The Afghan Girls Theater plays “Les Messagères”, after Sophocle’s “Antigone”, directed by Jean Bellorini, at the Théâtre national populaire de Villeurbanne (Rhône), June 24, 2023. JULIETTE PARISOT
They are nine bodies on stage and seem to form only one as their voices carry the same song against violence. Nine very young Afghan actresses, in an adaptation ofAntigone by Sophocles worked with Jean Bellorini, the director of the Théâtre national populaire de Villeurbanne (Rhône), which is to be played for three performances from June 28 to 30. On this Monday the 26th, three days before the premiere, the young actresses seem inhabited by the weight of a text that resonates with what they have experienced: the flight from their country, in August 2021.
On stage, a basin of water on a black background and a nocturnal star like an omnipresent eye. A narrator, Shegofa, declaims a prologue written by Martine Delerm: “The little girl in front of her window is always the same. The little girls in the shadow of the windows. (…) Head full of dreams, dreams barred with iron. (…) Behind the little girls, there are the men. »
In the Roger-Planchon room, the air suddenly seems to have changed in thickness. During an hour and a half of spinning, the actresses will embody Antigone, Ismene, Creon, Hémon or the Messenger, and they add depth. The form is unfinished, but the emotion is there and does not let go of the viewer.
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Because, as in the play, behind Antigone, the fate of these young actresses was sealed by the violence of the men. All were part of a troupe of women – a pioneer in the Afghan capital – the Afghan Girls Theater Group, created in 2015 by the director Naïm Karimi, who rehearsed at the French Institute in Kabul.
“Like Antigone, they said no”
On August 15, 2021, when the Taliban militias were a few kilometers from the capital, the latter asked them to join him at the French embassy: they had to flee, quickly. In Paris, the visual artist Kubra Khademi publishes a list of artists in danger on which the young troupe appears. Jean Bellorini and Joris Mathieu, from the New Generation Theater (TNG)-National Dramatic Center of Lyon, decide to welcome them. The nine Afghan women will take one of the last planes that will leave Kabul and they will settle in Villeurbanne.
It is from this meeting between very young refugee artists and the director of the TNP of Villeurbanne, accustomed to forming “ephemeral troupes” with teenagers, that the project was born. The Messengers : nine women who will carry the voice of ancient characters and make their own heard.
“They are very young women who have a strength that gives them great delicacy on stage, even if their relationship to the theater is very vertical: it’s an entire game, like a gift, because they are like Antigone, they said no and found themselves alone”emphasizes Jean Bellorini.
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2023-06-28 15:31:17
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