Well-known for its exceptional creativity, Collectif La Machine pushes the boundaries of stage theatre once more with its most experimental play yet
After a period focused on creation and touring, Collectif La Machine is back: now Paris-based, the company returns to Nice and finally takes to the stage again at Espace Magnan on 28 February to present Comptes & Légendes de Famille. Unfolding as a theatrical mini-series in six episodes of roughly 15 minutes each, the hybrid of theatre and live cinema showcases another facet of director Félicien Chauveau’s unbridled creativity.
Video via Collectif La Machine on YouTube
The stage is a black box. Inside, actors work alongside cameraman Antoine Vialatte, who is an integral part of the story himself. They build scenes using toys, maquettes and miniature sets. Above them, a screen projects what Vialatte films in real time. The audience sees hands moving small objects below whilst watching the cinematic world those objects create above.
The story is that of a family that is forced to take a hard look at itself. Émilie receives a postcard from the 1960s and keys to a Volkswagen van. She and her partner Constant follow the clues to Scrupt, a forgotten village in the Ardennes. There, guided by La Nickette – the village healer, gruff and tender – the family excavates what was buried. The van and a mysterious photograph crack everything open.
What emerges is “une lignée qui ne tient pas debout” – a family that does not hold together. Yet they must tell their own story. The family films itself, live, before the audience, unearthing secrets that poisoned everything, psychological wounds that were passed down through the generations, and deadly silences.
The French title, a pun, is a giveaway: Contes et Légendes means “Tales and Legends” – a familiar phrase. But Chauveau replaced contes (tales) with comptes (accounts). The two words sound identical, but comptes carries a different meaning: accounts as in ledgers, debts, reckonings. The expected “Family Tales and Legends” becomes “Family Accounts and Legends” – the balance sheet of the emotional debts families carry.
Three Questions
Chauveau structures his dramaturgy around three concerns: the intimacy of the family nucleus, as dysfunctional as it may be; the transgenerational memory which holds secrets and silences but also gestures that protect us; and the more philosophical question of when a story told becomes more accurate than the story lived. What narrative must a family invent in order to survive itself?
The avant-garde director explores these through humour, poetry and emotion in a piece that moves between comedy and thriller, burlesque and excavation, the everyday and the fantastic. The extraordinary, he suggests, nests in the cracks of ordinary life.
Why Miniatures?
Watching trauma performed with toys ought to create distance – that’s a therapist’s approach. Here, it does the opposite. The miniature staging makes everything sharper and brings truths into focus. But there is beauty to vulnerability…
By showing how the story gets made whilst the audience watches the finished film above, Chauveau involves it in the construction itself. There is a script but every show may slightly vary, which gives the performance immediacy and a dynamic that makes the viewer an active part of the show rather than a passive onlooker.
Since co-founding the company with fellow actor-director Benjamin Migneco in 2011, Chauveau has built a reputation for theatre that sits somewhere between dark comedy and poetic nightmare. Productions like Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Dr Jekyll et le Mystère Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes showed his talent for taking classic texts and giving them a contemporary twist. Most recently, Chauveau toured extensively with Manifeste de l’Hôtel de Chelsea, a re-interpretation of texts written by Yves Klein in 1961. But Comptes & Légendes de Famille is different: it is Chauveau’s own text, his own story, and his boldest experiment yet.
For those interested in a collection of Felicien Chauveau’s and Collectif La Machine’s texts, these are available at Editions Harmattan.
VISITOR INFORMATION
Comptes & Légendes de Famille
Espace Magnan, Nice | 28 February | Duration: 1 hour 45 minutes
Text and Direction: Félicien Chauveau
With: Antoine Vialatte (camera/performer) and cast
VENUE DETAILS
Espace Magnan
31 Rue Louis de Coppet
06000 Nice
Tel: +33 (0)4 93 86 28 75
PHOTO CREDITS
- All photos courtesy Collectif La Machine
- Video as credited
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