Clara Koskas, Artistic Director
In my view, theater is the ultimate art form that can unite all disciplines. It is the sacred place for the spokespeople of “silent and forgotten voices,” of thoughts that span the centuries.
Theatre is a social art in the sense that the audience comes to it to escape from itself.
Its task is to “represent the movements of the soul, the spirit, the world, and history,” as Mnouchkine says. A show is not an object frozen in time; it evolves according to each audience. Each performance is a (nearly unconscious) dialogue between spectators, actors, and the work itself.
As artists, our responsibility is immense; we are disruptive in the sense of shifting collective consciousness. The actor is a spokesperson for messages,
I seek to cultivate my work through what surrounds me to draw from it questions and answers on the universality of what constitutes us as human beings.
All my research and work constantly interfere with traditional theaters, the rituals of different cultures. What fascinates me is to see so many differences that all have something to contribute to each other and when through a gesture, an emotion, a way of reacting to a situation we can see the very essence of what connects us all as human beings. ” More than ever, I feel that the human race is one. Beyond differences of color, language, culture and possibilities, the feelings and reactions of each person are identical. People flee wars to escape death; they emigrate to improve their lot; they forge new lives in foreign countries: they adapt to the worst situations” (Sebastiao Salgado).
However, man is moving away from his brothers and sisters and the more time passes the more his desire for individualism strengthens, and sometimes takes inhuman turns like racism, fascism…
When photographer Sebastiao Salgado is asked what a portrait is, he replies that it is about paying attention to the other. For me, this is also a definition of theater. Theater is a necessity; it becomes political through the way we do it.
This frantic race in which man lives, which acts like a tsunami on the entire world with the exception of certain territories, plunges our species into unimaginable paroxysms of inhumanity. This is what I call dehumanization and which is expressed in different ways: being under the yoke of a power, the meteoric rise of robotization, the confinement of oneself and so on. In the 60s, Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, was asked this question “Man having now found something so serious that it is on a planetary scale that the danger is run, must it also be on a planetary scale that men come together?” He will answer: “I believe so, yes.”
It is only by uniting that we can save what can still be saved, and by taking an interest in others more than ever that we will find the keys to fighting.
“You cannot achieve fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, from the courage to turn one’s back on old formulas, from the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must invent the future.” (Thomas Sankara, Discourse on Debt)