It is an atypical show. Patiently built for eight years, born on trestles in a garden then hosted at the 2022 Avignon FestivalAt the end of the long journey of a collective creation, he brings together seven plays, thirteen hours of shows organized around four intermissions, including two meals!
Through the worries and desires of our time, The Ash Nest is a marvellous epic in the land of tales, depicting the encounter of two worlds in peril, in which two singular beings fill the inadequacies and inconsistencies of the world with their love.
Before performing at the Amandiers de Nanterre and then in Toulouse, he stopped in Normandy for a unique performance, on March 11, 2023, at the CDN of Caen. Do not miss this event! Interview with Simon Falguières.
Simon Falguières, can you tell us about Le K, your company ?
The Le K company was born more than 15 years ago. It has undergone several metamorphoses over the years. We were first a multidisciplinary collective, then a theatrical collective, and finally a company. We grew up in the middle of squats and alternative places before re-establishing ourselves in our original territory, Normandy, more than ten years ago.
The company has always worked, in parallel with its creations, on the establishment of an extremely assiduous territory (first on the department of the Eure then on the whole of the Norman region) with cultural actions and small off-road forms. We work in a company with great fidelity between the technical and artistic collaborators over the creations.
“We have always worked to establish ourselves in the territory.”
In recent years we have developed a repertoire of shows in a wide variety of formats, ranging from the small form in school to the theatrical epic on the major national stages. Over the past year, we have gathered about 40 employees who have participated in the company’s various adventures. We defend a theatre of stories, a theatre of text, only around original creations. We defend a theatre that puts actors and actresses at the center of the device.
For the past two years, the company has been involved in a completely different adventure: the creation of a place – a theatre factory in a rural setting – The Hydra Mill in Saint Pierre d'Entremont in the department of Orne.
The Ash pit was first presented in 2018. How did you assemble this piece ? Have you been supported by the Ministry of Culture ?
The Ash Pit is the founding adventure of the company. It is a theatre adventure as little is lived in a lifetime. It started in a school, then, without production, on a wooden trestle under the stars, two summers in a garden in the Charente.
As of 2018, the Réseau des Producteurs Associés Normands and the Théâtre du Nord, CDN of Lille-Tourcoing-Hauts de France have decided to accompany the project, on the production of a first version of six hours of shows. The Théâtre du Nord then took over the production and we formed a "SEP" (joint venture company) with the various producers and Le K.
“The Ministry of Culture has supported us every step of the way.”
Following the success of this first version, we organized a regional tour. The company then resumed production of the show and a new time of creation was set up during COVID at the Théâtre de la Tempête in Paris. As a result of this research, the Festival d'Avignon offered us to come and finalize the work as I dreamed it at the launch of the adventure: a 13-hour theatrical epic.
We then went back to creation to finish this artistic and human adventure that occupied eight years of my life. The Ministry of Culture has supported this project on all stages of life of this show, since its first professional version in Tourcoing.
The Ash Nest is a simple and complex work, in 7 pieces. Can you present it to us ?
The Ash Nest speaks of a world cut in half, like an apple cut in half.
On the one hand, a world that could look like ours. We have a young middle-class couple, Jean and Julie. One day, the devil comes to them. He tells them that the machines of finance are falling apart. The scales of values are reversed. There is no more work for anyone. The people decide to cross the continent by fire. Jean and Julie flee to the country in flames and they abandon their child, an infant, Gabriel, in front of a trailer of actors. The actors adopt Gabriel who will grow up with them in the ashes of the lost continent.
On the other side, a fairy tale world. In this world, the queen falls ill. The king has a dream. In this dream, he sees that a man on the other side can save his kingdom. Princess Anne, his daughter, takes to the sea to find him and save his mother.
“The mosaic of a broken mirror of myself.”
Anne and Gabriel love each other without knowing each other. They go on odysseies to try to find each other and by their union, save the two worlds in danger.
Who are the authors or artistic references that fed your writing ?
The Ash pit is a declaration of love at the theatre! I wanted to put everything, all my emotions of spectators and readers. This is a world work. It is also a play where we move from one genre to another: farce, comedy, drama, melodrama, symbolist drama, thriller, political satire etc. The references are therefore multiple. One can find the soul of Shakespeare, Molière or Maeterlinck but also sometimes as light perfumes, Beckett, Lewis Carroll or Lagarce.
There is also the very strong presence of a film that has marked my life and that nimbles the entire universe of the work: Fanny and Alexandre of Bergman. A film about the paternity and magic of the theatre. Finally, for the references of direction, they are also multiple. I honestly don’t think I can handle them. The Nest of Ashes is an epic piece that starts from an intimate necessity, as always. It is the mosaic of a broken mirror of myself. A bed I wanted to put all my loves in.
Are there possible comparisons between your work and the contemporary world ?
In The Ash NestI’m talking about a tearing of the world, a loss of meaning. So through the filter of the tale and the fable, I speak of my vision of the world in which I live and of the hope that the theatre gives me in front of this world in suffering.
“The adventure of our troupe is a love story.”
So comparisons are possible and multiple. But I don’t want to get into a news story. I prefer to pass these impressions in the narrative of a most timeless work possible. I want to make a theater of the present full of ghosts of the past and not a theater of current events.
Some people talk about art as a way to overcome the absurdity of the world, love is also, according to you ?
What I can say is that our troupe adventure, which has been going on for all these years, today with the creation of our place, with my closest collaborators, is a love story.
I believe that theatre is always a love story. A agape made of fragile balances to try crazy gestures. And on the evening of the performance, if this love can give back for a few and a few, a little sense in the face of the absurdity of the world, the time of a moment, the time of a party, I think we will have exceeded something by our work.
What are your plans today ?
I am currently working on a solo that I will play at the Tangram Scène nationale Evreux-Louviers. It is entitled Morpheus. This is an almost speechless room, any audience. I reconnect with my first love of a burlesque theatre but also of a plastic theatre made of paintings, sculptures and puppets.
And for the troupe’s next play, I’d like to go back to work on the work of a poet. Write from another subject, go back to study. It will be a project for the year 2025. In the meantime, I put all my energy into building the Moulin de L'Hydre and several participatory projects in the Normandy Region.
From Louviers to Avignon, including the Théâtre du Nord and the Théâtre de la Colline, from the animation of a collective to the one-on-stage and return: the itinerary of a young artist.
Author, director and actor, Simon Falguières is the artistic director of the company The K established in Normandy for 12 years. After a dozen creations, he wrote and staged his first young audience show in 2018, Lung. The text is published in March 2020 at the Ecole des Loisirs. It creates in January 2019 the first version of The Ash Nest at the Théâtre du Nord CDN in Lille Tourcoing Hauts de France. Between 2017 and 2019 he created seven episodes of a theatrical diary entitled The Diary of another alone on stage. In 2020, he wrote and directed The Stars, at the National Theatre of the Hill. The play is published in Actes Sud Papiers. In July 2022, he directs the complete Ash Pit at the Festival d'Avignon at the FabrikA. The text is published in Actes Sud Papiers for the occasion. He performs in many theatres in Normandy, Vire’s Le Préau CDN and the Comédie de Caen where he is associate artist, but also the Tangram SN Evreux-Louviers, Le CDN de Rouen Normandie, DSN, Le Trident SN Cherbourg en Cotentin as well as the national network Théâtre de la tempête, Théâtre de Nanterre Amandiers, Théâtre edelacité de Toulouse, Tréteaux de France. In 2022 and 2023, he created three rooms: The Golden Branch at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique in Paris, Wandering is our life with the Belle troupe of the Théâtre de Nanterre Amandiers and a solo Morpheus.
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