For many years, Jacques Rebotier has continued to work in different directions at the same time, writing, directing plays and contemporary operas. His artistic accompaniment of the Amandiers took an unexpected form, as this play was not originally programmed for this season. It has been included in response to an impulse - a "coup de coeur". And to the desire to share an adventure along the paths leading to the unpredictable. An "opening" that is also an invitation to the curiosity of the public.

Le Dos de la langue, recently published by Gallimard, is a set of texts described by their author, Jacques Rebotier, as "poésie courbe" ("poetry curve"). One of them has the title les Ouvertures sont (without punctuation). Syncopated discourse, a sort of out-of-step litany, a series of dreamy reflections, separated by breaths of silence.
"The word exploits the breath," states Jacques Rebotier, and he proves it.
He is known as a great manipulator of words, a great master of those devious games which break known meanings into little pieces, which distort them, dig into them, and end up flushing the sources of life out of them. He is known as an author, a musician, and a director. And always as a poet, though an invariably crazy one.
And since he did not write les Ouvertures sont with the theatre in mind, he thus decided to stage this totally interior and finally rather serious text. Intimate.
A sort of conference, or confidence. Just the fascinating coming and going of a thought arriving in calm, irregular waves, carrying along in its movement a logic pushed to its limit, ie the absurd. Naturally, with Jacques Rebotier, you can hardly expect radical Cartesianism. He flutters around within the irrational with the ease of a clever child, capable of inventing more, more quickly and more strongly than the most serious of the surrealists.
Here, it's a question of walls, vertical (the Berlin Wall), oblique (the Great Wall of China), and horizontal, like the one built by the United States to cut itself off from Mexico and which cuts through a park, that was previously common to the two countries, called the Parque de l'Amistad, or the Park of Friendship! Of walls and of the sea, too.
It is about the stream of thoughts that form a theory. Of openness, of course: a hermetically closed body very quickly ceases to be a body. It's about so many other things too ...
In the writing, the words dance. In addition, Jacques Rebotier senses "a rather slow sort of progress, like in a state of weightlessness, which follows the rhythm of the form that has been meticulously constructed shot by shot, like in filmmaking: shot sequences, cut-away shots, then back to the main shot. Episodes follow each other in this way. Imperceptibly, the landscape changes, we pass from one opening to another. Openings in bodies, mouths, ears, openings in houses, windows, doors. False doors made of glass which we bump into when we want to enter these glass buildings that Today is so fond of "...
Today, when we watch the news on television, we feel both close to and completely out of step with the events which appear on the screen, which took place we don't know when, perhaps even in the present, in places reduced to fragments of landscapes, urban or mountainous, desolate or sumptuous. This is how the real fake lecturers of Ouvertures seem to feel the world turning around them, the shifting grounds of life.

Jacques Rebotier works mainly from the verbal fabric of everyday, everybody's language: "The breathing of the ocean is its waves. The general language lives through us through our tongues, it lives on us and we. we live through it. On the stage of the world. millions of little languages bustle about in all directions, so that the huge living language exists". Of "the journey of the language" in each of our mouths, in each of our heads, Jacques Rebotier attempts to seize its smallest flexions, inflections. intonations. To introduce music into the world of words is also "to be interested not in its construction. form, structure. but in its power to destroy.
Its capacity to make you think laterally. elsewhere, the capacity to de-form thoughts, lives."
(Le désordre des langages, 14th January)


Words exchanged are both never-ending history and enormous text.
In parallel, writing becomes collage or montage, gathering, collecting snatches of reality. It becomes a kaleidoscope or a stereoscope. Everything is "poeticizable", even the most trivial, the most prosaic elements. With Jacques Rebotier, every phrase could "almost" come from us. Is it a game or a sort of mirror which says, "Here you are, is that you"? In reality, it's a little of both. Everyday verbal fabric is matter, material. To write on the basis of concrete elements with a mirror that scarcely distorts at all, to create a sort of raw collage of words, phrases taken directly from our everyday conversations, a form of cold reality edited like in a film, without touching it, just twisting it a little. some equivocation. a few slight ambiguities. At the same time, Jacques Rebotier seeks to by-pass the loss of meaning in which we are plunged. "Life is a curve" he says to us.

To move in the gap which protects, is to re-discover the sincerity of the expression which suddenly escapes us, committing us to recognize its evasions, its inventions and the discovery of meanings not yet suspected. "I am seeking the maximum openness of meaning for the minimum number of signs. From this, the imagination of he who sees and hears begins to move. and what I'm interested in, is this movement inside the head of he who experiences, it becomes active. Through my texts, I'm seeking to restore the active power of sense and the senses." To struggle against an unequivocal language in order to rediscover all the force of the imagination is to rediscover a little of the "eye" and of the "I". Another meaning may appear which is like the negative of the first. More than a second meaning, a little more consciousness.

The theatre of Jacques Rebotier is set in a game-playing space, where everyday words take on a quite different aspect. To rediscover the taste of play is also to rediscover a childlike naivety, which alone opens the way to laughter for us. To play with words, sounds, is not only to listen to the language but also to give back to laughter the only place it belongs, the first place: "I was seeing what a burst of laughter revealed of the essence of the things to which I had free access. I made no distinction between laughing at something and knowing the truth, it was generally the existence of "what is" and myself which made me laugh."

"The fit of laughter" that Georges Bataille speaks of is what admits no calculation. To no longer have a minute for yourself, "to be yourself, delighted in yourself", to dare to dash forward, to throw yourself beyond yourself. Instead of closing us, the gap opens us, instead of being self-sufficient, it leads to a multiplicity of meaning.

The gap opens the way to a new awareness, which is situated in a place where we cannot put down roots, the in-between. " I like those moments just before we fall asleep and those when we're not yet completely awake, the in-between. The brain is free-wheeling and, at the same time, in touch with reality. The me which is giving up and the real which tugs at the sleeve of the brain. The interior cannot really be distinguished from the exterior. So ideas can blend together, sensations can accumulate, the regard can shift, everyday life is hazy. Reverie."

Jacques Rebotier invites us to rediscover this quality of "amazement" which takes note of a difference of level between the world and language. The world that I live. it's the one I speak or even as Wittgenstein says: "The borders of my language mean the borders of my own world."

Chamber theatre, word-concert …

Well, to attempt the climb to the upper sources of the plateau, which is the body, and to the body of the body, which is the voice.

A short journey to the interior, to the interior of the word, and its manufacturer.

So, zoom from the stage to the actor, frame his body, even better, his mouth. There, stay there, the mouth, and what comes out of it, the thread of the voice, the mechanics of the breath, an attempt to enter the factory by this opening, the mouth.
Connect to the audience, more precisely, their ears.
Don't move. Endeavour to attract the ears onto the stage, by magnetization, see carmen, spell, incantation. Is there still room for ears?

Give up for a moment the seductive power of the stage, of space, and of sight, for a theatre of the mouth, or even the lips, the curtain of the lips, walls, sea, murmurs.
(Re-read in passing Théâtre de bouche by Gherasim Luca, since here, of course, it's a question of poetry, which alone can hold its own between the sound and the sense.)
Not profanation, but something like a "retrofanation" (Re-read in passing Eloge de l'ombre, sing the praises of the word, and of its shadow, thought.)
Sing the praises of thought and of its free thread.

Enter its true logic which is also that of sound, of colour, and of dream. Put that out loud, well, not too much, no. Not destroy pretty blue scrolls.
Reverie on the train of thought, flickering thoughts, floating lights, snatches of meaning.

Speak, sing, speak-sing, hum, cantillate, sing.
Chorus, of two. (Listen again in passing to the choruses of Answer to the previous question.)

Background: the murmur or the hum of the world.

Play the game - the card - of a theatre of the interior, of deep inside, the intimate. Play the magic, or else if not too bad.

And the no-address, try?: not "you", but "I", or better one's intimacy, to talk to oneself, that is to no-one, can theatre be done with that?

Essential to try to enter the thought when it doesn't say "you", when it's not thinking itself. When it thinks all by itself (and which makes up 90 % of its activity!).
Think something other than thought out loud.

Perfectly obvious, small mystery: a human being speaks when breathing out. He speaks on his outbreath, even better, he uses it, twists it, grinds the breath, kneads it, sculpts it with his tongue and all the muscles of his mouth to make: the word. Pure exploitation. Commensality the little heron would say perched commensally on his hippopotamus. Mystery number two: my body is crossed by air, the universe, in short by the exterior. Scandal: my very interior is in reality very exterior! And what I call my body is, in reality, a fragile layer between an internal wall and an external wall, the thin covering of this conduit. Perishable and light, hardly thick at all.
Let's explore this opening, and some others, of the body.
Then re-zoom, but back, other orifices, in houses, trains, and those holes that worms make in the earth, and mine workings where other little worms are operating.
So what to say about all these walls which endeavour to stop the flow, borders of states, doors and walls of houses, skins of bodies?

Raise the anchor with these adventure-actors, who are also loved for their ear and their taste for form.