“I wanted to give a chance to the flying skeleton in my first piece, The itchy wings, created in 2003, almost twenty years ago. » In his new office in La Glass menagerie, in Paris, of which he has just taken over the artistic direction, after a few years at Les Amandiers, in Nanterre, the director Philippe Quesne goes back in time to talk about his new opus, Phantasmagoria, announcement “without actors but peopled with spirits”.
Suffice to say that we really want to lift the veil on such an enigmatic landscape. And here we are again in 2003, between fall and flight, fantasy of death and a little beer between friends, damn itchy by the desire to glide to sluice life. “I started my work in an abandoned house, he slips. I thought it might make the skeleton happy to have a second life. »
Special effects homemade
Presented as part of the Fall Festival, Phantasmagoria is a cabaret of apparitions and illusions, without any of its usual actors or friends, but filled with objects. In passing, he brings out the piano embedded in a rock in the Vincennes zoo for the performance The Secret of the Rock (2018). “I was also passionate about the attractions imagined by Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, at the end of the XVIIIe century, he says. He was already in a virtual research and designed phantasmagoria with projections and specters to exorcise fears after the French Revolution. »
“I was working in deserted theaters and I began to imagine a mechanical cabaret, with skeletons and ghosts, which would play on its own and survive us. »Philippe Quesne, director
It was during the slowdown imposed by the pandemic, in 2020, that Quesne, creator of a theater “without conflict, soft and benevolent, full of attention for its characters”, according to the definition of the actor and accomplice Gaëtan Vourc’h, let his imagination run wild. “Time had stopped and silence reappeared, he remembers. I was working in deserted theaters and I began to imagine a mechanical cabaret, with skeletons and ghosts, which would play on its own and survive us. »
From 1789 to today, “between the virus, the war in Ukraine and energy problems…”, Philippe Quesne takes only one step to refine the macabre dance that is Phantasmagoria. “There are a total of around fifty skeletons and around fifteen lonely pianos, some of which I recovered from people in Lausanne during a creative residency, he continues. There are always people missing or missing when there is a piano left in a family. » He adds as a confidence: “I have great empathy for single machines. »
The one who also likes special effects homemade pouring wet firecrackers and sparklers keep claiming “Black Box Craftsmanship and Machinery”. ” It’s not about making contemporary digital,” he adds, unfolding the technical sheet of Phantasmagoria. “Fire, smoke, tulle screen, rear-projections, magic lanterns…” On the music of Pierre Desprats, the skeletons will have a field day. “But it’s joyful to live with spirits”, emphasizes Quesne.
Phantasmagoria, by Philippe Quesne. autumn festivalCenter Pompidou, from 3 to 6 November.