Cels

When you come to understand Cels, it might be too late. That's what comes to mind when I try to write something about it.

The feeling of not fully understanding the force that hides within a work like Cels haunts you during the assembly, the preparation of the project. The sensation of not being able to foresee the weight and effect of the words when they are finally spoken. The fear of not having been able to anticipate the force that everything you prepare can have on the actor, on yourself, finally on the spectator, the day a few elements come together.

Cels is another great work by Mouawad that we are fortunate to be able to rehearse, to perform. It speaks of so many hidden things under a thrilling, distressing, and surprising plot that you cannot grasp them all at once. Faced with the text, you feel small. Faced with characters guilty of something that makes you cringe. I have often not understood why the author conjugated those words at that moment. And it has also happened to me to understand it in the middle of a rehearsal. In the unsuspected moment of having theatrically formed a glance, a pause, a tone of voice.

The characters live before you the ordeal of discovering the darkest parts of their own identity: what we are, in the deepest sense. And they do it while seeking the identity of a name. While investigating who the other is. They meet who they are, and this happens before us, raw and cruelly. And it's extraordinary.

The text is poetry. And it's philosophy. And it's also pure theatricality - in the sense of knowing how to weave, plot, organize acts that are both real and fictional at the same time. And we are privileged to be close to it. And for the spectators who see it, you may not like it, but it will make you feel alive, intelligent, and free. Perhaps sad or perhaps happy, but alive.

A song to life like few can be lived.

Oriol Broggi