L'Esthétique de la résistance

Sylvain Creuzevault examined the French collaboration camp during the Second World War in Edelweiss [France Fascisme], presented last season at the Odéon. Conversely, L'Esthétique de la résistance focuses on domestic, German resistance to Nazism. Published in three volumes from 1976 to 1982, Peter Weiss's novel follows the initiatory journey of a young man in the midst of the anti-fascist war who travels from Berlin to Stockholm via Spain, and, in the course of his encounters with all manner of historical figures, including Bertolt Brecht, raises the question of a possible communist unity. Coming from a working-class background, he also trained - and this is the singularity and strength of Weiss's work - in the analysis of works of art, in order to build with his friends a genealogy of resistant art, free from any ideological injunction. Created in 2023 with the Groupe 47 of the Strasbourg National Theatre School and members of the company, this show is performed by seventeen actors with a dishevelled, Dantesque style. It draws on the heritage of theater - documentary, epic, tréteaux, agit-prop, commedia dell'arte and storytelling theater - in other words, what Sylvain Creuzevault calls "the theater of distances, which presents the world and human situations as modifiable".