Archipel
Mar 31, 2015
Performed in the Theatre de la Bastille
What connects an island to the mainland? What links the fantasy to the reality, and are these linkages grounding, or eternal fetters that hinder the artist? What are the boundaries between performance and theatre, storytelling and visual art? These are the questions that Anya Gleizer ventures to address in Archipel. Blurring the boundaries between representation and enactment, weaving her art into the very narrative of the play, uniting set and costume so that the actors quite literally form and are formed by the set, Anya Gleizer's search for connection becomes one those of the performers.
Set to the script written by directer Matthieu Tricaud, Archipel tells the story of a war-torn mainland, from which refugees flee to an island to find sanctuary. And of the isolation and false-tranquility of the island-community that seeks the mainland to find a way to wreak positive change and have a voice. A coming-and-going of wandering ships, an Odyssey to find home and escape it, Archipel goes further to question the very reality of the island itself. Does the island exist as an escapist day-dream or as a distilled form of reality in its own right, as the waves of an impartial sea sweep it from our sight? Does a story offer us a respite from our lives, or the only meaning we are to find?
Anya Gleizer was in charge of Set, Costume, and Artistic Direction in this piece.