Fence Archive

25. La Charité sur Loire - Bazar Café, May 2017

Fred Fortas and Natalie Rafale in Denis Baronet's People in the Sun. Photo byJean-Michel Tisseyre

Fence 25 was our second visit to La Charité sur Loire, a couple of hours south of Paris, where the Fence has set up a French base.

This time we went as as part of the town's annual "Festival du Mot", where Fence members and writers performed plays from The Hopper Project, a response by four writers to the paintings of Edward Hopper.

Denis Baronet (France) Zainabu Jallo (Nigeria), Sara Clifford (UK), and Andreas Flourakis (Greece) worked together on separate but interwoven plays under Denis' coordination to create theatre pieces which were then performed, in French, in the giant front windows of the Bazar Café, the Fence base in La Charité. We performed five short plays in all, to a street audience.

Sunday - Sara Clifford
Western Motel - Andreas Florakis
Intermission - Zainabu Jallo
Night Hawks - Denis Baronet
People in the Sun - Denis Baronet 

All parts were acted by Fence members Denis Baronet, Fred Fortas, Morgane Lombard, Jonathan Meth and Natalie Rafale.

The shows were directed by Alain Foix, with set and sound by Bénédicte Lesfargues, and were performed in a series of episodes over several days and evenings to an enthusiastic audience seated in the street (kindly closed by the Mayor) directly in front of the café.

Morgane Lombard in Zainabu Jallo's Intermission.
Photo by Neil Fleming

Separately, in the context of the Festival du Mot, The Fence's Natalie Rafale performed her children's play Les Mots Qui Tombent du Ciel.

The meeting also debated and made preliminary plans for the future of the Bazar Café space as a potential hub and writing retreat for Fence members. Since the meeting, the Café has met a crowd-funding target and is moving ahead with plans to open to the public.

The following Fence members attended the week: