Lancelot Hamelin Ici, Ici, Ici
directed by the author

Presentation :




"By good, I therefore mean following what we know with certainty to be a means of getting closer to the model of human nature that we are offering; by bad, on the contrary, what we know with certainty prevents us from fulfilling this model. "
Spinoza, Ethics.

Ici Ici Ici is the opposite cry of over there, shouted out by a man who left Algeria during the war of independence. As he speaks, he becomes aware of having done wrong / in speaking, he determines the wrong he has done during his life.

Evening falls over the Jura mountains. In a small bar, the owner is reluctant to close. He holds forth to his last clients, Alain, Kader, drinkers, not talkers. The owner is resentful about something and it's going to come out tonight. Because yesterday, the waiter hired for the summer, young François - who has another name, Karim, the half-caste, the mixed-blood - said to the owner, "My father used to know someone with the same name as you". This encounter brings back the pied-noir family history.


Three actors for one monologue - indeed, a character who is present in the world begins to speak and, through his expression and his word, presents a world in himself. The idea that a person - a whole representation of a person - is above all not reduced to itself - the borders of the individual, joined to the boundaries of the world.

A play, a work on the regard. To look at human beings, people - res in the language of Spinoza, between "thing" and "nothings". This play works on portraits: portraits of characters - the actors as people, a father and his son (Jean-Claude Bolle-Reddat, Sylvain Bolle-Reddat) and an amateur (Mehdi Tsabet) - portraits of human beings caught before the rush of time - To transform every portrait into a self-portrait, as if objectivity was the subjective skin turned inside out - politics, the mortal remains of the intimate.

For this work, the active eyes of a visual artist, Mireille Babty, who peels off the image of the actors, making self-portraits with the others - and of a stage designer, Pierre Garcia, who develops the space to prepare for the circulation of living bodies, their contact and, perhaps, their meeting.
In association with these regards, Philippe Gordiani, attentive to people's sound image, invents a space for hearing. He offers an electro-acoustic composition for guitar and actors' noises.




Some notes on the play Ici Ici Ici

"Now there are two kinds of death: the death that is inevitable and common to all creatures, and the voluntary death that is particular to some of them. It is this second death which has been prescribed to us in the word of the messenger of Allah: "Die before dying" "

Abd-El Kader, Mawqif, 221

The play is created in spaces which are not normally seen as performance spaces: the lounges of the Villa Gillet in Lyon, the cafeteria of the ALIS Young Workers' Hostel in Dijon. To the notion of scenery, we prefer that of space. And we like to see in every place a "personality" whose views echo the text and the presence of the actors.

It's a matter of shifting the question of character and scenery to rediscover the reality of place and the word. The person is the mobile point, alive, restive, where the two elements, space and statement, are linked.

An artistic birthright of the soil


Outside a theatre auditorium, theatricality finds itself stripped of its codes, and it must therefore refashion them on the spot, making do with the materials offered by a given place and audience at a given time. It's a matter of moving towards an almost naked art, an impoverished art, an art exposed to the elements, created by/for those who are there, in the logic of a kind of artistic birthright of the soil which allows he who is excluded from cultural practices to share this harvest, and the artist, often cut off from reality by the representation to which he devotes his existence, to witness the overflowing of his creation by the working of life - with chance and the unexpected imposing their strictness onto that of the creative process.










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