Massimo Furlan / Numero23Prod.

Vidéos

Un Jour (2014)

Presentation

One day: the timeframe for the event to unfold, to happen. One day: the timeframe of the
story, from beginning to end.
This work, which focuses on death, the disappearance of the body and the ways in which it
can reappear, strives to consider all possible outcomes: ghosts exist although they donʼt
exist, they are both present and absent. In that way, every hypothesis remains open, urging
one to suspend oneʼs beliefs and need for decision.
This project is based on discussions and research carried out with anthropologists,
historians, and philosophers in order to understand the role and principle of shamanic rituals
that enable the living to come into contact with the dead, and especially to reverse the
unilateral relationship of the living towards the dead in order to consider how the dead react
to the living: because the dead produce signals, they elicit stories and induce actions.
One Day plays on the ambiguity of states of being and spreads confusion: who is dead, who
is alive? Sometimes we think about the dead with such intensity–the dead who remain in the
collective or the family memory–that they seem to have a fuller life than some who live but
lead a ghostly life, as if they were already absent. Voices suddenly evoke this, although you
donʼt always know who is talking, or who is who, since identities are so porous and hazy.
One Day brings together different ways of “being there”. There is no chronology, no principle
of causality. Instead, actors switch from one state to another, as if they were in a trance or
possessed: from life to death, from death to life, from actor to character and vice versa. This
structure is conducive to changes of register, going from burlesque to tragedy, cabaret to
performance, from a language steeped in theory to a visual language.
This work should be shared with the audience who capture the relationships that bind
characters together, and connect sequences that can be seen and perceived on stage, freely
and openly.

Theme
The iconography of ghostly beings is broad and ubiquitous: evanescent bodies, shadows,
luminescence, whispers, and white traces. Although they are usually invisible and fleeting,
but with a presence that is nevertheless revealed, ghosts have been represented in all sorts
of ways, depending on different time periods and cultures. The simplest and most
conventional representation is the white sheet with holes for the eyes, in short, the friendly
ghost. Massimo Furlan and Claire de Ribaupierreʼs project One Day questions our beliefs in
the invisible, the possible exchanges between the dead and the living, the porosity between
the two realms, and the emotions they share after the end.
On stage, six characters struggle with a reality that is grim or gentle, burlesque or poetic, in
an aesthetic that veers towards a performance that is a complete hybrid, keeping it unclear
who is dead and who is alive.
Although they are usually invisible and fleeting, but with a presence that is
nevertheless revealed, ghosts have been represented in all sorts of ways, depending
on different time periods and cultures.
Furlan establishes a scenario and visual sequences that he designs and puts to the test
during rehearsals. He often develops what he likes to call “long images”, i.e. frozen moments
that distinguish his stage art from theatre and cinema, that stir up in the spectator feelings of
contemplation and bizarre, distended confusion. The idea is to let images, voices, and bodies
come forward, without reducing them to words; to evoke relationships, fear, tears, separation,
suffering, emotions, dreams and apparitions; so that we may wonder if the dead, who haunt
us every day, drive us to invent new forms of communication, to renew our sign systems.
Origin of the project
The One Day (or A Spectral Day) project was inspired by a week spent with Jane Birkin,
chatting in her kitchen, resurrecting ghosts from the past and talking about illness and death,
about the closeness of those who have departed but whose presence still lingers in archives,
letters, drawings, pictures, songs, films and objects. Those who are absent still haunt our
memories and our homes: they pervade our daily lives, our thoughts and conversations,
forcing us to develop new forms of communication, a new system of signs.
The question of ghosts is actually something that is familiar to both Massimo Furlan and
Claire de Ribaupierre. In a first series of drawings and paintings, Furlan dealt with the topic in
pictures, which he collaged and overlaid with photographs of deceased people; and de
Ribaupierre wrote a PhD thesis about ghosts, about the presence of ancestors and the
genealogical novel in the works of Claude Simon and Georges Perec (Le roman
généalogique, Brussels, La Part de lʼoeil, 2002).
Anthropologists, historians, and philosophers today examine different modes of conversation
between the living and the dead, as they have given up on asserting that there is a strict
separation between the two realms. For a long time, artists and writers have been coming up
with ghostly figures allowing us to try and think of the living and the dead in the same space,
and to actually think “from the position of the dead”. That is what One Day strives to do: give
bodies and their apparitions permeability; let images, voices and bodies come forth and
question them, in all their forms, without reducing them to mere words; let gestures and
movements express the separation, suffering, tears and desire for one another.
The phantom body
The stage project was designed around the idea of the “phantom body”, the ghostly presence
of the deceased and the various ways in which they appear, and their relationship with the
living. The project also covers illness, the wounded and ailing body and the manner in which
these are portrayed: flayed models, wax sculptures and anatomical charts. The project aims
to explore the porosity between the world of the dead and the world of the living and the tiny
gaps where both worlds meet–in the darker recesses of dreams–and to get them to appear
like looming shadows, at times poetic and enigmatic, and at others under a bright light,
farcical, burlesque and macabre, in a kind of English style with a light spirit and a lashing
tongue.
Ethos
This project raises the question of believing in what is invisible, of desiring someone else, of
helplessness and miracles. It will be designed as a series of gestures, of glances, of
whispers and light touches, and will be interrupted suddenly, sometimes in a brutal and
burlesque manner, with sinister choreography, using popular and carnivalesque imagery.
The aim is to play with the iconography of the ʻghostʼ–the evanescent body, the faint glow,
the shadows, the whiteness, mysterious apparitions, but also skeletons, walking dead, and
corpses–and to find a way to stage the diseased body, the flesh. Interplay will emerge
between the mannequin, the puppet, the white sheet and the physical body. Finally, the
performance will be punctuated with black humour and elements of burlesque to defuse the
tragedy, while also making it possible.
Origin
The One Day project kicked off at the Château de Vaulx in Charolles (F), where a meeting
took place between all the dance companyʼs performers, Jane Birkin, anthropologists Marc
Augé and Daniel Fabre, Middle Ages historian Pierre-Olivier Dittmar, and philosophers
Vinciane Despret and Serge Margel. Conversations focused on the deceased and their
“return” to the world of the living in different forms, during the Middle Ages as well as in
modern times, and in different societies, such as African or Asian. The intensity of the
discussions and the quality of the arguments expressed were a fantastic drive for the project.
After the meeting, several threads were identified:
– The first thread is relationships: relating to others, dead or alive, to the visible and the
invisible, to human beings and ghosts, and to otherworldly elements (rain, clouds, light)…
These relationships happen because of a gesture, a gaze, a word or a prayer, a song or a
lamentation. Their intensity exposes how we think about the deceased, how we “reconstruct”
the deceased to communicate with them despite their absence. This absent “other” cries out
to the living, making requests, and asking questions, requiring some form of exchange.
These relationships obviously imply the existence (in one form or another) of a body, dead or
alive: how can it be touched, how is it present, under what form, how does it stay or
disappear, how does it travel through space, what it is made out of? Each body part might be
considered separately as expressing a state of being: an arm, a hand, a cheek, a foot, a
torso, etc. Each body part has its own strength, is independent and in a way has its own
“soul”. If the body is no longer alive, then it must be reconstituted, re-assembled through
words, through memories and pictures: life must be blown into the deceased in order to be
reborn in whatever form.

– The second thread is fear: when faced with death, we feel fear. We fear the lifeless body;
corpses stir up terror. Death leaves survivors speechless. They canʼt speak; no words can
express the pain. In one fell swoop, reality tumbles and words suddenly disappear.
Depictions of corpses are manifold: flayed men, whose insides are made visible beneath the
skin and under the flesh; there are the walking dead, zombies, skeletons, etc.
No one knows where the dead go, and the unknown is a source of fear. Anxiety is something
that has no object, something that cannot be represented. One seeks to tame the dead, to
get used to their disappearance. Prick up your ears: the ghost is calling the living and
speaking to them directly. When it identifies itself as a ghost, it becomes less scary: it has
found a form.
– The third thread is tears and the heart: tears, lamentations and desolation are tightly
linked to Judeo-Christian tradition and to representations of the Deposition of Christ, of La
Pietà. The whole body shares in the sadness, in expressing loss. Tears flow from the painted
and sculpted faces of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Tears express “inwardness”. In
his Confessions, after his friend and his mother die, Saint Augustine talks about tears and
their necessity with great accuracy: “I cried with happiness under your eyes, over her, over
me and for myself. I let the tears I was holding back flow freely and my heart and wallow in
them. Only tears could feel good and fill up the space that my friend had left in my happy
heart.”
The face is home to tears; it expresses the heart, its inwardness. Eyes are windows to the
soul, revealing peopleʼs complexity and mysteries. When one remembers the deceased, the
first thing that springs to mind is the face, which is where love expresses itself. The
photographed or painted portrait helps to remember and feeds the memory. Pictures of a
face are pictures that call to action, that capture, motivate and move the living.
Finally, the heart is the home of “inwardness”, of the singular individual. It appears in
monotheistic religions as the home of the close relationship that man maintains with God.

– The fourth thread is dreams and apparitions: the deceased visit relatives in their dreams.
In the world of dreams, the deceased are both present and absent. When they appear in
dreams, the deceased take the form they had when they were alive. They look to keep bonds
with the living, to communicate; they address the living and make them do things.
In Judeo-Christian tradition, the soul detaches itself from the body after death and becomes a
breath of air. Transparent, it flies away. In other religions, the spirit reincarnates in the form of
an animal or a plant. In Africa, it seeps into the body of descendants, of new-born children.
In the Middle Ages, a new intermediary place was invented: Purgatory, between Hell, where
the souls of the damned go, and Heaven, where the souls of the pure go to rest. In that
place, which is thought to be close to Earth, “ordinary” deceased people go to await their final
judgment. Spirits in Purgatory keep in touch with the living. They err, restless, waiting,
passing time, roaming, and drawing trajectories. Each body follows its own trajectory and
seeks to maintain ties with the living and to stay in touch.
Death means separating a subject from life within a community, but it also implies reinstating the subject into that community in a different form.

Mise en scène et scénographie : Massimo Furlan
Dramaturgie : Claire de Ribaupierre
Assistant à la mise en scène : Laurent Gachoud
Création et régie lumière : Antoine Friderici
Création musique : Stéphane Vecchione
Création vidéo : Bastien Genoux
Régie son et vidéo : Philippe de Rham
Régie plateau : Hervé Jabveneau
Costumes : Severine Besson
Maquillages : Julie Monot