Unpublished article - Chloé Delassis
Founded in 2015 by the young and promising Lorraine de Sagazan, the La Brèche company presents a mind-shaking show on France's major theater stages. Un Sacre, is the interweaving of several true accounts of the deaths of loved ones, touching us either by their similarity to our own experiences, or by the richness of their emotion.
Over the course of a year, the company went out to meet 365 people. When asked «What resonance does the word “reparation” have in your life?», the recurring theme was death. Bringing to the stage the grief of nine of these people who have not had the opportunity to mourn their dead, Lorraine de Sagazan also lends a ritual dimension to this performance, which she calls a «ceremony». The fire, the dances, the gestures and the costumes evoke various funerary customs whose meaning intelligibly reaches us, despite their exoticism.
On stage, Jeanne Favre, Andréa El Azan, Antonin Meyer-Esquerré, Benjamin Tholozan and others each assume the role of one of these interlocutors, appropriating their testimony through their words, but also expressing this tribute through their bodies. Directed by Sylvère Lamotte, they paint a series of choreographic tableaux, each with its own ceremonial aspect, sometimes solemn, sometimes more exuberant. Letting go of the need to save energy, their movements act as a kind of catharsis - an emotional purgation - for the audience.
Sharing the tears
If the background of the show Un Sacre takes on a certain tradition (the tradition of the Corsican mourners, for example), its form is open to a genuine exchange, verbal or emotional, with the audience. Over and above several interactions with the audience, which are rather comic in tone and contrast with the dramatic weight of the subject matter, the atmosphere is dense and liberating: we return to the roots of ancient dramatic art, where sharing tears was no less common than sharing laughter.
The auditorium is thus charged with a responsibility shared by everyone in the room: to honor, with dignity, these departed beings, whose essence still seems very present to us through the actors' performances and the thoughts we collectively address to them. Objects belonging to the original narrators of the stories or to the actors are passed from hand to hand within the audience, allowing us to assert our emotions towards our neighbor, while at the same time providing a human contact that consoles the heart in this general emotion.
Un Sacre, La Brèche, France, September 28 to May 20
April 12, 13 and 14, 2022 | Théâtre de la Cité - CDN de Toulouse Occitanie
May 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, 2022 Théâtre des Célestins - Lyon
May 18, 19 and 20, 2022 | La Comédie - CDN de Reims
Write to the author: chloe.delassis@leregardlibre.com
Photo credit: © Compagnie La Brèche / Mélissa Leroux / Syhleam
French 
German 
English