Published in 1961, at the height of the Algerian War (1954-1962), Les Paravents, considered by Genet to be "the pinnacle of his theatrical work", had to wait until 1966 before being staged in Paris, where it caused a huge scandal.



The play is certainly one of the founding pillars of contemporary French theatre. Roger Blin premiered Les Paravents at the Théâtre de l'Odéon in 1966, and it caused a huge scandal, with some people seeing it as an offense to France. Set in an Arab country colonised by Europeans, its starting point is the mirroring and chaos of the Algerian war. With this epic and insolent fresco, which brings together a hundred characters, Genet thwarts and disturbs our codes and expectations. In a unique language, he sweeps us away and illuminates the world of the dead and the world of the living in a series of tableaux that make up a fascinating political and poetic ritual. 60 years after its creation, 16 actors and actresses form this human community that also tells a story of immigration in France.



After La Dame aux camélias and Mes frères, Arthur Nauzyciel presents his 3rd production in Rennes. He returns to Jean Genet, whose Splendid's he staged in 2015. Writer, poet and one of the twentieth century's leading authors, Jean Genet, the "irredeemable" praised by Cocteau and Sartre, created a powerful, sensual and moving body of work that gave voice and body to the marginalised and excluded.

Au 7e étage du Splendid’s Hôtel, 7 gangsters sont encerclés par la police. Ils ont kidnappé la fille d’un milliardaire américain. Aucun doute sur l’issue à venir : elle leur sera fatale. Sous le regard d’un flic fasciné qui a choisi de trahir son camp, les voyous tentent de retarder l’assaut. Comme un écho à son film Un chant d’amour où il filmait le désir sexuel de prisonniers qu’épiait constamment un maton, Jean Genet construit ici un espace-temps sans échappatoire possible.



Et cette pièce résonne singulièrement avec La Dame aux camélias, créée par Arthur Nauzyciel en début de saison, par ce qu’elle dit du rapport du pouvoir au corps, au désir et au crime. Depuis la création de Julius Caesar aux États-Unis en 2008, présentée au TNB la saison dernière, Arthur Nauzyciel souhaitait continuer à travailler avec cette même équipe d’acteurs américains auxquels se sont joints Xavier Gallais et Jeanne Moreau pour Splendid’s, œuvre sensuelle et spectrale qui témoigne d’une recherche esthétique entre théâtre et cinéma.

RAFALES | MACHINE (CUNT) FIRE



Raffiche was born from the impossibility of restaging Jean Genet’s Splendid’s fourteen years after Motus’s “historical” performance, with a female-only cast. The rules of international copyright expect of theatre makers to respect the sex of characters, as they are indicated in the script. Even with an author like Genet who, for his whole life, fought for the necessity of metamorphosis, of betrayal and ambiguity. From this surprising denial exploded the desire to work on the themes of identity and revolt, of the refusal to adhere to a preconceived deference towards the separation of reality in male and female. An original script by Magdalena Barile and Luca Scarlini starts from the same narrative situation (a group of rebels besieged in a hotel – whose name remains from the original, only the name as a homage to the French playwright) to tell of mutating and subversive identities, creatures that have suspended the will to define themselves. Characters who have, for a long time, used performance as a form of political activism, and who now, in a situation of threat and constant persecution from powerful conservative lobbies, have moved on to another kind of struggle. They have taken up machine guns, without foregoing their natural elegance, to state “another” vision of society, without pre-established roles and heterocentral control. A show for hotel suites, that stages, really close to the audience, almost a touch away, the pungent and exciting breath of revolution, the sexy smells of transmodern witches. Not only are they back. They remain with us to sing a tune other than preconceptions, stereotypes and prohibition.



RAFFICHE was the opening performance of the special project HELLO STRANGER that the Municipality of Bologna dedicated to the 25th anniversary of Motus’s resistant artistic activity. This evocative (and provocative) path across various places connected to Motus witnessed, between October and December 2016, a whirwind of repertoire performances, conferences, films, installations and the release of the HELLO STRANGER book. This controversial performance premiered at the VIE Festival in Bologna (ERT) from October 18th to 22nd 2016. It is an “outlaw” homage to Jean Genet’s Splendid’s with an all female cast: a link with the past that, at the same time, reconfigures our own present. We have chosen Genet because, more than any other author, he is coherent with the dramaturgical line that overrode all of HELLO STRANGER, namely the reflexion on identity and its plastic transformations.



ÜBER RAFFICHE (nude expanded version)



Exploring, digging up, crossing the borders of the blank page and of our own shows is a usual practice. Deciding that a work is “finished” is one of the most difficult decisions to take. Often we fling the finish line far away, leaving it suspended… The birth of Raffiche already comes from an insubordinate need for openness: on the occasion of Hello Stranger, the project of the Municipality of Bologna which celebrated the 25 years of Motus (Autumn 2016), we thought about a remake of Splendid’s (theatre piece by Jean Genet, which we staged for the first time in 2002, with an all-male cast). But the simple re-staging was not enough, we decided to cross the threshold of sex, the armed and over-protected barrier of gender by imagining the show with an all-female cast. Despite the peremptory prohibition by the international copyright – which prevents from changing identity to the characters of protected works – we continued with other words (those of Magdalena Barile’s and Luca Scarlini’s) and with other intentions.



We had decided to keep the original and extravagant location of the first staging in 2002, namely luxurious hotel suites, where the piece is in fact set, and this has been case for the premiere, in the prestigious Royal Hotel Carlton in Bologna, the Rimini Grand Hotel and other hotels…



This pseudo-realistic and strongly cinematographic version will continue existing since taking the audience out of the theatre and invading a real hotel is an operation we are interested in pursuing… But the urge to demolish walls has planted its roots in us so deeply that, for the 2017 edition of Santarcangelo Festival, we are attempting a new experiment: Über Raffiche, a nude (expanded version) of Raffiche, which will not be set in hotels but in an open space, as the big emptied room of a gym. No walls but only some elegant furniture, no behind the scenes but everything in sight, nude: at the centre just the bodies of our beloved armed actresses.

RAFALES | MACHINE (CUNT) FIRE



Raffiche was born from the impossibility of restaging Jean Genet’s Splendid’s fourteen years after Motus’s “historical” performance, with a female-only cast. The rules of international copyright expect of theatre makers to respect the sex of characters, as they are indicated in the script. Even with an author like Genet who, for his whole life, fought for the necessity of metamorphosis, of betrayal and ambiguity. From this surprising denial exploded the desire to work on the themes of identity and revolt, of the refusal to adhere to a preconceived deference towards the separation of reality in male and female. An original script by Magdalena Barile and Luca Scarlini starts from the same narrative situation (a group of rebels besieged in a hotel – whose name remains from the original, only the name as a homage to the French playwright) to tell of mutating and subversive identities, creatures that have suspended the will to define themselves. Characters who have, for a long time, used performance as a form of political activism, and who now, in a situation of threat and constant persecution from powerful conservative lobbies, have moved on to another kind of struggle. They have taken up machine guns, without foregoing their natural elegance, to state “another” vision of society, without pre-established roles and heterocentral control. A show for hotel suites, that stages, really close to the audience, almost a touch away, the pungent and exciting breath of revolution, the sexy smells of transmodern witches. Not only are they back. They remain with us to sing a tune other than preconceptions, stereotypes and prohibition.



RAFFICHE was the opening performance of the special project HELLO STRANGER that the Municipality of Bologna dedicated to the 25th anniversary of Motus’s resistant artistic activity. This evocative (and provocative) path across various places connected to Motus witnessed, between October and December 2016, a whirwind of repertoire performances, conferences, films, installations and the release of the HELLO STRANGER book. This controversial performance premiered at the VIE Festival in Bologna (ERT) from October 18th to 22nd 2016. It is an “outlaw” homage to Jean Genet’s Splendid’s with an all female cast: a link with the past that, at the same time, reconfigures our own present. We have chosen Genet because, more than any other author, he is coherent with the dramaturgical line that overrode all of HELLO STRANGER, namely the reflexion on identity and its plastic transformations.



ÜBER RAFFICHE (nude expanded version)



Exploring, digging up, crossing the borders of the blank page and of our own shows is a usual practice. Deciding that a work is “finished” is one of the most difficult decisions to take. Often we fling the finish line far away, leaving it suspended… The birth of Raffiche already comes from an insubordinate need for openness: on the occasion of Hello Stranger, the project of the Municipality of Bologna which celebrated the 25 years of Motus (Autumn 2016), we thought about a remake of Splendid’s (theatre piece by Jean Genet, which we staged for the first time in 2002, with an all-male cast). But the simple re-staging was not enough, we decided to cross the threshold of sex, the armed and over-protected barrier of gender by imagining the show with an all-female cast. Despite the peremptory prohibition by the international copyright – which prevents from changing identity to the characters of protected works – we continued with other words (those of Magdalena Barile’s and Luca Scarlini’s) and with other intentions.



We had decided to keep the original and extravagant location of the first staging in 2002, namely luxurious hotel suites, where the piece is in fact set, and this has been case for the premiere, in the prestigious Royal Hotel Carlton in Bologna, the Rimini Grand Hotel and other hotels…



This pseudo-realistic and strongly cinematographic version will continue existing since taking the audience out of the theatre and invading a real hotel is an operation we are interested in pursuing… But the urge to demolish walls has planted its roots in us so deeply that, for the 2017 edition of Santarcangelo Festival, we are attempting a new experiment: Über Raffiche, a nude (expanded version) of Raffiche, which will not be set in hotels but in an open space, as the big emptied room of a gym. No walls but only some elegant furniture, no behind the scenes but everything in sight, nude: at the centre just the bodies of our beloved armed actresses.

Solange and Claire are two housemaids who construct elaborate sadomasochistic rituals when their mistress (Madame) is away. The focus of their role-playing is the murder of Madame and they take turns portraying both sides of the power divide. Their deliberate pace and devotion to detail guarantees that they always fail to actualize their fantasies by ceremoniously "killing" Madame at the ritual's dénouement.