MANIA

CONTES ET LEGÉNDES by Joël Pommerat

Joël Pommerat returns to Nanterre-Amandiers with a brand new show, after having presented the emblematic Ça ira (1) Fin de Louis, which immersed the viewer in the 1789 revolution and the origins of our political organization. This time, it is childhood, one of the favorite subjects of the author-director, at the heart of the play, whose characters are aged nine to fourteen. Adolescents or preadolescents, this is the moment when they live in their bodies, and therefore also in their minds, radical transformations that we observe through a series of short sequences located in the near future; little tales that are both concrete and fantastic, sometimes in relation to each other.

What distinguishes all these stories involving adolescents, is the systematic, unusual presence in such a context, of android robots, more or less perfect replicas of young human beings. This artificial presence functions as a revealing, even disruptive, element and depending on the families, the contexts, the situations in which these sophisticated machines are found, they reproduce or question the identities and values of their owners.

By their resemblance but also by the functionalities which are conferred on them, these android dolls offer, as stylized versions of the human, a paradoxical representation of what we are – both our double and our image reflected as in a distorted mirror. Already present in his rewriting of Pinocchio (2008), the rebellious adolescent puppet launched on the path of humanity, distant cousin of Galatea animated by the love of its creator in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this matter of transformation takes in Contes et Légends an even more disturbing color.