III. We are linked by our promise to use “loyaulté” and to transform our solitudes into a joyful emotion to be shared with an audience.   

Richard III - Loyaulté me lie - Carnet de bord #1

François Royet

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