After the revival of Cabaret Canaille, we concentrated our work on metamorphosis. But actually, our work started even during the first days of drama this year : a few of us had prepared a little dance for a birthday, and we decided to keep it in our work. Our first real work was to make a little scene in groups about a metamorphosis of our choice. Different things appeared on scene: an opening out flower, a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, a bird spreading his wings, and the man’ s life…
Then we discovered our first text, which is a song called La Fleur de l’Âge, by Jamait, about metamorphosis of life : after knowing the lyrics by heart (or almost…), we had a few searches of choreography.
And we discovered another new text : Cortège, a poem from Paroles by Jacques Prévert completely surrealistic: I like this text because it can give very strange scenes, as we saw!
Then Ronan and I proposed little “remakes” of the classic story of the princess kissing a frog, which normally has to change into a charming prince…normally…
And finally came the time to go to Vernou!!!!!!…
After a looong travel by bus, here we were : the famous donkeys of Vernou were welcoming us at the entry of the castle! No time to waste! Immediately came the “Slippers Parade”, with a lot of new styles this year! After finding volunteers to clean THE carpet, we entered into dealings for the distribution of rooms….And here came our work.
We stared with a new text : the prologue of Le Maléfice de la Phalène, the first story by Federico Garcia Lorca, who is the writer who probably led José to the direction of plays. That story is pretty strange: it talks about the world of bugs, who were living in a perfect love when a man troubled them…Little by little, bugs came on scene : earth-worms, cockroaches, and butterflies were invading the castle…that was a good beginning actually! Then in this scene, we introduced animals made of paper by our own hands (and not without a few difficulties…), which gave to this scene more strength.
We discovered another new text called La lumière est comme l’ eau, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This text was a little hard to understand because of its unreality, and probably because we were all talking at the same time I guess…Concentration was a huge problem…So, realizing that the text wasn’ t really understood by all of us, we took it back at the beginning, and then we worked on the 3 main scenes of that text, 3 “pictures”, with all the equipment we had with us : tables, paper, swimming suits, electric torches, a dustbin, some imagination, and here we go! What a big production! But we still have a big work to arrive at the end of that text!
Time to dance and sing with La Fleur de l’ Âge! We finally joined all our ideas to get to only one group, and saw that we really missed boys in the drama option!!!!!
Then the “Terms” presented us their Bac’ s texts about different metamorphosis : the metamorphosis of love, of life, of the man, of the woman, of Satan…
The Grimm brothers finally led us to a little general view of our work in a fairy atmosphere…
On Saturday night, the castle was lived in by a new population : we were all metamorphosed in …strange things… : a baby, a few gods, an angel, “terrible children”, the Death, a big mama, the oysters general, and even the queen of the imps were there for a great parade…fantastic!
Our last night at the castle finished by little works on several musics…frogs, crazy drivers, flamenco, L’Eve future…..and finally Bénabar!
After a short night, our stay took end with the distribution of the origamis and the traditional summary…Then it was time to leave, a little ill for me (just a little), but knowing that the donkeys will wait for us until next year…
After a big rest in bed for me, we resumed work for the presentation of the 17th December: we were going to present Le Maléfice de la Phalène, The Frog, Bac scenes, and La Fleur de l’ Âge. We made a few changes, brought all the frogs we found and finally came the day of the presentation to our first spectators…I think it was a good one, but I guess we should have been a little bit more concentrated… We didn’ t have the opinions of the public on that work for the moment. And this presentation found a good end in the canteen where a beautiful “buffet” was prepared !!!…To be continued…