Le Voyage de G. Mastorna

WHILE ARTIST CHARACTERS (painters, sculptors, actors, authors) often feature in the theatrical repertoire, the act of creation, “art in the making”, is on the other hand a rare theme that requires careful handling. How does one avoid simplifying a phenomenon that is as complex as it is varied in its expressions?

The recourse to allegory or myth provides playwrights with an immediately understandable way to speak of artistic creation. Muses are thus present in eighteenth-century allegorical comedies, as are mythical characters who serve as symbols of the creative act. Pygmalion is the subject of a comedy by Louis Poinsinet de Sivry (1760), an operatic scene based on a text by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1775), and a play by Georges Bernard Shaw (1914). Orpheus is evoked in many operas and plays, including Pierre Corneille's La Toison d’or (The Golden Fleece) (1660).
Invented characters can also be used for this purpose, as recently in Pascal Rambert’s play Une vie (A Life) (2017), which reflects on the origins of the desire to create.

Apart from these symbolic evocations, the creative process depicted on stage is most often related to a performance, in the sense that it is understood in the field of art.
In the operatic repertoire, vocal performance –characterised by passages of remarkable technicity and virtuosity– in itself constitutes a means of exalting the creative act, as exemplified by the singing contest that is woven into Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser libretto. Moreover, the tradition of Italian bel canto, which showcases the singers’ virtuoso vocal abilities to the detriment of stage action, makes the plot secondary to the performers’ prowess, with singing exercises prolonged through improvisation that can be compared to a technical, physical and artistic performance.

In the theatre, whether the performance is fictional (skilfully rehearsed and defined to appear improvised), real (developed entirely in the course of the performance), or partially real (improvised within a given framework), it plays on the uniqueness of the staging. It then depicts the spontaneity, meanders, regrets as well as the bursts of poetry that constitute the creative act.

Among the famous examples of “real performance” –despite the anachronism of the term in this case– Antonin Artaud’s “Vieux-Colombier lecture” in 1947 perfectly depicts the “pure” creative act, the mobile thought of an artist in the twilight of his work, appearing on stage for the last time. Recently discharged from psychiatric internment and greatly diminished physically, Artaud reconnected with a highly expectant audience –the Parisian intellectuals who admired him as a great theoretician of theatre– but got lost in his preparatory notes, which led him to largely improvise. He ended up leaving the stage in front of an audience both disconcerted and fascinated. The text of the lecture itself, reconstructed from Artaud’s notes and testimonies, would later become a work itself, performed by Philippe Clévenot in a recreation of this lecture in 1995.

In contrast, the fictional performance is based on a written text that deliberately distorts the audience’s perception: in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, the audience initially believes it is witnessing a rehearsal before the characters in the play actually enter. This loss of bearings in relation to truth and fiction seems to be precisely what constitutes the act of creation, as also established by Federico Fellini’s script for G. Mastorna’s Journey and the twists and turns that ensued during shooting/production.

Between these two conceptions lie semi-directed improvisations such as the production by the collective formed by tg STAN, DE KOE et DISCORDIA, Paroles, pas de rôles / vaudeville joué, performed at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in 2010 or again, in 2018, the production by Birgit Ensemble, Les Oubliés (Alger-Paris).