Press File - Kunstenfestivaldesarts

groups of two, three or four, onto individual paths, driven by the artist of their choice, transported
along their choice of geographic and imaginary routes.
I like this idea that in the car, life stands stills, always unfolding before our eyes. This puts a
different perspective on what is understood. Often, theatre performers want to make their mark
on the world and society, but on emerging from the dark auditorium and months of rehearsals,
this fine world may as well be Mars. If you are placed in a very everyday context and from the
beginning you accept its rules, this does not prevent you from forging a common artistic theme,
in fact quite the opposite.
I also like the fact that the audience taking part in a theatrical act, which is in essence public and
which requires a certain expertise, is also confronted by the regulations of another public space,
the highway code, and the technical skill involved in driving a vehicle well. In the car the public
can access other dimensions: privacy, disorientation…I wanted to create a journey that sets a
poetic process into motion.
It is like returning to our origins, returning to the very rudimentary things about the theatre.
Confronting the other, this unknown, this stranger to us. We are not fooled. We know that we
have paid to see an actor. There is no actual discrepancy, it must be more abstract, more
cerebral. Seeing through the eyes of another…
What do you think is important to explore here within the theatrical form of this project?
I have always considered one detail in Galilei Galileo by Bertolt Brecht to be very beautiful. At
one point in the middle of a banquet, Galileo gets bored. His gaze comes to rest on a chandelier
swinging from the ceiling like a pendulum. This detail sparks off all the research which will lead
to the proof that the earth rotates. Verfremdungseffekt ! The distancing effect! Alienation. In a
paradoxically very familiar context. Inciting surprise, curiosity…
What sort of relationship do you want to establish with the audience?
The relationship with the audience is fundamental here. The audience is here to live, dream and
feel but that is its right and it also has the right to be left in peace! taxitheatre is not an
interactive project because the essential ingredient of its success is to listen, which is what the
spectator who sits in the car is about to do. I would like the public to feel like a privileged
interlocutor, being transported in comfort and feeling close to the sensitivity shown by each
artist.
Here the spectator is moving and yet ‘motionless’ in the car, he is involved in the rhythm of
dramatic art. There cannot be anything abrupt in this movement: the spectator must move with
the same rhythm as the artist.
This is not face to face but side by side. Like a beautiful metaphor for human relationships. Each
place in the car has its specificity; it offers a particular viewpoint and frames the outside world
and the driver differently. You never see the same thing (and it is about more than the objectivity
of being physically transported!).
An impression of Brussels…
A chaotic city! It seems like a concentration of different European cities. The logic of the streets
becomes entangled, parallel roads, roads crossing into star-shapes and circular roads, road
signs and signals direct everyone onto the main roads so as not to congest certain areas. Very
different traffic systems work together. And Brussels is not the same Brussels from one district
to the next, or even from one block of houses to the next.
A secretive city! In this chaos, you always get the impression that there are lots of hidden
places, but not in the same way as Marseille where these are signposted as prohibited or there
are barriers. All that hidden water! The winding Senne, a city historically constructed on the
marshes…Some streets do not even exist on maps which have no doubt had to be simplified in
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