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ENIKŐ SEPSI
THE “KENOTIC” RITUALITY IN VALERE NOVARINA’S WORKS
Antonin Artaud’s complaint that “actors in France no longer know how to
do anything but speak,” is reflected in contemporary French playwright and
director Valére Novarina’s taking aim at articulatory cruelty and linguistic
carnage. Novarina represents the contemporary French language in its state
of mutation, distortion, and transformation. His theatrical practice and
the theatre revealed in his essays focus on the act of the creative word burnt
and revived by the actor, who lends him or herself to action, the hidden liturgy
of the word in space. Man created in God’s own image becomes a creator
through the Logos (Word) in this theatre.
For the notion of self-emptying and the abandonment of the ego of the actor,
a text by Novarina entitled “Work for the Uncertain” (a title which alludes to
a passage in Blaise Pascal’s Pensées) could serve as an example (Novarina
reformulates this image of the actor in several ways in several texts):
It’s an enclosure where we come to see the actor thrown onto the stage, forcefully
and alone, wrenching himself away from himself, always like a blind one, a foreigner,
an exile, as if fallen from his true place. He speaks like an animal surprised by the
very act of speaking. We come to the theater to take fright with the actor, relive our
entry into the incomprehensible body along with him; to breathe through an other,
to recapture the taste for living words.”
For Louis de Funès, an essay by Valère Novarina, was adapted for the stage
by the author, translated into Hungarian by Zsófia Rideg, and directed by
Adélaide Pralon in Budapest and Debrecen in 2016. The figure of the French
actor (Louis de Funés) is a constant reference in Novarinas works, but
the sentences and dialogues attributed to him areimagined. Duringa rehearsal
and workshop at Károli Gáspár University in Budapest two months before
the Hungarian premiére, Novarina explained that, while in the painting of the
nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries the human face had already
been deconstructed (for instance in works by Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon,
Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Chaim Soutine), in theatre, no one had undertaken
this. His ars poetica is to show the proliferation, the multiplicity of human
figures, like the Cubists did. As if in Novarina’s theatre the representation of
humankind would be prohibited as a mere “imitation” of the truth. The actor
Dominique Pinon says in Unknown Act: “Il resterait à dire ce qui distingue
l'acteur véritable de l’imitateur d'homme” (“It remains to be determined what
distinguishes the real actor from the imitator of man.”)
2 Valére Novarina, Work for the Uncertain, in idem, The Theater of the Ears, trans. by Allen S.
Weiss, Sun &Moon Press, Los Angeles, 1996, 115-116.
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