HYPERION
FROM JANUARY TO OCTOBER 2010
The action of this epistolary novel, written from 1793 to 1797, takes place during Turkey’s occupation of Greece. We follow the progress of Hyperion, and with him the story of young men cut off from history and trying to become part of it again. It is a Bildungsroman and a meditation on our relationship to history, a novel about fraternity and love, the transmission and political organization of emancipation… It also recounts the failures of attempts to achieve liberation and the implicit invitation to reformulate the task of the political, linked with that of the poem. This work questions the definitions of friendship, love, relations with the father figure, while at the same time constantly seeking to resume contact with history.
"I could define the theatre we do as still thought through from theatre’s own historical resources. But, for this period, I also want to assert its attachment to philosophy. I think the hostility or laziness of our world towards thought now makes the task of the theatre well nigh impossible. Like that of politics, what’s more. So my priority doesn’t lie in conveying the states of the world in an intelligible way, but in conveying in an intelligible way what the public work of thought, the extraction of the truly pertinent questions of our situation, should still be. And for me, theatrical performance is the public site of this work. I’d like to my residency at the CENTQUATRE to be as literal as possible. I’m going to try and let myself be guided by the shifts and constellations the place organizes through its very life. Then I’d like to give shape to that observation through written texts, through participating in the centre’s public projects. In addition I’ll adapt Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion for the theatre. My work will be dramaturgical in nature, involving hypotheses regarding the stage, and conducted with local amateurs."
Marie-José Malis
