
CE QUI DEMEURE
From March to September 2015 Élise Chatauret spoke with her grandmother, who told her the story of her life in an open-ended way. From this documentary material, edited like a film, comes a protean show that leaves the audience free to look.
Élise Chatauret masters the art of the documentary to perfection when it comes to bringing it to life on stage, knowing that her desire for theater has always been linked to that of an investigation. As she has done in her previous shows, she borrows her working method from that used in the making of a film. This time, she investigates the memory of a 93-year-old woman. She visits her, shares a meal with her, listens to her evoke her past in a vagabondage of words that she doesn't direct, but records and then transcribes, before moving on to editing, which poses the crucial question: what to keep or discard in a profusion of memories that have themselves been consciously or unconsciously sorted out by the speaker? Everything here is a matter of choice. The show's necessarily plural writing is supported by a set design that gives pride of place to images, while two actresses and a musician inject the whole with an irreducible life drive.