Le Théâtre du Soleil

The First Fifty-Five Years

Béatrice Picon-Vallin, Judith G. Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429638220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Direction & Production

Le Théâtre du Soleil traces the company's history from a group of young, barely trained actors, directors, and designers struggling to match their political commitment to a creative strategy, to their grappling with the concerns of migration, separation and exile in the early decades of the twenty-first century.

Béatrice Picon-Vallin recounts how, in the 55 years since its founding, the Théâtre du Soleil has established itself as one of the foremost names in modern theatre. Ariane Mnouchkine and her collaborators have developed a unique and ever-evolving style that combines a piercing richness of shape, color, and texture with precision choreography, innovative musical accompaniment, and multi-layered, metaphorical dreamscapes. This rich, storied history is illustrated by a wealth of spectacular rehearsal and production photos from the company's own archive and interviews with dozens of past and present members, including Mnouchkine herself.

Judith G. Miller's timely translation of the first comprehensive history and analysis of a remarkable, award-winning company is a compelling read for both students and teachers of Drama and Theatre Studies.

1 Destiny

“A popular theatre piece is theatre that’s beautiful and easy to read; it speaks to something important, something that’s really meaningful to ordinary people.”

Ariane Mnouchkine¹

“We were making art; we were making art for the people; we were happy.”

Off-stage voice of the Narrator from The Survivors of Mad Hope

“We invent theatre, that mysterious continent that theater always is for me, needing always to be redefined; we discover all the time archipelagos and shores on which others have, of course, already landed.”

Ariane Mnouchkine²

“We pursue the color of our dreams

Risking dashing some of your hopes.

Forgive us, dear Public, but time is short.

We may’ve forgotten what you remember.

Tomorrow, you may think as we do

That the world’s beauty is still on its way.

But tonight you and I seek its taste,

A taste only you can help me find – and share.”

Philippe Léótard³

At the close of The Clowns (1969), Ariane Mnouchkine understood that the celebrated “popular public,” a public of workers and laborers, was not who was coming to see their shows, even in the outdoor venues around Avignon. She concluded:

And, in a society like ours, they won’t come, no matter what we do. We have to stop pretending […]. I believe an actor does a play for about the same reasons people go to the theatre: there should be a meeting of minds, an encounter. But it doesn’t happen […]. Theatre should be pleasurable and raise consciousness; it’s the opposite of entertainment […]. You can sense that the theatre will either end up simply expressing the despair and rot in our society and in societies like ours (but more and more elaborately and with more and more ­talent) – and then it will stop, and say nothing more. Or it will re-find its roots and the ability to say something new.⁴

Her vision was radical: a matter of encountering a new public and a matter of seeking the roots of theatre.

Artisan-Companions

Such was her assessment at the end of seven years of apprenticeship dedicated to organizing progressively an ever-growing company – with its departures and arrivals – assembled around a solid core of people. At the same time as it was creating its shows, the Soleil was training its actors in a strikingly different manner from any arts conservatory, the arts conservatory being an institution that Mnouchkine had always distrusted. In a conservatory, there would be no space for imagining her constant experimentation with staging, for the different configurations of the technical team with its various ways of collaborating on creating costumes and sets and on organizing daily life. At the Soleil, everything was done in the moment, as each situation evolved, with new participants – the new people often recruited by friends or family – according to what each playing space offered as movement possibilities, and always in opposition to any definition of theatre as practiced at the time, both aesthetically and institutionally. Distanced from conventional theatrical practice, the Soleil also took its distance from any form of ideological brainwashing. Of course the company experienced the shock of May 1968 – with Communists, Maoists, or those close to political movements hoping to indoctrinate others. But the kind of political theatre they practiced, even if Marxism was a central lens for structuring dramatic conflict, was, rather, a festive politics – a more or less solemn festival or celebration built around common dreams and myths, with happiness as a goal. A number of leftist critics, after having praised them to the skies, declared the Soleil not Communist enough. Mnouchkine commented on this in 2011: “People started out by telling me I didn’t have my card. Either it was my professional card or the card of my political party. I quickly realized I would never have a card.” And she added:

It would be interesting to figure out how many young companies either dried up because of ideological demands or were destroyed by drugs. There were two enemies at the time: extreme partisanship and marijuana. We were extraordinarily lucky to have eluded both.

The notion of what a popular public was – as articulated by the decentralization movement in French arts – certainly influenced the Soleil’s thinking. But there were important nuances: first of all, that a critical assessment of the actual absence of such a public in the theatre was imperative. Second, which began as an intuition before it became a conviction, that the foundation of any theatre must be a theatrical troupe and that a popular theatre would, in fact, necessitate a large permanent company. In addition, that the concept of popular art must include forays into master works of American cinema as well as Eastern, that is Asian, theatre – which Mnouchkine always characterizes as: “sophisticated, poetic, metaphorical, and musical.”

The Cartoucherie. Located outside of Paris in the Vincennes woods. It is quite a trip to get there. The City of Paris quickly set up a shuttle bus from the Vincennes metro stop to the theatre. The Soleil finally bought its own bus to facilitate the commute. Archives Théâtre du Soleil.

The history of the concept of popular theatre in France was having a very bumpy ride at the time, subjected as it was to instrumentalization by various dogmatic tribunals. For example, the influential theatre review Théâtre Populaire, chastised the director Jean Dasté for being “guilty of carrying out a deviationist staging of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle.”⁵ And other theatre people, hungry for power, grabbed onto the label to shore themselves up, forgetting those who had theorized the concept before them.

To best situate the Soleil, we will, in the following, think in terms of two parallel strands, both deeply anchored in the materiality of the daily life of the actors and technicians. On the one hand, the slippery, empirical, and fruitful encounter with theatre history; and on the other, the fitting out, on the outskirts of the city, of the instrument destined to realize their dreams, a “space of theatre,” totally invented and constantly evolving – without equivalent in the history of Western theatre – meant to bring together all the arts and crafts of stage work and to permit creations which would serve both actors and public.

A genealogy: finding their place slowly in theatre history

The young Soleil was not particularly concerned with finding its place in any greater History. This was not a time for such questions. In France, one wanted to be in tune with the present, the immediate now, able to invent everything that was possible. Nevertheless, certain theatre “families” began, almost imperceptibly, to be perceived within the company. Several actors had been trained first at the École Dullin, known for improvisation and mime work (G. Hardy, A. Demeyer, J-F. Brossard, L. Guertchikoff). J-C. Penchenat had attended the Nice Conservatory, which might have disqualified him from the Soleil, but he had also studied physical theatre with Jacques Lecoq, taking night courses with Monique Godard. The actors learned to sing under the tutelage of Alfred Abondance, one of Dullin’s close collaborators who ran their stage music workshop and who had trained the actors in Jean-Louis Barrault’s company.⁶ The Lecoq connection, a further connection to Lecoq’s own teacher Jacques Copeau, loomed large: it was certainly in the classes of Lecoq – that outsider to the French theatre world – that Mnouchkine had been able to intuit a crucial synthesis between what she had observed on her travels in Asia and the corporeal and mask work practiced by the Lecoq school. Studying with Lecoq allowed her to understand that what she had seen during her long travels wasn’t uniquely Asian – that Eastern theatre is first of all theatre, before being “exotic,” and that the Land of Theatrical Utopia she had in mind was not bounded by any particular borders. And, indeed, international actors started arriving: Mario Gonzalès had been a puppeteer and dancer in Guatemala. Fabrice Herrero came from Argentina, accompanying the great Franco-Spanish actress Maria Casarès, who had spent a year there.

“Creating a Fraternity of Actors … From the beginning, I recognized that was the true problem.” (Jacques Copeau, Registres I: Appels, 1974, 187.)

The young troupe kept on learning and growing through the rehearsal process – a real source of theatrical research; through continuous physical training with Mario Radondi who followed them to the Cartoucherie; and through outings to the Cinémathèque, where Mnouchkine, the cinephile, led them. They also attended many productions at the Théâtre des Nations: “With my theatre companions,” Mnouchkine explains, “we went to the Théâtre des Nations as though opening an encyclopedia. We went to learn. Sometimes we didn’t like what we saw, but we learned. […] The Théâtre des Nations was incredibly stimulating.”⁷ These were indeed very heady years for the theatre in general: there was work to be seen by Jorge Lavelli, the Living Theatre, the Bread and Puppet Theatre, Maurice Béjart’s ballet; there were performances by Maria Casarès, Peter Brook and (as of 1971) his Center for International Theatre Research, Luca Ronconi, Dario Fo, Jerzy Grotowski, whose innovative work one of the Soleil actors, J-P. Tailhade, observed for a short period of time.

The Legacy by Marivaux, directed by J-C. Penchenat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• A word from the author
• A word from the translator
• Opening: For all those who have worked, or are working, with the Théâtre du Soleil
• Prologue: origins
• Chapter 1 Destiny
• Chapter 2 Collective creation (second try, first draft)
• Chapter 3 The Shakespeare Cycle
• Chapter 4 A new way of writing: creating the great Asian epics
• Chapter 5 The House of Atreus Cycle or the archaeology of passions
• Chapter 6 The Soleil brings in a camera
• Chapter 7 Ten years of collective creation: between cinema-theatre, documentary theatre, and the lyrical epic
• Transverse perspectives: six thematic illustrations
• First Epilogue (2014): the galaxy of the Soleil
• Second Epilogue (2019): returning to Asian sources, expanding, and transmitting
• Appendices: chronology and awards, theatre programs and posters