For twelve years, Caroline Melon was a director with the spoken word festival Chahuts in Bordeaux, and focused particularly on contexts for involving people and benevolence. For the last three years she has been working with De chair et d’os to develop cycles of urban performances and presentations that have all been leading towards this first movement of the three-part piece Suite pour transports en commun, which explores shared waiting areas. In a day when cities are turning into places we pass through, these controlled areas are about to come to life.
This is an uninvited theatre of surprise, accident and obstruction, in which the medium of variety songs will serve as a link for a moment of reconnection, and sudden sharing of cultural codes. It’s all based on the aptly named Foule Sentimentale (Sentimental Crowd) by Alain Souchon. Someone wearing headphones starts to hum, and gets louder and louder. A voice responds from further away, and a third joins in, until a whole little choir is in place. People exchange amused or knowing glances, as it breaks through the hard shell of the people always rushing to and fro that we are.
The sensitivity and finesse of Caroline Melon’s writing are expressed in the way it pleasantly invades daily life, through the abrupt, subtle and gentle shift designed to combat abandonment and uprooting in the places we live. This is a poetic and gently humorous subversion of the ordinary.
BIOGRAPHY
For twelve years, Caroline Melon was a director with the spoken word festival Chahuts in Bordeaux, in the Saint-Michel area in Bordeaux, working on the complex question of involving the poorest and most vulnerable populations, audience diversity and inventing gathering places. She left the festival in late 2016 to devote herself to artistic creation. Since then she has been developing a form of activity inspired by immersive contexts as part of the association, De chair et d’os, and her projects and productions often include local residents and guests. Her shows, performances and cycles such as Bons Baisers de Libourne, Kairos, La Tournée or La belle Joanne, always exhibit a benevolent approach with focused attention on the human participants. In Rennes, this first movement of the three-part piece Suite pour transport en commun (created in 2019) will open up her welcoming and off-the-wall world, with a clear-cut appetite for experimentation, play, mystery and surprise.
DISTRIBUTION
Un projet de Caroline Melon
Jeu : Christophe Andral, Sébastien Genebes, Cécile Maurice
Intervenant vocal : Emmanuel Vranckx
Mise en condition : Célie Augé
Régisseur : Mikaël Plunian
Professeur d’arabe : Driss Wahbi
distribution en cours
PRODUCTION
Production : De chair et d’os.
Coproduction : Été Métropolitain (Bordeaux Métropole), Les Tombées de la Nuit (Rennes), le Grand T – théâtre de Loire-Atlantique (Nantes), IN SITU (Réseau cofinancé par le programme Europe Créative de l’Union européenne)
