Suíte 1

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2004/2009

“I listen to many tired words,
yes tired!
I write against this!”
Philippe Minyana

SUÍTE 1 (SUITE 1) represented for us, in the beginning, a language exercise; it resulted in an approach of this disturbing dramaturgy, with no spectacular or decisive pretensions regarding the work. A work that offers us an actual discourse, revealed in a condensed sequence of short sentences, interrupted, repeated and re-signified in a kind of dramatic and good-humored score of daily life. In a little more than three weeks, we dedicated ourselves to deal with the exact and musical word of Philippe Minyana.

SUÍTE 1 (SUITE 1), written in 2002, is part of a trilogy that still includes SUITE 2 and 3. A work created in a context of research and observation of the man, which uses an aesthetical and political thinking that kicks off the elaboration of the text. It is not quite the transposition of the quotidian talk to the scene, but the recreation of its sonority and poetic strength. About this, the author himself says: “The theater is for me, words that roll, that make noise…” or “is the phrasing that interests me (…) a speed of execution (…) What was interesting was (…) to play the score. That is, not to interpret the meaning, but the music, the speed.” Because the meaning is born precisely of this parade of aligned , non-hierarchical words, the exact image of the banality of the lives they restitute. “I frequently say to actors that I use ‘the talking of a woman in a bakery, this incessant flux of words always identical, always useless, but in which, suddenly, can be identified the presence of concrete objects, recognizable real facts. And the verbal diarrhea is suddenly covered of a brutal weight and truth.”

In this perspective, SUÍTE 1 (SUITE 1) proposes the insistent coexistence of one man and five women in alternated and numbered situations of conversation and meal, in which intend to restitute to the memory the facts of a common past. These figures, spokespeople of a text, reinsure the own existence amidst the apparent banality of their lives. About the idea of character in Minyana’s work, the French theoric Michel Corvin says: “they are no longer the owners and the lords of a language that express themselves. They are not previous to their word. They make themselves talking (…) They begin to exist with the first word they pronounce and disappear, like in Beckett, with the last.”

Marcio Abreu

Curitiba, February 2005

 

*Play specially created for Semana da França in Curitiba PR, promoted by Aliança Francesa, 2008.

**The translation of the play, made by Giovana Soar especially for the montage, was released in 2008 in Palco Sur Scène Collection published by Imprensa Oficial de São Paulo in partnership with Consulado Geral da França and Aliança Francesa.