Duration: 45 min.

All ages from 11 years old.

 

Possession is a form of puppet-magic, where we dive into the heart of what lurks in the recesses of our darkest thoughts... A suspended time where madness and the strange take shape, in the guise of Antonin Artaud. A summons to meet his ghost, on the other side of the mirror...

 

"But however much we cry out for magic, deep down we are afraid of a life that would develop entirely under the sign of true magic. I accuse the author of Jabberwocky of having wanted to penetrate a void that did not want to be possessed." (A. Artaud, letter to A. Parisot)

 

At the start of this project came the discovery of the birth of an inner monster, or the double possession of Antonin Artaud via his "plagiarism by anticipation" of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky: When he discovers Carroll's text, Artaud has only one certainty; this text is not Carroll's, but his own. Through this devouring madness, he will thus attempt to eliminate the slightest doubt between Carroll's creation and his own, to become one with this text, thus creating his own version of the Jabberwocky, and at the same time feeding his own "monster".

 

"True theatre, because it moves and because it uses living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to stumble. (...) and theatre, which does not fix itself in language and in forms, destroys by the fact the false shadows, but prepares the way for another birth of shadows around which the true spectacle of life is aggregated. (...) This leads to rejecting the usual limitations of man and of man's powers, and to making infinite the frontiers of what we call reality." (A. Artaud)

 

With such a statement, the challenge of awakening these "shadows" becomes obvious. Questioning the inhabited/incarnate/surpassed/possessed being means going to the place of porosity where magic and puppetry can coexist, to the place where the impossible is called into question by the disruption of the audience's usual cognitive benchmarks.