The Politics of Space in Ça ira (1) fin de Louis by Joël Pommerat Staging the People. The Gap Between Presence and Representation

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Δημοσιευμένα: Ιαν 25, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/ps2023.7991
Magdalini Ntourou
National Kapodistrian University of Athens
Περίληψη

Joël Pommerat's Ça ira (1) fin de Louis1 evokes the history of the French Revolution while exploring contemporary trends of depoliticisation. The linear dramatic structure of the performance follows the events from the King's convocation of the Assembly of the Three Classes in 1789 to the adoption of France's first Constitution and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in September 1791. However, the prospective dramaturgy -pointing towards the future and following “presentism”- neither moves from crisis to crisis towards a climax and a final resolution nor aims at a historically accurate narrative. Instead, the crisis is permanent and lasts beyond the performance, extending towards contemporary political crises and blending fact and fiction, past and present. In its five-hour duration, the theatre becomes a “parliament” where the spectator is positioned in the gap between presence and representation. The paper explores the ways the performance exposes this gap using strategies of staging the people (Rancière, 2011). After exploring the sound and vocal elements of the performance as a spatial “distribution of the sensible” which contributes to a heightened sense of presence and their spatio-temporal relation to history, we will examine how the aesthetic practice of staging the people is manifested in two scenes of the performance.

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