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This piece is a trilogy composed of 3 different solos coming from a 4 months research period on the subject of exhaustion. It‘s performed by Yann Gibert with the help of Isabel Simoes in the second part.
The 1st part, Impulsivity (16 min)
This part presents the shape of a body initiating movements that the abortion of their finalization will make unrepresentative. The strong light on the white surface covering the whole back of the stage transforms this body in black and flat surface where all notions of perspective are lost. The intention only appears, this very first step in the physical process, when the body makes possible this movement that will never really happen.
This part is questioning this French formula “faire 1000 choses pour ne rien faire”. It’s this way of exhaustion that Yann Gibert explores. Here there’s no need of color, or volume, or music, the energy only is enough.
The 2nd part, Community (20 min)
Isabel Simoes appears alone on stage. After extracting a cray from her mouth she’s drawing a cross that will become the center of her future installation. This installation (chair, clothes, city garbage…) includes Yann Gibert.
Isabel holds Yann with a rope and goes back to the white cross she’ll never leave again. Yann Gibert, blind, naked, held by this golden link walks and meets the elements of this static community Isabel has created. Through this random process, Yann Gibert follows rules him only knows. As an independent element he creates his own community where Isabel is still the center. This process leads him to a total autonomy where the community becomes nothing else than the definition of his own identity, and freed him from it.
This second part is a work on the improvisation in a danger situation. The installation, each time different, is kept unknown for the performer. The discovery of the geographic situation of the elements sets Yann Gibert in a permanent stress where the hazard only will lead him to the end of a strict process. The exhaustion is here faced by this will of going on our way, absorbing the failures to try again, making fugitive and absurd meetings to building our identity. How did it begin, when will it end…
The 3rd part, Identity (35 min)
The space is cleaned, the props are positioned, black out, Yann Gibert is singing in the dark, the show can begin.
Yann Gibert appears sat on a chair, he reads to the audience what could be an autobiography (“My name is Yann Gibert…”) but reveals being pure fantasy from its author : childhood in a Swedish fjord, friendship and struggle with marine animals, wedding in Paris with a dolphin, metamorphosis in a shark to become “Yann Gibert Princess of the Fjord”!
This reading is interrupted with several non-illustrative actions starting from elements installed on big sheets of paper at the front of the stage (a chair, a knee protection, a pen, an alarm clock). During those intervals, Yann speaks in Portuguese about why he is happy to dance, gives to the audience 8 minutes of dance on a rock soundtrack, presents a buto exercise of balance before taking notes from this experience, lives just 2 minutes of nothing.
The story is over, the song is coming back, and this is the end of the show.
The apparition of a total narrative element in the piece creates, in the imagination of each people present in the audience, a beginning of materialisation of could have happened in the precedent parts of the solo. Until the end, Yann Gibert refuses to deliver any key for a possible official interpretation of his work. The dynamic rhythm of alternation between pure static reading of a fairy tale and physical involvements of concrete present actions stimulate the imaginations in a quest for an answer and leads them in each personal desired place by the audience itself.
The exhaustion is here present in this pathetic attempt of defining our own identity.
“je est un autre” was writing Rimbaud. What Je did, what Je does, and what Je would like to do could be the beginning questions for a possible answer.
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