En
Fr
EsIn production • December 2023
Plonger
Menteuses [Be]
Freely inspired by the Eloge du Risque, by Anne Dufourmantelle
A girl walks to the edge. It It shakes, it moves strangely, but the girl walks, she advances, she climbs the few steps and advances again. At the very end, at the very edge.
“Are you going to dive?”
“What are we risking when we suspend a decision? Are we betting that something else will happen?” (Anne Dufourmantelle, Eloge du risque)
Plonger takes place around a pool. At the bottom, sometimes. On a diving board, often In a nocturnal and surrealistic atmosphere imbued with a great deal of humour, two characters bring this abandoned, almost fallow pool to life through their wanderings and existential quest: the Insomniac in a swimming costume and the Caretaker of the venue. In this deeply hybrid piece where the physical, theatrical and emotional body merge, the stage becomes a mental space, in which the border between the conscious and the unconscious fades.
Credits
Conceived, written and co-directed by Sarah Devaux Co-direction Mélissa Von Vépy As the insomniac in swimming suit Sarah Devaux As the pool caretaker Marcel Vidal Castells Sound design Noé Voisard Light design & technical management Thibault Condy Set design Neil Price, Camille Collin & Charlotte Perrin Costume design Camille Collin assistée de Cinzia Derom Dramaturgy consultancy Yvain Juilliard (as part of écriture en campagne-Sacd)
A production by Cie Menteuses
Financial supports Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles – Service Général de la Création artistique – Service du Cirque, des Arts forains et des Arts de la Rue, SACD – Soutien à l’écriture Spectacle vivant; Wallonie Bruxelles International, Wallonie Bruxelles Théâtre / Danse, Bourse Ecriture en Campagne – with the support of Latitude50, La Chaufferie-Acte1, la SACD et la SSA Residencies & coproductions La Maison de la culture de Tournai – La Piste aux Espoirs (Be), Théâtre Varia, Bruxelles (Be), Le Sirque, pôle national cirque de Nexon (Fr87), UP – Circus & Performing Arts, Bruxelles (Be) Residencies Le Château de Monthelon – Atelier international de création artistique (Fr89), Théâtre des Doms, Avignon (Fr84), Cie Happés/Mélissa Von Vépy, Aigues-Vives (Fr30), Théâtre des Franciscains, Béziers (Fr34), Latitude 50, Marchin (Be), Le Columban, Wavre (Be)
The company
Menteuses [Be]
Sarah Devaux and Célia Casagrande-Pouchet met at ESAC (Ecole Supérieure des Arts du Cirque de Bruxelles) in 2011. Immediately an artistic complicity is born. After their training, in 2014, specialised in flying rope and smooth rope, they plunged into their first physical and artistic research linking these two apparatus. Les Menteuses was created in 2015, to host their first show, À nos fantômes. We meet a baroque character, struggling with her desires, her fantasies, but also her disillusions, all in a completely metaphorical universe. Everything is played out around a large black magic rope, sometimes vertical, sometimes swinging. Since then, the company has established itself in the Brussels landscape, but also extends its collaborations with various international partners. The company is committed to working on a sensitive and theatrical creation, where the universe seems to be balanced between dreamlike, surreal and absurd. The place given to image, light and sound reveals their attraction to a certain cinematographic aesthetic. If the body in suspension constitutes one of their essential scenic languages, which allows them to open up another metaphysical space, the question of the apparatus seems to be moving away today to make room for a scenography specific to the project, but also for a body that can express all its poetic, physical, emotional and theatrical potential in an attempt, in whatever way, to tell the story of what stirs the human soul.
Sarah Devaux
Sarah graduated from ESAC (Brussels) in June 2014. There she specialised in corde lisse and made encounters that would mark the rest of her career, in particular the collaboration with Valérie Dubourg, for her show Péripétiesbut also with Célia Casagrande-Pouchet, with whom she founded the Cie Menteuses in 2015 and their first show À Nos Fantômes, with Mélissa Von Vépy and Tom Boccara (film director). She is currently in the cast of Open Cage-cie Hors Surface, in the next creation of the Indécente-Camille Châtelain company for a hybrid piece, mixing circus and live music, No Rest for Lady Dragon, and Mélissa von Vépy’s Les Flyings. Her love of theatre has also led her to work with Belgian director Pascal Crochet in a play that places her research around the poetic possibilities of the body (released in 2021), and with the company Teraluna, in a play about the family, Les Gunn’s habitent au 43, written and directed by Sébastien Barberon. Within these various creations, Sarah pushes her research into a metaphorical language and a physical and singular theatrical universe, where the circus becomes a powerful means to tell a different story. To tell a different story about the human being, in all its madness and beauty; in its aspirations, its quests, but also its anxieties and contradictions… Strengthened by all these experiences, Plonger arrives at a point in his career where the need is felt to write the circus from another point of view, without compromise or inhibition.
