
from La Mastication des Morts by Patrick Kermann
THE STORY - After several years of separation, five friends engage in a peculiar role-playing game: reassembling the life of their hometown through a collection of posthumous words. These stories from another time shed light on the mysteries of the place and trigger in the participants a true need to relearn how to live together. The characters of Ci-Gît! invite the audience to discover the village of Moret-sur-Raguse through a succession of revived stories. Like an inventory, the performance unfolds before the spectators' eyes as a large puzzle: piece by piece, testimonies intersect and characters meet, while more than a century of history is sketched as a backdrop. It is the audience’s turn to play with this narrative by reconstructing the connections between the characters and the events of the village.
THE AUTHOR - "It was while visiting a small cemetery in the French countryside that the idea of creating a 'polyphony from the beyond' came to me, giving a voice back to the hundreds of deceased buried over the past century in Moret-sur-Raguse, a symbolic village entirely invented... But before I arrived there, I toured France's rural cemeteries and collected a set of names with distinctly French sounds to exclude any exoticism. Except for the purely imaginary geography of the village in question, everything I tell in my play is authentic, with only a few details altered—small stories and big history intertwined. La Mastication des Morts is an 'oratorio in progress.' It is a work on numbers and memory, the fragile small memory of a multitude of voices inscribed in the history of a community. The goal, in gathering the inhabitants of the cemetery of Moret-sur-Raguse, is to hear the uniqueness of each, their own language that, emerging from beyond the grave, beyond the bodies, makes us resonate, living on borrowed time, with those who belong to another world... From this perspective, La Mastication des Morts is a joyful attempt at reconciliation with death, which our era systematically avoids. It also responds to Jean Genet's project for a theater situated in the heart of a cemetery, addressing people capable, in the dead of night, of confronting a mystery. The dead I momentarily pull from oblivion by staging them know neither the resignation of sadness, nor the burn of lament, neither horror nor ecstasy, nor hell nor heaven."




PERFORMANCES
February 19, 20, and 21, 2013, at Trioletto in Montpellier.
THE ARTISTIC TEAM
Director - Camille Daloz
Performers - Emmanuelle Bertrand, Alexandre Cafarelli, Jérémy Cateland, Bastien Molines, Julie Cucchiaro
Lighting Design - Camille Mauplot
Production and Distribution - Julie Juret
PRODUCTION - Crous de Montpellier and Le Cri Dévot.
RESIDENCY HOSTING - Théâtre de Lenche, Marseille.