Lieux-Dits publishing

This second volume of Traces explores the creation of A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction by David Geselson. 3 years ago, Katie Mitchell created this monologue at the Théâtre de Vidy-Lausanne. To stage it, she proposed precise specifications: the show would have to emit as little carbon as possible. In France, the MC93 invited David Geselson to create a version of the project based on this framework. While it may seem possible to put on a show about disaster, doing so without contributing to it is a complex – and exciting – challenge. Through notes by David Geselson and his collaborators, design sketches and interviews, the booklet delves into the issues, challenges, successes and failures that come up when trying to create an eco-responsible show.

> A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction

Neandertal features scientists attempting to rewrite the history of man’s origins by deciphering fragments of ancient DNA. Life and research mingle, collide and feed off each other, and their various discoveries, taken from the solitude of the laboratories, shatter all ideas of racial or ethnic purity.

> Neandertal

How do you tell the story of creation? How do you share the texts, images, stories and words of others? What has transformed and nourished a work? The abandoned paths, the dead ends, the false trails, the side roads? How can we also talk about what makes our theatre at Lieux-Dits? There are always the shows. But in an attempt to give an account of what we go through in creation, to give a place to what disappears once the show is set, to make visible this invisible factory, Lieux-Dits is presenting the “Traces” series.

The first volume focuses on Neandertal, created for the 77th Festival d’Avignon. From the poems of Louise Glück to the words of Ursula Le Guin and the words of the project’s collaborators, this booklet is an echo, an exploration, a plunge into David Geselson’s latest show.

> Neandertal

This book was born of a multitude of meetings. David Geselson is a writer, actor and director. For a few years, he has been inspired by André Gorz’s Letter to D. to turn himself into a public writer, starting from a simple desire: to question people he meets and to write the letter they were never able to write, if such a letter exists.

Over time, there have been more and more letters and they have regularly been read onstage. This book is an anthology of some of the letters, providing yet another dimension to these texts that address, “love, hate, loneliness and reconciliation, sometimes even beyond death” (Brigitte Salino, Le Monde).

> Unwritten Letters

Nina Simone carried within her four centuries of colonial history.

How does the fear of being destroyed for being who you are leave indelible scars on the bodies and minds of those subjected to it, which are then passed down from one generation to the next?

As Europeans and as Westerners, we are also the heirs to these wounds, inflicted or suffered. Whether victims or perpetrators, our stories are the fruit of the upheaval caused by the development of the empires that would later become Europe, on the inhabited lands of the Americas beginning in the 15th century.

So, how do we make a shared narrative? What legitimacy can we claim to do so?

> Silence and fear

It is September 2007, in the living room of André Gorz and Doreen Keir’s house in Vosnon. It is evening. They have prepared a meal and some drinks and welcome us to their home. In an hour, they will commit suicide. In the meantime, they talk.

> Doreen

David decided to write and reinvent the story of his grandfather Yehouda, who died in 2009 in Jerusalem.
Having left his native Lithuania in 1934 to settle in Palestine, Yehouda lived through the various stages of the construction of the state of Israel, from the ideal of the kibbutz to the tragedy of the Nakba. Grandfather and grandson will tell their stories, in Jerusalem and Gorscht, in Paris and Tokyo: a man whose ideal has been shattered, and a young man who has inherited an unbearable history.

> En Route-Kaddish