Cover number 6
Deal cloth brothel Antoine Rigal
Dimitri Tsiapkinis - Trakt number 6
Dancing Madly
I am not a poet. All the same, I write poems. I am not a photographer. Nevertheless, I take pictures. I am a dancer and I make “non-dancers” dance, and very often people suffering from psychopathologies.
From what level of erudition does our art become suitable to be shared with an audience? And why do you absolutely want to share it?
I saw a woman who weighed at least 120 kg, dancing the Martinican bélé and I was touched by her grace. I was able to observe a person suffering from psychopathologies making gestures with such commitment that left me speechless. I have seen young women take up dancing in countries where dancing is considered prostitution. I have seen actors without legs and without arms fighting in a cinematographic work. I've seen psychotics paint pictures that upset me. I saw a butoh dancer who ate nothing but beer and cigarettes, in breathtaking choreographic acts. That's why I absolutely want to share my art which encompasses states of madness: the emancipation of the individual through art and beyond all conformism. When my social context prevents me from asserting my singularity and leads me into conformism - which is regaining ground in our times - I manifest with my whole being. I reformulate ways of being through my artistic gesture. Beauty is in me, even if it remains interdependent with the aesthetics of my time.
Hey Dites Ho! Number 6
Bernadette Mary Gridelet
TRAKT, a unique magazine...thank you to all of you who have participated in bringing the magazine to life, through your creations, your proposals, your enthusiastic responses. Especially to those who have persevered again and again, writing articles, sometimes to their amazement, who trust in life. Because a magazine is life! In any case, it is our perception of things.
“You think I'll be good in pictures, no, yes? I want to write but you think that…?
- But yes !
- Good ! »
The encounters made on this beautiful path, varied, colorful encounters: these people we didn't know yesterday, sometimes living far away... whom we finally meet, with whom we share stories, experiences, whom we can't wait to do discover !
Yes, this magazine has a suitcase full of you and what you share!
Yes, this magazine is worth listening to, reading, supporting.
That's just a tribute...
Roland Lebret - Number 6
What to do with a text?
The question only arises after having accepted not to know anything about it when one feels compelled to immerse oneself in it despite the difficulties which seem immeasurable. It was, no doubt, the same for the author of this text: “To put an end to the judgment of God”.
A long story for him, since he comes to be part of this long work which starts from the moment when we can say that he invents the theater of cruelty, even if our Greek and Roman ancestors had traced the path which was far from a route parallel to that of Artaud.
These texts were published on February 7, 1938, shortly after the beginning of his long hospitalization which lasted almost ten years, from September 1937 to May 1946. We can say that the text, "To put an end to the judgment of god" is a testamentary text, which coincides with the very completion of his life.
Deciding that we were going to present this text was an impulsive decision, one could say raw, as were the drawings of Artaud which cannot be separated from the theater of cruelty. To do this, we had to take a few precautions which consisted in letting ourselves be seized by the voices of Antonin Artaud, Maria Casarès, Roger Blin and Paule Thévenin who were the first to record it for the Radiodiffusion Française which hastened to bring it under censorship on February 1, 1948! Destiny that could be said to be expected even though Antonin Artaud himself deleted the part entitled “the theater of cruelty”. This act of Artaud should be taken into account and deserves a documented reflection.
If the first decision we made was to immerse ourselves in the voices, the second was to include in this cover precisely this part excluded from the recording of the French Broadcasting.
Without knowing it, we had made the decision to dare the act, sheltered from voices. But we had another protection:
the reading of the text which was our other shield.
So here is what we did, initially, with this text: get as close as possible to the available recording. We added a video where one of us painted a portrait of Artaud on a glass plate, which has the function of painting without seeing what the spectators will see. The back and the place are not the same for everyone.
Our question therefore becomes this only, today, by writing these lines: what was the other side of this text which had gripped us, already, a few years ago, at the time of leaving a work of more than 40 years in a psychiatric hospital?
The reverse side of the text is not the meaning of the text. We know well that finding a meaning in a text takes the place of a shelter against this text. The other side of the text is what it produces as a symptom.
Mine, in this work, was to note, after the fact, that during the rehearsals, the memory was not part of it. While, alone, everything was going easily and just before the show, we, with another, spun, our respective shares, without a hitch. They came on the scene again! We had to face it because, at that moment, we can no longer go back.
This time each and everyone had neither the text in front of them, nor the voice. The voice had to be that of everyone, way and voice, back then, from what Antonin Artaud's text could arouse in everyone. It is up to everyone to face it, the collective being only a softening.
This week of rehearsal was special for me. Death lurked and came at the start of rehearsal week, just before the second performance.
During rehearsals, I happened to say that ARTAUD not only rejected everything that could explain life, and therefore death, everything that could mold it, make it something conditioned, and that he therefore proposed to us to create life at every moment. Such is the cruelty, at the heart of life, that the theatrical act is supposed to produce, bringing to the stage the impulses of life and death which, like god, are the masks of the cruelty inherent in all creation and all life.
To say that can only attempt to define a gaping hole that Artaud, very close to his last breath, wants to make heard, wants us to hear.
What have we done with this text? In a particular journey from one performance to another, mixed with everyday life, what it provoked in me was the return of a pain that was never really named, and therefore never really recognized: the pain of loss, of the disappearance forever which had already been at the start of my life.
I allowed myself to be taken to the edge of "holes of emptiness", as Artaud invites us to do, to the point of telling us that he is the author of his life, always to come, to the delirium of the car -creation.
Artaud's act: to put an end to the judgment of God, is an act of every moment. He led us, despite all the precautions of a staging, to the edge of the meaninglessness of all life, which becomes a necessity of creation and transmission where we find neither certainty nor comfort.
Artaud's act is to lead us to the edge of reality, to the edge of the impossible to say or do. There remains the act, alone, capable of giving it a name, just before dying. In this case, the act is always raw.
What a text can do with us is probably fairer.
Gilles Lolivier
Gilles Lolivier
Stephan Vivier - Number 6
My name is Stéfan Vivier… Stéphan Vivier on civil status..
born into a practicing Catholic bourgeois family, full of certainties. My father, a Monsanto engineer at Shell Chemistry introduced me to Africa, Asia, and genuine racism.
Shy child, sent to boarding school at 7 years old, my hypersensitivity quickly turned into social phobia.
Mocked by those of my generation, transparent to my parents, I was a failed child, a teenager and a young adult who found myself blushing when he met his gaze in a window. Unable to study..! Failed sales rep (phew..!), failed photographer, failed cameraman..
From the age of 16, having left the family hearth, heavy drinker and heavy smoker, I lived in my ivory tower, my room, which protected me. Little life of a little gentleman.
And yet I fought.. A war photographer, that's what I wanted to be..., bear witness to our world...! Two stays in Belfast during the era of Mrs. Thatcher, and hunger strikers..., a report with the rebel Tutsis, a few months before the Rwandan genocide. Not for me. The fear in the belly, the weapons in the hands of kids, fear of dying. Passionate about art, painting, poetry, I always knew I was an artist. But the artists were the big names in the Figaro Magazine supplement.
I had to leave Paris for Sète. Night supervisor in a center for the handicapped, flea marketer on Sundays, a box of paints for sale, and my artistic adventure began at 45 years old. What a waste of time!
Abstraction so as not to hurt me, and then I finally threw myself into the great family of singular artists. More afraid! Clumsy, not good.. whatever, finally I said who I was without cheating. My first canvases were harsh: alcohol, drugs, sex, violence, social injustice.
Today, after more than 15 years of painting and sculpture, thanks to artist friends or collectors, I continue my journey with delight.
I like to tell our world, with a more raw work, and with the humor that my parents passed on to me, against their will...
Revue Tract 8
