Projects: Festival du Mort, 2018
The Festival du Mort was a two-day Halloween 2018 Bazar Cafe production in La Charité sur Loire which show-cased excerpts from plays by a number of Fence writers in a walkabout evening of Halloween theatre. The event's French name ("Festival of Death" in English) is a play on the Loire town's famous literary festival, the "Festival du Mot." The following is a synopsis of what was presented
Raze The Bar
By Hortense Gerardo, USA
Trade in your tarot card at the bar for a glass of red or white, and the barwoman (Hortense Gerardo) will tell you your destiny. You might also get served by Death (Neil Fleming) – to a purgatorial woodwind soundtrack played on Alain Mignon’s sculptural organ.
Morte au comptoir
By Alain Foix, France
Welcome to the underworld. Not so different from a world you might recognise. Make the transition to the other side with Barman (Fred Fortas).
Charon (Alain Aithnard) then becomes your guide for the evening, as crossing the Styx, the audience explores separate worlds created across 6 locations in the Bazar Cafe building.
Burning
By Ulrike Syha, Germany
The build-up to revolutionary action - and its consequences. Meticulous and devastating evocation of a bomb attack from the point of view of a ten year-old. (Morgane Lambert)
The Last Post
By Sara Clifford, UK
An alternative funeral. Margaret (Anna Desreaux) marks the passing of her husband Kenneth in an unexpected way. Alain Mignon’s unique sonic sculptures - Percussion and strings, with Manuele Robert as spirit dancing between the wooden sculptures, like tombstones in a cemetery. A re-interiorisation of the black trumpeter who subverts the last post with jazz extemporisation
Glass Heart Solos : Death - Plus…
Dance, with Hortense Gerardo, Manuele Robert and Alfred Alerte, USA and France
A soundtrack which moves from the sound of heavy rain to Ghanaian funerary rites through Chinese percussion to country ballad. Hortense ritually summoning the creature (Alfred) from its underground lair. A kind of hyper extended tubular pastiche gorilla… Manuele is the ghostly spirit observing, on the edge of their shared intensity. But who is master and servant? And of what?
Paris Underground
By Jessica Litwak, USA
Sarah Bernhardt (Morgane Lambert) and Moliere (Fred Fortas) play out a joyous pas-de-deux as we flit by moonlight among the celebrated inhabitants of Père Lachaise, against the backdrop of their ignorance of the grafitti’d swastika on Bernhardt’s tomb, which Alice B Toklas (Penny Black) works silently to remove. This had particular poignance for those in the audience aware that the Bazar Cafe building although closed for 25 years, was once where the Gestapo made their local headquarters.
Last Dog Standing
By Neil Fleming, UK
A lone detective (Fred Fortas) co-opts the audience in his search for the meaning of vengeance and an understanding of true horror, while simultaneously trying to work out who it was who killed him.
Baby Doll
By Penny Black, UK
Mother Pat (Anna Desreaux) and two daughters Margaret (Morgane Lambert) and Fiona (Penny Black) act out a macabre children’s tea party with dolls. But whose story is it and how does revenge come served in the afterlife?
Translations from English by Fred Fortas,
and from German by Anne Monfort for Burning
Script Editing & Direction - Jonathan Meth
Concept and Production - Alain Foix