Points de non-retour [Quais de Seine]text and direction Alexandra BadeaCreation Festival d’Avignon 2019

Points de non-retour [Quais de Seine]Creation Festival d’Avignon 2019

Text and direction Alexandra BadeaWith Amine Adjina, Madalina Constantin, Kader Lassina Touré, Sophie VerbeeckVoices Corentin Koskas and Patrick AzamScenography and costumes Velica PanduruLighting Sébastien Lemarchand, assisted by Marco BenignoSound composition Rémi BillardonDramaturgy Charlotte FarcetArtistic collaboration Amélie Vignals, assisted by Mélanie NonnotteTechnical manager Antoine Seigneuer-GuériniScenery construction Ioan Moldovan / Atelier Tukuma WorksProduction, administration and development Emmanuel Magis (Anahi)

Production Hédéra HélixCoproduction La Colline - Théâtre national, Festival d’Avignon, La Comédie de Béthune - CDN, Scènes du Jura - scène nationale, Scène nationale d’Aubusson, Théâtre du Beauvaisis - scène nationale de Beauvais With the support of DRAC Hauts-de-France, Région Hauts-de-France and SPEDIDAM L’Arche is Alexandra Badea’s publishing house (theater texts). Tour 2019/2020 5th to 12th July 2019 [Creation] Festival d’Avignon, Avignon (FR) 7th November to 1st December 2019 La Colline - Théâtre national, Paris (FR)4th to 7th December 2019Comédie de Béthunes - CDN (FR)22nd and 23rd January 2020Le Lieu Unique - Scène nationale à Nantes (FR)3rd February 2020Gallia Théâtre à Saintes (FR)6th February 2020Scène nationale d’Aubusson (FR)12th to 14th Mai 2020Comédie de Saint Etienne - CDN (FR)12th and 13th June 20Sibiu International Theater Festival (Romania)

Copyright: © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

Everything is political in life.Even love. This feeling that runs through our physical and psychic abilities, surprises us and alters us by its strength. Everyone defines it differently and yet it is political. We can not love in a sense that differs from our existence. We love as we think the world.

Alexandra Badea « Points de non-retour » [Thiaroye]

SynopsisFor this second part of the trilogy « Points de non-retour », Alexandra Badea places in the center of the history Nora, a documentary producer for the French public radio. During a trip to Algeria, in the footsteps of her grandfather, whom she never knew, Nora tries to fill his father’s silence about his origins. In this quest, she will be confronted with the complexity of the Algerian war, less Manichean than at the time of the clashes between separatists and supporters of the French Algeria.

What is the responsibility of history in the rifts of this family with mixed origins, as so many others?

This is a question that connects all the characters of this fresco in three parts, whose first, [Thiaroye], was created in 2018. Alexandra Badea and her troupe of actresses and actors continue their journey through the contemporary and, more than ever, universal history of France.

Intentions of « Points de non-retour »the trilogyI arrived in France in 2003, I applied for French naturalisation in 2013.

I made this request because I wanted to get the only right I was missing as an European living in France, the right to vote. I also wanted to have the same passport as the language in which I write, the only language in which I can do it. I did not understand the term « naturalisation » well. Its sound even annoys me, its meaning too. The list of synonyms includes « assimilation », « digestion », « ingurgitation ».

I was naturalised French in 2014. At the ceremony we were told: «From that moment on you have to assume the history of this country with its moments of greatness and its shadows». The first question that came to me was: How to assume the colonisation or the war in Algeria? What does « assume » mean? My French friends who were born in France did not ask for their passports, they were born here, no choice to make. I chose. In this case, is my responsibility towards the painful past of France even bigger?

In any case, I need to understand this past to question these blurred territories, these wounds that do not close again, which still divide, which prevent us from rebuild ourselves. What are the historical moments of our recent past when politics interfered in the intimate, annihilating it? What are the missing narratives of this great national narrative that we are asked to assimilate? For a moment I wonder what would be relevant to show on a set today, to articulate this reflection and to undo the neuralgic points. I have formed a multicultural team of artists, mostly binational, from different countries in the image of France today: Madalina Constantin is Romanian, Sophie Verbeeck is Franco-Belgian, Amine Adjina is Franco-Algerian, Kader Lassina Touré comes from Ivory Coast…

I would like to know their stories, the journey of their parents and grandparents.

With the desire to be surrounded by researchers, historians, professors. Starting from meetings, we could cross the actors’ experiences and reflections with those of people with a completely different background, other lives, people we do not see often and that we know little, to whom we give little space, people of different generations and from different environments, people encountered during artistic workshops. To ask ourselves what are the parts of our history that we do not know, that we do not understand, that we do not have the courage to name.

Also questioning the tipping points of a life, points of no return:who we were (during childhood, adolescence), what did we do (through education, trauma family, school, society, history) and what can be done from what we have done. Ask ourselves how the injuries of others can calm our wounds and vice versa, find our common wounds, places of betrayal, lying, disillusionment.

What are we missing at all?What do not we hear?What are our missing stories that we need to rebuild?What do we have to bring to the world?What do we need to understand, to forgive, to repair?Are there generations sacrificed by history?Do we come to the world with the wounds of our ancestors?How do you care for them, how do you pass them on?Where do politics destroy intimacy and how can we rebuild what has been destroyed?How to overcome what prevents us from acting on the world, how to meet each other, how to stay anchored in the present ?

From this material and these questions, I will write the text.I will articulate these stories in a common structure. I will put these meetings on the stage, I will gather these characters in a fluid narrative where past and present cohabit, where a common voice will take form to draw the path of another possible.

Alexandra Badea, June 2017

Intentions of the authorIn the first part of this trilogy on the missing narratives of the recent history of France, « Points de non-retour » [Thiaroye], Nora, documentary director on the radio, makes discoveries on an unfinished show of a friend who was violently killed. By inheriting his computer, she decided to finish his documentary on the colonial massacre of Thiaroye. Three other stories revolved around her. Nora entered the intimacy of these people and finds out that each one of them had a grandfather who had a role in this tragic episode of history. Towards the end of the play she spoke of her father, who asked, in the moment of his death, to be buried in Algeria. Never before he had talked about this country. His children did not take this last wish into account, it did not even make them think.

At the beginning of the second part of the trilogy, Nora crosses the Pont Saint-Michel. She stops. Fear of heights. Breathing chopped. She falls. She stands up and turns around. A malaise that comes back and about which she speaks. A therapist accompany her in this process. She resists a long time, she does not want to open the door to this past. The images appear, images of which she does not know the source. A woman comes back in her dream. Words arise, bits of sentences... Nora decides to learn more about her father, who left when she was still a child. She did not grow up near him, she rarely saw him. The father remarried with another woman who already had a child and instead of raising her daughter, he took care of him. Nora hardly knows him, they can not agree on succession, relations are cold and despite all these tensions she is forced to get closer to him to understand more about his father’s relationship with Algeria in order to put an end to this troubles that have awakened in her.

While searching through her father’s archives, Nora learns bits and pieces of her family’s past. She finds pieces of newspapers, notes, books. She then will get to know what happened on the evening of 17th October 1961 on the banks of the Seine, where thousands of Algerians – men, women and children – are participating in a peaceful demonstration in the streets of Paris against the curfew imposed by the prefect of police, Maurice Papon, and the government. The demonstration is violently repressed: 11.000 demonstrators are arrested, closed in stadiums, taken away in basements, beaten, tortured, some are murdered and thrown into the Seine.

She will also learn about the resistance in France, the networks of the suitcase holders, the groups constituted to help French recruits who refused to go to Algeria to make war, fleeing to Switzerland with falsified papers.

She will learn what happened at the Charonne metro station, in Sétif, in Oran, in detention centers where Algerian women accused of terrorism were raped. She will learn how, in the streets of Paris, French women who were demonstrating or wandering with Algerians were publicly humiliated. Nora will grasp the gap between those who have been disgraced for a long time and those who have been destroyed by anger.

In this search another story will intermingle. The story of Irène, daughter of « pieds noirs », and Algerian Younes. Younes and Irene grew up together in Sétif, they fell in love and fled to Paris to live this love. But the war is also approaching the metropolis. This couple is trying to resist in this tension where the Algerians are hunted down by police and harkis. Fear descends into their bodies, it paralyses, it spoils love. By following the daily life of this couple, that is becoming more and more difficult to live, we discover how the war of Algeria was lived by the Algerians of Paris and we can get closer to the 17th October 1961.

Despite the reluctance of Younes, Irène, who is pregnant, insists to go with him to the demonstration. They are arrested by the police on the banks of the Seine and thrown into the courtyard of the police headquarters. Being French, Irène is released. Younes remains. She waits for him on the docks. She sees the dead bodies of Algerians thrown into the Seine. Younes will not come back. Irène keeps looking for him. She knocks on every door. She goes from detention center to detention center, she goes to hospitals, she goes to the morgue. She also complains against the police officer who humiliated them. She receives a non-suit. During this search, Irène loses control of her emotions, violence possesses her body when she faces her aggressor, that she comes across by chance, and she can no longer contain anger. They meet again in prison. At birth, her son is adopted by her brother, who comes from Algeria. The war ends. Years later Irène is released. How will she rebuild the relationship with her son? And, especially, how will this son rebuild his identity?

Nora discovers that Younes and Irène are the grandparents she has never met. Even her father learned that very late. In her house, Nora recreates this broken past like a puzzle through objects, notes, photos and history books.

Alexandra Badea, November 2018

Note on the directionThe show will be structured in four parts. These two stories that weave together, intertwine in the same surreal space that evolves throughout, that is metamorphosed and destroyed. The characters coexist together in different space-times. Present and past move together, sometimes they overlap, sometimes they look at each other in mirror, sometimes they come into conflict or tension. Irène and Nora are two characters that are reflected in a mirror. Each one appears and disappears in the dream of the other. Each one, in different moments of the play, take a look on the other. Progressively, the imaginary space takes the place of the realistic space. A dialogue is woven between the two women, a dialogue beyond time.

In the first part we are in an intimate, confined space. A bed, curtains that float. Irène and Younes appear and disappear. Nora remains alone. Her therapist is invisible, a voice from nowhere. On the walls of her bedroom images come alive, blurred pieces of this abstract past, fragments of her dreams and nightmares.

In the second part this space opens, the outside penetrates the inside, this white space becomes a war ground. The sound that is suggested for a few seconds between the scenes – voices of the manifestation, songs, slogans in Arabic – becomes more and more present and violent. Sometimes it covers the voices of the actors, leaving room for the bodies that clash, that get lost and find themselves again. Irène tells in front of a camera what she sees. The victim becomes a witness. By addressing the camera that follows her, her gaze meets the spectators. Sometimes her testimony is interrupted by her emotional state. Sentences are chopped. She gets out of the field and stops the camera that is watching her. Nora and her «brother» look for the archives of the absent father. Documentary images and testimonials intermingle. The computer also becomes actor and conductor of the History.

The third part happens in the prison, in the closed space. Irène is alone. Interlocutors pass by her, but none of these bodies are visible on the stage. People who talk to her are out of sight, outside of the scene. Irène is filmed by the same camera, pieces of film are made in live editing. Through the image we can see her in a wide angle with her lawyer, her brother, doctors (prerecorded image) and in close-up (image captured live on the stage).

In the last part of the play the past dialogues with the present through the appearance of the « father-son » Léon in different ages. Sometimes he speaks to his mother, sometimes to his father, sometimes to his daughter or to his adopted son. His presence can not be put on the stage. Léon Morel is absent, he is the effaced person, without identity, without past and without future. It is an apparition invoked by other people through the memory or the imagination.

These different parts are articulated by a live writing that is recreated in each performance. The author is on the stage and she created this story under the gaze of the audience, like a necessary «mise en abîme» that allows different entries and exits for each of the witnesses.

Alexandra Badea, November 2018

While we do not tell these stories with the shadow points, the wounds, the suspensions, we will not build anything here. Everything will collapse. The same system is perpetuatedand we look on the edgeapplauding the vanquishedwho collapse. We are the reserve lot.Those who train day and night and watch the match without doing anything. We enter the game in the final seconds to replace the heroes of the day, but it’s always them who smile at the end in the photowith their gold medals between the teeth. There are people who are dead for these lands without having known them. And these lands refuse to give them their graves

Alexandra Badea « Points de non-retour » [Thiaroye]

The artistic teamAlexandra Badea text and directionAlexandra Badea is writer and director. She graduated at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts in Bucharest, in the direction section. Her first texts, Mode d’emploi, Contrôle d’identité and Burnout, were published in September 2009 by l’Arche Editeur. Mode d’emploi was awarded at the Journées des Auteurs of the Théâtre de Lyon. Two other theater texts have been published by l’Arche: Pulvérisés and the triptych Je te regarde, Europe connexion, Extrêmophile, as well as her first novel, Zone d’amour prioritaire.

She is the author of several radio dramas on France Culture: Red line, Mondes, Europe connexion. As a director, she has created fifteen shows in France and Romania, first working on existing plays (Biljana Srbljanovic, Sarah Kane, Dea Loher, Joel Pommerat etc.) or on «écritures de plateau» (Mihaela Michailov) and more recently on her own texts. In 2015, she created Mondes, a performance based on texts written live and with live music. In the cinema, she has directed two short films, 24 heures and Le monde qui nous perd. Since 2018, she writes and directs her trilogy on the missing narratives of the History of France: « Points de non-retour », with the creation of the first part, [Thiaroye], at Théâtre La Colline, National Theater, and the second part, [Quais de Seine] in the Festival d’Avignon in 2019. Alexandra Badea is the winner of the Grand Prix de la Littérature Dramatique 2013.

Starting in the 2019/2020 season, Alexandra Badea will be a partner artist of La Comédie de Béthune, Centre Dramatique National, and an associated artist at Théâtre du Beauvaisis, Scène Nationale.

Amine Adjina actorGraduated at ERAC, he works with Béatrice Houplain, Robert Cantarella, Alexandra Badea, Yuri Pogrebnichko, Valérie Dréville and Charlotte Clamens, Guillaume Levêque... After leaving ERAC, he works with Bernard Sobel in L’Homme inutile ou la Conspiration des sentiments presented at Théâtre La Colline in 2011. He then works with Alexandra Badea in Je te regarde, with Jacques Allaire in Les Damnés de la terre by Frantz Fanon, with Vincent Franchi in Femme non-rééducable by Stefano Massini. He creates, with Émilie Prévosteau, the Compagnie du Double in April 2012, in which he wrote and directed Sur-Prise and Dans la chaleur du foyer, as well as Retrouvailles !, which he co-directs with Émilie Prévosteau. He also writes Le Musée vivant for Robert Cantarella, Clean me up for Coraline Cauchi, Amer in 2016 ordered by the Compagnie de la Chouette Blanche, directed by Azyadé Bascunana. In 2016, he acts in Master, written by David Lescot and directed by Jean-Pierre Baro as part of the Odyssées en Yvelines of the CDN Sartrouville. He is the artistic collaborator of Jean-Pierre Baro on Disgrâce by John Maxwell Coetzee, presented at La Colline in 2016. In January In 2017, he won the Beaumarchais-SACD scholarship for his text « Arthur et Ibrahim », presented at the Tarmac in January 2018.

Madalina Constantin actressBorn in Romania, she studied at the Academy of Theatrical Arts and Cinematography of Bucharest. She begins to work at the Bulandra National Theater and in the Bucharest Small Theater. Admitted to the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique in Paris in 2003, she co-founded two years later, with Alexandra Badea, the company Europ’artes. She acts in Histoires de Familles by Biljina Srblianovic, La femme comme champs de bataille by Matei Visniec, Fuck You Europa by Nicoleta Esinencu, Contrôle d’identité and Mode d’emploi by Alexandra Badea. In 2010 she met Anatoly Vasiliev in Rome for a study on Tchekhov’s texts and learns about his method of ludic perspectives. From 2010 on, she explores texts by Camus, Genet and Dieudonné Niangouna for her play Sheda, presented at the Festival d’Avignon in 2013. It is in this context that she meets Frédéric Fisbach for the creation of Corps, based on Alexandra Badea’s novel Zone d’amour prioritaire and continues the collaboration with him in Élisabeth ou l’Équité by Éric Reinhardt. In the cinema, she works in Romanian and international feature films, including the première of Fanny Ardant’s Cendres et Sang, presented at the Festival de Cannes in 2009, but also in short films, including Solitudes by Liova Jedlicki, with which she won the best actress award at the Festival de Clermont-Ferrand in 2013.

Kader Lassina Touré actorHe began to work with theater in Ivory Coast in 1989, under the direction of his brother Allassane Touré. He then joined the Compagnie nationale de théâtre et de danse de la Côte d’Ivoire in 1994, in which he worked under the direction of Alexis Don Zigre. He continued his training at the École de Théâtre Binkadi and then at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique in Paris. During his career, he works with many directors, such as Marie José Hourantier, Fargass Assandé, Eva Doumbia, Patrick Janvier, Ketly Noël, Christophe Merle and Dieudonné Niangouna in Nkenguegi. Also a cinema actor, he works on several TV movies and feature films under the direction of Christophe Gros-Dubois, Brigitte Drouan, Éliane de Latour, Arnaud Mercadier, Jérôme Cornau. He also works as an artistic collaborator accompanying the directors, especially when searching for documentation on African societal issues.

Sophie Verbeeck actressOriginally from Charleroi, she moved to France to take drama classes. Trained at the École Régionale d’Acteurs de Cannes, she works with Robert Cantarella, Alexandra Badea, Yuri Pogrebnych, Valerie Dreville and Guillaume Levêque. She collaborates with Robert Cantarella in his performance Le Musée Vivant and with the directors Sylviane Fortuni, Béatrice Houplain and Grégoire Strecker. In cinema, she works with Bernard Tanguy in Parenthèses, Jalil Lespert in Iris, Josée Dayan in Captaine Marleau, Jean Paul Civeyrac in Mes Provinciales. In 2015, she plays her first major film role in À trois on y va, directed by Jérôme Bonnell, with which she earns a Césars nomination as a female revelation. She received a prize at the Festival de Cabourg in that same year.

Velica Panduru scenography and costumesAprès des études au Conservatoire d’arts plastiques de Bucarest et de workshops à Stuttgart, Copenhague et After studying at the Conservatory of Fine Arts in Bucharest and participating in workshops in Stuttgart, Copenhagen and Barcelona, she collaborated with a large number of directors, in Romania as well as abroad, realising the scenographies of more than 65 performances for the National Theater of Timisoara, the National Theater of Sibiu, the Teatro Piccolo in Milan, the Bulandra Theater in Bucharest, the Thalia Theater in Budapest, among others. In 2011, she worked with Guy Régis Jr. in « Sujets à vif » at the Festival d’Avignon, then signed two years later the costumes of Sheda, by Dieudonné Niangouna, and the scenography of Corps, based on Alexandra Badea’s Zone d’amour prioritaire, directed by Frédéric Fisbach for the 67th edition of the Festival d’Avignon. Her scenography of La maladie de la famille M. by Fausto Paravidino, staged by Radu Afrim, has been selected as the best Romanian scenography for the Prague Quadrennial. In 2016, she works with Dieudonné Niangouna as a costume designer for Nkenguegi and with Eugen Jebeleanu for the scenography of Yann Verburgh’s Ogres. With Alexandra Badea she has worked three times at the Timisoara National Theater and at the Mic Theater in Bucharest. Velica Panduru has received twice the Uniter Prize: artistic revelation in 1997 and best scenography in 2009.

Points de non-retour [Quais de Seine]

Teaser and booklet of the performance online:

https://anahiproduction.fr/en/alexandra-badea/quais-de-seine

Please contact us for any other technical matters.

Contact :

artistic directionAlexandra BadeaHédéra Hélix 4 Rue de Beauvais 60300 SenlisFRANCEhederahelix@gmail.com

administration, production and developmentEmmanuel MagisAnahi+33 (0) 1 43 57 36 29 - +33 (0) 6 63 40 64 68 emmanuel.magis@anahiproduction.fr