At the Paris-Villette theater (75), Isabelle Lafon proposes Knights. Four liberated and sassy women who excel in the art of telling themselves and telling us fantastic stories. Between lightness and gravity, dramatic art at its peaks!
Sur scene, freedom has taken up residence: freedom of speech, freedom of tone, freedom to cry or laugh, freedom to come and go! Moreover, they have space on the vast theater stage to go about their little business, to ride their desires and hobbies: four women in the saddle, free, liberated, impertinent and Knights who do not hesitate, if necessary, to mount their high horses… Only a line of light marks their entry into our universe, three stools in the bare immensity, dramatic art in its simplest form, an hour and a half of unequaled pleasure! Denise (Isabelle Lafon) admits straight away, the trotter trainer prefers horses to children. However, she accepted guardianship of young Madeleine, who was disabled.
To help her with daily management, she appeals to other women to come and live with her. The conditions, surprising but indisputable? Have a close or distant relationship with the horse, take care of the child without fail, live in the apartment for a favorable rent but come there without furniture… Saskia (Johanna Korthals Altes) the building engineer, Nora (Karyll Elgrichi) the special educator and Jeanne (Sarah Brannens) the bar waitress take up the challenge. Each carries a unique story with its successes and failures, successful or failed show jumps. In turn, with little words or interposed letters which mark the difference and proximity on stage, they soliloquize or dialogue with each other. On the attention to be paid to Madeleine whom we will never see, especially about their existence as a woman in search of a future, of a utopia perhaps to be conquered, in any case to be built.
Between the four women, so incredibly different in their life journey, strong bonds of familiarity and complicity are formed. Which does not exclude headaches or angry outbursts, lurches and cross strides! The protagonists always speak in front of the public, from the stage to the room a strange feeling of complicity is woven. Reinforced by the doubts and hesitations carried by the four actresses, constantly oscillating between improvisation and the framework of their text. Between forgotten, usurped, changed words, life is there in all its complexity, both fluid and solid between affirmations and contradictions: are individual choices a brake or a driving force behind a common project? On what criteria are the success or failure of living together based? With the sole weight of words, of the beautiful and well-founded name of his company, The MarvelousIsabelle Lafon and her three companions demonstrate it. Under the cover of little or almost nothing, the essential in the first sense of the term, they offer us a moment of theater like no other, both dry and luminous.
The show seems to be built before us, with us, accomplices of this quartet which attempts a possible other, to make common cause while hiding none of their asperities. They, like us, straddle between illusions and aspirations, certainties and doubts… Are we in the theater or in real life?Captivating, moving, the question arises in the face of such enchantment which descends from the hangers and spreads over the desert immensity of the big stage. Yet surprisingly, magnificently, extraordinarily inhabited by four frail silhouettes dressed in a simple ray of light. But what light, wide-eyed, to illuminate this path to emancipation that is proposed to us! Yonnel Liège, photos Laurent Schneegans
Cavalières, Isabelle Lafon : Du 16 to 27/06, Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Friday at 7 p.m. Paris-Villette Theater211 avenue Jean Jaurès, 75019 Paris (Tel.: 01.40.03.72.23).
