Theater. Between the lukewarm and the hot, Jeanne Candel has decided: she is on the side of electric passions. Whether they are Christ-like or pagan, erotic or mystical, sad or joyful, it doesn’t matter, as long as the nerve of the living does not desert the rooms. The director of the Théâtre de l’Aquarium stages Baùbo – the art of not being dead, a skillfully disjointed show like a dream delivering its enigmas, its flashes and its inconsistencies. A dream of eruptive beauty where the artist’s illuminations on love, its end and its renewal are exposed.
Jeanne Candel wants to attract spectators. It is no coincidence that Baùbo ends with the disappearance of three actresses who tear themselves away from a wall where their clothes were stapled to rush into a mouse hole: they demand our attention until the final minute of their presence on stage. We attest to their existence as much as they legitimize ours. Once the trio is off-camera, it becomes dark. The power is cut, the blood no longer circulates. Love is also seeing this other who faces us.
This unclassifiable show argues for the necessity of passions whatever they may be. Demonstration in three stages: the birth and end of a love, told by actress Pauline Huruguen, seated on a chair in front of a closed curtain. Then, on the open stage, the pantomime of loss, revisited during a silent and comical ceremony. Dressed in black crepe, the mourning performers try to bury the deceased feeling played by an actor (who does not let it happen). Finally, the return of vitality, with the summoning of a Greek myth parodied by the performers: the goddess Demeter, who mourns her lost daughter, returns to joy when her nurse, Baùbo, displays her genitals in front of her.
Sketches of buttocks, fingers, eye and bird
The bodies and the music escort life and death impulses which travel between exaltation and sorrow. There are few words, but many images that emerge in absurd bursts: the man being rolled up in a carpet for his burial, the musicians hidden under sheets of paper, the female posteriors cleaning the wall where sketches of buttocks, fingers, eyes and birds are penciled. Or the irresistible performance of Jeanne Candel herself, who, climbing onto a bed, performs, as an interlude, a jubilant trickster act.
As is often the case with the director, the writing is a rebus, more visual than textual, sometimes indecipherable and sometimes luminous. The music played live (under the direction of Pierre-Antoine Badaroux) is by the German composer Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672). The works of the Austrian writer Robert Musil (1880-1942) inspired his work. But, in reality, we think much more of this definition attributed to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan: “Love is giving what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it. »
In this interstice conducive to the imagination anchors a saucy spectacle which gains in poetry as it chooses to be concrete, even trivial. The accessories seem to come from a DIY store (staplers, scissors, wicker trash can, shovels, adhesive). No Hamiltonian blur, no pathos or tremolos. If necessary, a drum solo supplants the vocals of the superb singer Pauline Leroy. Roughness is a muscle, crude humor a breath of oxygen. Since passions are not ethereal, there is no point in leading the audience into the vague soul of vaporous thoughts. The goal is to pick him up, raw, with scenes that he can’t always explain but which invigorate him. How vivid is this Baùbo, whose impact can be summed up in one word: dazzling. This is the name (recalls Pauline Huruguen) given to those who survived lightning.