New work
Playwright
Bernard-Marie Koltès
Choreography and staging
Marie-Claude Pietragalla
Julien Derouault
With
Julien Derouault
Abdel-Rahym Madi
Running time 1:20
In the Solitude of Cotton Fields
The two choreographers Marie-Claude Pietragalla and Julien Derouault have created a workspace with their Théatre du Corps, showcasing singular shows, by mixing dance and theater, body and poetry, orality and movement with nuance. This unique method, where the actor dances and the dancer plays, is today at the center of their creative work.
«Try to reach out to me, you won't touch me. »
Bernard-Marie Koltès
« In the solitude of cotton fields written by Bernard-Marie Koltès, is a major contemporary theater work, it features a dealer and a client: two-night owls, two injured being, and two solitudes ... The playwright displays what precede just before the conflict, a verbal battle that can be compared to a street fight taking place on an isolated ground. On this neutral and deserted spot, two characters are forced to reveal themselves and be laid bare. Supply and demand, dealer and customer, light and darkness... Koltès uses contraries to express the complexity of their relationship.
Dance manifests the poetry of the 2 characters unconscious, and the space is filled with words, whose purpose is to gain time just before the exchange of blows. It’s a parade where they both gauge, graze, and provoke one another.
Desire incarnates itself in the body, the breath, and the choreographic moments, it disturbs the protagonists, causing them to react and to acknowledge how they are affected. Dance and words are here to impress, to test the adversary, to seek one another rather than bite, but really it is a ritualization of the encounter with death. »
Marie-Claude Pietragalla and Julien Derouault
« Two men who meet by chance, are faced with only one choice: either they fight each other with the violence of enemies or they meet sweetly as brothers. My characters want to live but are not allowed to do so, they run up against brick walls. As they struggle, they merely become aware of how hemmed in they are, how much their life is restricted by obstacles all around them. Limits, hurdles everywhere - that is what theater is about. »
Bernard-Marie Koltès
French playwright and author Bernard-Marie Koltès studied at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg’s Theatre School where he began writing plays. His life was nomadic.
In 1968, during his first trip to New York City, he discovered the emotional intensity of the city as well as the American gay culture of the time. His New York experience helped inspire the characters and the situation in In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields.
Koltès’ career was closely linked with that of avant-garde director Patrice Chéreau, who produced nearly all of Koltès' major plays, including: Black Battles With Dogs; Quay West; In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields; and Return to the Desert. His final play, Roberto Zucco, premiered in Berlin in 1990.
He died from complications due to AIDS in 1989. At the time of his death, Koltès was considered to be one of the most important young voices in French theater, and an heir to the legacy left by post-war non-naturalistic playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and, especially, Jean Genet. He is now considered one of the most important French playwrights of the 1980s.
