Le Chant du Cygne / L'Ours

Two one-act plays by Anton Chekhov that have been associated to give voice to this “language that suggests”, as the young director Maëlle Poésy puts it. At the end of a performance, Svetlovidov gets drunk and falls asleep in his dressing room. When he wakes up during the night, he is alone and afraid, locked into the empty theatre. While seeking help, he meets a prompter in whom he confides the story of his glorious past. Just like Swan Song, The Bear stages characters who are “suspended in a present time between nostalgia for what no longer is and hope for what is yet to come; in-between moments, set before decisions that tip life in one direction or another.” In the form of comedies, these plays talk about the experience of mourning and the rebirth of love. And they explore the ever so fine relationship between fiction and reality, the piling up of feelings, stories and lives on theatre stages, those of the characters and the words of their authors, those of the audience who receive them, those of the actors who convey them. By juxtaposing the two texts, Maëlle Poésy evokes the cycles of time, great losses and eternal renewals, quoting Rilke: “And it is not even enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when there are too many of them, and one must have the great patience to wait for them to come back. Because these are still not real memories. It is only when they have changed into blood, glance and gesture within us, when they are nameless and no longer to be differentiated from ourselves, only then can it happen that in a very rare moment, the first word of a line of poetry arises from amongst them.”