NE PAS STAGNER

"Through bad lack, mountaineers lose their guide in the high mountain peaks. After enduring hunger, cold, storms and solitude, they discover a hostel where they take shelter and get to know one another, discussing their past and their future. Through a radio, they learn that a war has broken out. To stay in that hostel or to leave is the question they ask themselves, under the impassive eye of the hostel manager. While Charles, supported by Michel and Romain, wants to wait for the end of the war, Cecile tries to persuade them to leave with her. Only Robert will follow her. "This is what I wanted to say: leave suffering by passing from the hostel as though from the Club, don’t stagnate in this hostel or in the Club... you can leave it and fly on your own wings." (Cécile) This nameless work initially created from collective improvisations is not actually theatre, or even anti-theatre. Nor is it sociodrama, psychodrama or raw art. It is simply an instinctive and playful creation which has no artistic or cultural intention. It was not born out of a need to exhibit but, for the members of the theatre group who put it together, from a need to live a different life, to accomplish a genuine action. The actors are also the orthers and the characters they play are themselves. The theatre is life itself, or dreams meeting reality. For the majority of the video, they act with their backs turned to their audience, the story splits up into bizarre and incoherent dialogues, the setting appears clumsy or absent. Throughout, the spectator appears not to have been taken into consideration. The public performance, which might never have taken place, simply required an important moment of experience – the ending. This film is not a record of madness nor yet an investigative piece of truth-cinema. In the form of a journalistic report, it is the reflection of the life experiences of the theatre group of Club Antonin Artaud. The object of this film was to observe this experience, which is like a sensitive and meaningful faith, to penetrate this microcosm without deforming it with aesthetic intentions or intellectual judgements and without allowing the ghosts of authors of intervene, to exhume and exalt this world while at all times respecting it. This film has no desire to prove or interpret anything. It shows something important, an existence too often ignored, but just accepted through cultural, scientific or philanthropic explanations. This film does not record a completed work. It is an opening." (source: www.borislehman.be, translated at Argos)