play by: Didier Galas
Drawing: Jean-François Guillon
Production: Les Hauts Parleurs
Tuesday 19th September 2017 at 5pm
Citadines – Centre d’Art
In French only, length: 60min
What is a virtuous World?
The answer lies in this free adaptation of texts by François Rabelais. But, beware, when Rabelais becomes a philosopher, it is withhumor. He enjoys himself with the language and sense of the stories he tells us. By this fact he puts forward a definition of virtue as a
certain humanism: a transformation of being that demands a daily questioning of oneself.A virtue which transcends the human being in order to offer him the power of the hero.This proposal is also a way of making two distinct aspects of François Rabelais’s writing appear. It is, first of all, a speech drawn from itsprefaces, in which one can hear the temperate voice of the writer, a scholar and a physician addressing himself directly to his reader.Secondly, it is a language more grotesque and exaggerated, spoken by the characters of the novel; imprint of freedom and anarchism,each sentence is the place of crossing common sense and the most virulent bad faith, between vice and virtue. By fusing these twofacets of the author, this monologue, with the pace of conference argued by gesture and drawing, tries to touch what might be an ideal Heroic Virtue. The fables, dances, parables and drawings that we go through offer a unique opportunity to hear what Rabelais considersmost essential in the very fact of living: sharing and exchanging with his contemporaries. “
