The Buddhas of the Cartoucherie

After a very long wait, the core team for Cre-Actors was finally able to meet over the weekend, at the Cartoucherie in Paris: home to our French partner, the Théâtre du Soleil.  The simple experience of walking into a theatre space after so long was powerful enough in itself: and at the Cartoucherie we had the joy of not one theatre but many, with one of them - Théâtre de l’Aquarium - offering the first, incredibly accomplished live performance that most of us had seen for well over a year.  But the Théâtre du Soleil’s space at the Cartoucherie is even more than a performance space: it is a space of intense, profound holiness.   

When I say “holy”, I don’t simply mean “religious” or even “spiritual”, certainly not in any doctrinaire way.  Rather, I am recognising the power of this theatre’s engagement with the most vital questions in our lives, its status as a place of contemplation, rigour and pilgrimage, its function as something distinct from the mundane, something essential and restorative.  It is the perfect place for us to begin our work on this important project, because it enables us to question who we are as we emerge slowly from our time of isolation; because it asks us how we can be together in social space, how we can jointly continue our lives informed by the new knowledges of the last year.  We have seen a passionate rejection of racism and expressed the need for cultural dialogues - and we have seen the horror of racial violence.  We have seen the pandemic take so many lives - and we have been denied the possibility of mourning.  In the Cartoucherie, you can feel the potential to overcome this.   

In 2014, when the company was starting to rehearse Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Guy-Claude François, their scenographer and the person most responsible for the evolution of the space, passed away.  Ariane Mnouchkine had his body placed on the stage for a final goodbye to the company. “He consecrated the stage of Macbeth”, she said.  

In 2001, some Tibetan monks visited the company to work with them on Cham dance.  They spoke of an energetic current that flowed from the many Buddhas painted on the walls of the theatre’s second space - the open area between the foyer and the auditorium.  The Buddhas were first painted in the late 1990s for a production about Tibet: And Suddenly, Sleepless Nights.  Vincent Mangado tells us that, when they were being painted, one face simply appeared in the design.  You can see it in the top corner of this photograph: a human face emerging from the wall, complementing the artistry, not created but mysteriously revealed.





Michael Walling - Border Crossings

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