Jean Lambert-wild and Stéphane Blanquet examine the hours spent “as usual” - the ones that separate the children’s murder from the parents' suicide, but also the teeming and terrible hours that see the children die, one by one, in their genitors’ arms. Their idea is to place those two temporalities side by side and watch them unfold, head-to-tail, for the duration of the show so as to create a tension from which the unrepresentable can emerge: the shifting of minds towards madness.
The stage is divided in two versions of the same domestic space, one’s ceiling thus becoming the other’s floor. Between those two levels lies a grey area where words are projected. The words can be read but cannot be heard: they are the unspeakable.
The performers embodying the couple are able to inhabit one floor while simultaneously haunting the other; their movements are choreographed by Juha Marsalo, who had previously teamed up with Jean Lambert-wild's and Jean-Luc Therminarias on The Retreat into the Forests (Le Recours aux Forêts). Within their limbs and through their movement, the dancers will give a face to what cannot be represented. The duplicated couple is reminiscent of a discreet motif that can be found across Jean Lambert-wild's work: doppelgangers.
Tomorrow, here to stay...
Tomorrow, war will make itself at home amongst our belongings.
It will move into our homes quietly, without spilling much blood.
It will be a ghost in our midst and its familiar breath will distill a numbing fear in us.
We will scream out our terror in silence while eagerly seeking a distraction away from the mute uncertainty of what lies ahead.
Our daily actions will be a quiet repetition of the movements of this ghost. It will use all the technological innovations at hand to make us accept the comfort of our imminent destruction, at all costs.
The relentless pressure we will endure will give us the opportunity to face our ruin, without learning from it.
Long trained to softly forget the ways of peace, we will know but one dance.
The victory of war will then be complete as it will effortlessly come to mark the beat of our annihilation.
Jean Lambert-wild
In War Sweet War
In War Sweet War lies the terrible abyss before which we stand today. The abyss of modern tragedy of our time - ourselves. Like all works of theatre, War Sweet War is a mirror we look into to examine the face by gazing deeply into the eyes; or better still, it is a hallway of mirrors, a face-off creating infinite reproductions. The two sets of identical twins look into each other’s eyes and cannot tell who is alive and who’s already dead.
The living hit the wall, slide against doors and convulse uncontrollably. They stretch time and put it to a halt. They try to go back in time. They try to find each other in their homes and within themselves; they witness the destruction of their own bodies. They shiver, fall, lose their balance, start, suffocate, bump into each other - body and movement are ever-present.
“Choré”, short for choreography, is sometimes used colloquially in French. However, using “choré” (chorea in English) in the context of War Sweet War echoes the word’s actual meaning, since it stands for a neurological disorder relating to abnormal movements. An involuntary manifestation that cannot be controlled. A choreographer’s language is the body and in the body lies a whole world with unfolding dreams and nightmares. We work with the primary nature of the "being", in the presence of its demons. Between the walls of the set that are covered in leaking black ink, I in turn tag the stage through the chorea of bodies in motion.
I write in vain; I am a "choreographer".
The eclectic team of specialists, artists and technicians on War Sweet War are experimenting with great enthusiasm. The game is exceeding expectations and what makes it even more exciting is that no one really knows its rules. However, what the members of the team do know is that they are each progressing towards the spot, in the middle, where the red thread of our story runs; War Sweet War.
Juha Marsalo