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The theatre of Matéi Visniec

Born in north from Romania in 1956 (Bucovine). It very quickly discovers in the literature a space of freedom. It is nourished of Kafka, Dostoïevski, Poe, and Lautréamont... It likes the surrealist ones, the dadaïsts, the theatre of the absurd and grotesque, oneiric poetry, the fantastic literature, the magic realism of the Latin-American novel, even the Anglo-Saxon realistic theatre, in short, all except socialist realism.

, left later in Bucharest to study philosophy, it becomes very active within the generation 80 which upset the poetic and literary landscape of Romania of the time. It believes in cultural resistance and the capacity of the literature to demolish totalitarianism. It especially believes that the theatre and poetry can denounce the handling of people by the "great ideas", as well as the washing of the brains to operate by the ideology.

Before 1987 it is affirmed in Romania with its purified poetry, lucid, written with the acid. From 1977 it starts to also write plays who circulate additional amount in the literary circle, but who remain prohibited of creation.

In September 1987, it leaves Romania, arrives to France, request political asylum, starts to write in French and works for Radio International France.
To date, Matéi Visniec counts many creations in France, about fifteen its parts written in French are published (Southern Acts Paper, Harmattan, Lansman). It was with the poster in a score of country. In Romania, after the fall of the communist mode, it became one of the most played authors.

Plays published in French:

• Three nights with Madox, 1995, Lansman Editions.
   

• Partitions fraudulent, 1995, Crater Editions.
   

• Broken up theatre or the man dustbin, 1996, Editions the harmattan.
   

• The horses has the window, 1996, Éditions Crater.
   

• Letters with the trees and the clouds, 1997, Editions southern Acts papers, in the collection "Briefs besides"
   

• Paparazzi or the chronicle of a sunrise fallen through followed of
  Sex of the woman as battle field in the war in Bosnia 1997, Editions southern Acts papers.
   

• How could I be a bird? 1997, Crater Editions.
  Odd job for an old clown followed of
   

• The history of the bears panda told by a saxophonist who has a girl friend has Frankfurt, 1998, Éditions southern Acts papers.
   

• History of Communism told with the patient mental 2000, Editions Lansman.
   

• The king, the rat, and the insane one of the king, 2002, Lansman Editions.
   

• Attention with the hurdy-gurdies injuries corroded by lonelinesses, 2004, Edition Lansman.
   

• Richard, Anton, and Co: 3 parts, 2004, Lansman Editions.
   

Full bread pockets, and other short parts 2004, Editions southern Acts papers.
 

But, mom, they tell us with the second act what it passed to the first, the one moment Space, 2004
The theatre of Matéi Visniec word with the setters in scenes :

Broken up theatre or the man dustbin
Matéi Visniec is the Master of the laconic writing of the concentrated small size.
There is at this Rumanian a relationship with Kafka, Mrozek, Borgès, and what attracts me at this former hostage of a censure of State refusing a score of its texts, it is that it answered it while using of another language, ours. In Ionesco, Cioran, is added from now on Matéi Visniec.

We have to make here with a modular theatre articulated on the incongruity of limiting situations. In this vertiginous mirror and crushes, it does not have there a narration, but a whole of traversed fables of acts of resistance of absolute tender to a law and order whose center is everywhere and the obsessional periphery. The principle will be each time of an aberrant logic, circles which one does not leave, poetic bestiary and mortifère, universe with the unidimensional reduction, the obsession, loneliness in agglutinement. Matéi Visniec is the contemporary scribe of the absurdity.

Gabriel Garran

Director, Gabriel Garran is the creator of the International Theatre of French Language in Paris, theatre which it directed during many years. It put in scene "the man dustbin" of Matéi Visniec in 2004.

"But what is violoncello made?"

When one reads Matéi Visniec, one enters another world. One forgets the law, the laws, the law of gravity and nothing is opposed any more to this returns by the sky what has just fallen into the abyss. Everywhere it is a question of the ground, it is a dramatic author who works clay. Its art is to model the world which returns to us unrecognizable and yet truer than natural. Thus, the characters are our brothers and our brothers become characters. For the remainder, all is under control: the horses are with the window, the traveller is under the rain, Godot is not nowhere, but Madox is everywhere. There is at Matéi Visniec, beyond the absurdity which brings it closer some giants, the true generosity which allows all the audacities. Because it is the author himself which takes the risks, which puts the hands in the engine, which jumps into space with its characters. It brings a new style to an absurdity which started to feel tiredness, to make its age, and it shows to us through the opacity of this world.

In fact, a part of Visniec, it is a small box. And I often imagine all these boxes which never are not encased, but which holds in balance one on the other in deep mistaken of any form of gravity. There is up to the ceiling and one does not include/understand how none falls. One seizes one of them, because we like its form, invites us. One never knows what one will find there. Some, moreover, are not so easy to open; one can leave some nails there. But once the raised lid, there are a whole world, ground, feathers and rain. And then a musical instrument which shines in an obscure corner. And on all that appears, fall, in dewdrops, a humour soft-land-mark, subtle to tend.

And then, the box should be closed again, and nothing returns there any more! Like a robber, one gives the whole most discreetly possible and one from goes away, the wrongfully released air. At this point in time one types you on the shoulder: "But what is violoncello made?"

Benoit Vitse

Actor and director, Benoît Vitse directed the French Arts centre in Iasi to Romania, and the French Arts centre in Kiev to Ukraine, before settling in Iasi to direct the Theatre Ateneum.

Broken up theatre or the man dustbin
To work, for an actor, or a director on a text of Matéi Visniec, it is first of all a pleasure of the directions. As of the first reading one perceives with deepest the our being as the vibration of a large boat which propels us towards a destination than already we could have a presentiment of, the feeling of a large wheel which turns in our flesh.

The pleasure of the word, is delirious it of the language. And as the reading advances, the edge of our lips distends and through small cries, of laughing full the mouth one lands tired, repu and broken in a world which sometimes is well ours. Then one opens the window and trying to look at and to bore the thought of human one realizes with amazement which Matéi Visniec had only some lengths to describe in advance us situations, to give us characters that we could not suspect yet.

Yvan Romeuf

Actor and director, Yvan Romeuf directs to Marseilles the company Egregore and assembled "broken up Theatre or the man dustbin".

"But what is violoncello made?"

But what does this part mean?

To answer in a sentence would strangle the part.

But it is however necessary to be tested unceasingly with an explanation while hastening to say that it will not be "the ' explanation", and that any explanation is only one sight partial of the unit. It is a part, would still add Brook, not a treaty...
 
Undoubtedly, this part treats waiting, conditions of waiting, difficulty in acting, of the man wasting his life, the consequences to cohabit with a monster, incidence of the totalitarian capacities on the diurnal behavior of the individuals, the good direction, the fear of the other, the incidence of the totalitarian capacities on the night behavior of the individuals and their dreams, of these bastards of good people, art, the place of the artists, of the decreased man, paralysed, useless, quasi-death but insane of happiness to be quasi-alive, of the things which make good as it of these people who drown and who, at the rare moments when they remake surface, do not waste their time to shout the Help |, but say "the life simply is beautiful"...

One can live the moment with more force.

Lionel Astier

Did actor and director, Lionel Astier go up "But what one makes violoncello?", spectacle presented at the Lucernaire Theatre in Paris

The history of the bears panda told by a saxophonist who has a girl friend has Frankfurt

Attention, at Visniec a direction can in hiding another, and it is with the pleasure of tracing its way...

It is a text which gives desire for playing because it is funny, strange, unusual. Because it is a history of love as each one could dream some, unexpected, magic. Not a thunderbolt. Rather an angel which would be posed on the end of your nose the morning, with the alarm clock. And which would involve you in a single passion, until the end, until happy death, light.
 
It is the history of a musician who lives in the music of the nights, in the wander of the night birds, and which, meeting this woman, will be readily let take in the soft lattice of love, an infinite egg, bliss between childhood and death. Undoubtedly the SOUND which it sought since always.

It is the history of a fairy which is perhaps a woman, knowing to open all the doors, to hear through the walls, to give life to the objects, to offer animals which do not exist, speech without the words. It is the history a magician which teaches the dematerialization in seven lessons, the levitation into eight and serenity in nine.

That starts like boulevard, that continues in the delicious shifted poetry of Visniec (as in its short news jewels "voice in the plugging light"), that transfers with the ludic mystic of orthodoxe who read Buddha too much, and that finishes with a good slap of return to reality... Could one believe... But not: the scene is empty and "a strong apple odor penetrates in the room of spectacle"... Visniec, poet AND playwright, remain faithful to his principles: it titillated us the imaginary one, it shook our logic and caused our consciences, but it will not say anything more.

It is a comic and air part. Cynicism here misses almost, even if the destiny which the woman predicts, as while joking, with this excluded voluntary, is a life of panda in the cage of a zoo. He which conceived only the transitory one, the music, him which generated only the immaterial one, invisible birds of plugging light, fruits of genes offered by this woman, will be you he constrained with the impossible reproduction by the hands pataudes zoologists clutched with his black and white fur?

But they are there only speculations, divagations, comments of the avid reader of parabolas. The text of Visniec, him, remains simple, with the first degree, even in its comic, its absurdity and its poetry. Even in its vision of the man and the woman. Even in its pretences with logic, it always remains of an absolute obviousness.
 
This is why we want to laugh and make laugh. This is why the pleasure invades us and envies it itches us to confront us so that Visniec knows however well cleans: the theatre.

Remi Rauzier

Actor and director, Remi Rauzier signed the first setting in scene in France of "the History of the bears pandas...", spectacle created by the Company URGENT FOLD of Lyon and presented at the Festival of theatre of Avignon (OFF-1995).
The woman as battle field.

The work of Matéi Visniec is already rich many plays. What is amazing for a relatively recent author. Rare also are the authors whose inspiration is also varied. Comic, or primarily poetic parts are neighbourly with more serious works. The woman as battle field would be to arrange in this last category if L prone which it treats rather did not make it classify in essential works. As of the reading, it is the urgency to present it on scene which is essential initially.

While denouncing the reports/ratios which the Occident maintains with the Central Europe and describing the condescending attitudes that it practises with respect to the tragedies events of Balkans, Matéi Visniec puts to us in the presence of two women plunged in the reality of the Bosnian tragedy. All two victims. Both torn. Both marked with life. One in the intimacy of its conscience. And all that with a personal tone, a saving in means, rigour in the style which impresses at one time when manner of writing supports the brilliance at the expense of the report.

At Visniec, the images are born from the poetic words, vintages and. Of a writing where the extreme violence of the words and what they cover combines with a musical quality, a rate/rhythm, a poetry which make re-appear in a manner stronger still violence and the horror which vehicle this situation of the extreme.
It seems that such a work calls a setting in made scene of rigour and sobriety evacuating any naturalism. We are in the universe of the horror and indignation. The words are sufficed for themselves, help them to open out. As always with the theatre, it is the play of the actress who will be essence. They were well chosen, let live them silences from which will be born the images. Celle de Dorra la femme violée. Celle de Kate à la recherche dans les charniers de Srebrenica ou de Prijedor, de son identité perdue.

Guy Retore

Metteur en scène, Guy Retore a dirigé pendant de nombreuses années Le teatre de l’est parisien. Il a signé la mise en scène de "La femme comme champ de bataille" en 1999, spectacle présenté aussi au Festival d'Avignon (off)

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