[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
J’étais fatiguée de la ville alors je suis partie.
Voilà ce que j’ai rapporté.
Gabriel Tur: “We are looking for perfection in the compositions”
Cyd jolly Roger en concert au Baloard, avril 2009.
Gabriel studies in L’ERAC (Acting school) in Cannes, but on stage he can also play the bass and the cytar among other instruments with his band Cyd Jolly Roger. It was on a warm evening night of April that I decided to learn more about it and knocked at his door.
La Rôtisserie fights for survival
La Rôtisserie is a unique community restaurant. Far from the usual logic of profit making, its idea is simple : It enables any non-profit association to cook and serve dinner to raise funds to support its projects. With time and enthusiasm, 4 rue Sainte Marthe became a central place of socialization and mutual aid for the local community of the 10th district of Paris. Threatened with eviction from its historical premises, La Rôtisserie is more alive than ever as its members fight to defend it.
Undercover spies : When the press blows the whistle.
The Drax coal-fired power station, North Yorkshire, England
January 9, 2011, The Guardian reveals the existence of Mark Kennedy, a police officer working for the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) in charge of watching “domestic extremists.” Undercover inside the environmental protest movement for seven years using the name Mark Stone, Kennedy seems to have taken his whole mission too far. Other undercover officers might have followed the same path. The Guardian turned the spotlights on a unit whose practices proved to be highly controversial.
Identity on stage
A man and a woman enter the stage in silence. The atmosphere is intimate. I can see the detail of their features, the texture of their clothes, the light shining through their hair. A stripe of white fuzzy carpet crosses the floor. The walls are white too. We enter the play Identitéwritten and directed by Gérard Watkins. We are Friday night at the Théâtre de la Bastille, in the eleventh district of Paris.
The couple in front of us has almost nothing left. Overwhelmed by debts, their only hope resides in a survey. The ad says that if they answer some questions, they can earn money.
It’s a small theatre. When the doors opened earlier, the audience had to take a few steps along the stage to reach the comfortable seats. The frontier between what is shown and the people who watch appears as unusually thin. The Théâtre de la Bastille aims to be a place of experimentation and artistic adventures, a theatre of the unexpected flirting with the limits and the rules.
The play Identité won the Great drama literature price in 2010. Gérard Watkins wrote and directed it in reaction to a French law urging immigrants and their relatives to undergo DNA tests to enable their whole family to live together in France. According to him, identity and relationships cannot be reduced to science. It is a complex and mysterious personal journey.
During the play, the survey leads Marion and André to conduct a series of tests to find out if their parents are their real parents. But is it possible to reduce our identity to our blood and our genes? Why does it seem so important? Is the question actually relevant? Insidiously, the survey becomes more and more present. Time accelerates. The couple drifts apart. Marion starts a hunger strike. She protests against something she has no word to describe. She wants to exist outside the rules of sociability, of financial sustainability, of sanity imposed to her by the society that surrounds her.
The play is strongly rooted in our reality. It is a tragedy without violence questioning the way our lives are influenced and shaped by authorities, by governments. Gérard Watkins denounces the way individuals are classified, well-ordered by the powers in place.
To survive, André chooses to sell his identity, to do what he is told to do. As the play ends, he holds his wife in his arms. He is about to leave her. She refused to transform what she was into a series of tests, into numbers and codes, into an answer to one simple question.
I walk outside the theatre and meet the happy night time crowds of the Bastille district. The play has coloured my thoughts. The impression of space and comfort created by the long fuzzy white carpet and the clean white walls is now replaced by an uneasy feeling of uncertainty and indignation. Identité asks more questions than it gives answers.
15 janvier 2010 Manifestation à Montréal “Arrêtez le massacre en Tunisie”
Crédits : Fanny Bréart de Boisanger
