We will see Léonore, who might be a filmmaker, and Agathe, a Butcher’s
assistant, consumed day and night with a creative business, both wearying
and utterly unsettling. In a large room with white walls: one or two chairs,
a desk and an actress, a script in her hands. Despite the lack of means, a
colossal space will unfold from this point. With words spoken, whispered and
told again, a strange, dreamlike story will develop, the extent of which will
be revealed gradually. The body and voice that can be seen and heard
belong to Nathalie Richard, spectacular in her command of trials and errors.
As the only person on stage, she plays every character, women, men and
ox. For the theme here is body – or meat, in other words. Still raw, even
scraped. Suffering and pain loom beneath the purity of the set, the delicacy
of slow motion, the fair hair of Nathalie Richard, before suddenly moving to
a slaughterhouse. Through seemingly showing the strings, drafts, building
diagram and other rehearsals of her story, Judith Abitbol alludes to the
unremitting efforts produced by the mind to fill in the emptiness and
absence Agathe and Léonore have set to tackle – together, although each
in her own way – regardless of the inevitable putrefaction of the flesh.
Surprising, extreme and harsh, just like ‘enlarged children’s games’, her work
restores surrealism’s liberating power. With a somewhat sweetness to it. (CG)