Rimbaud sur le ring – Les Affranchis company

A little sports opera, based on Arthur Rimbaud’s “Le Forgeron”.
Directed by Pierre Hoden.

Performance on Tuesday, September 24 2024

“I’d be a man, and you’d be king, You’d tell me: I want!… – You see, it’s stupid.”
Tuileries Palace, around August 10, 1792.

One fine summer’s day, a Parisian blacksmith bursts into Louis XVI’s apartments, opens the windows of the Palais des Tuileries, and presents the pale king with the crowd of citizens shouting their desire for justice and peace in the courtyard. At the sight of this spectacle, the king remains mute. From that day on, the country and the whole world celebrate the day every year!

In a language that blends lyricism and popular idiom, the Parisian worker narrates the people’s sufferings, humiliations, and injustices. With humor and irony, calm and tenderness, the blacksmith expresses the ambitions of his people: to bring about a just, peaceful a just, peaceful, and egalitarian society.

“Le Forgeron” is one of the 22 poems in ‘Les cahiers de Douai’. Rimbaud wrote it in 1870, when he was sixteen. A teenager who dreamed of distant horizons and infinite skies, admired nature and young girls, he rebelled against war and marveled at the sensuality of the world. He is passionate, indignant, lyrical, curious about everything. And his poems are astonishingly intense. A new language emancipates itself from classical poetry, opening the way to modernity.

The power of Rimbaud’s writing is able to paint a real portrait of the men and women who make History. It’s no secret that when Rimbaud recounted the meeting between the blacksmith and Louis XVI in 1870, he was in fact saluting the procession of 20,000 dead who marched endlessly through the rubble of the Paris Commune’s smoking barricades.

So that the physical power of Rimbaud’s writing resonates, we give body to the men and women of ’92. Boxers embody the revolutionary people, thanks to the composition of a choreographic score.
Inspired by Muay Thai fighting techniques, their rhythms, history and aesthetics, choreographer Olivier Chanut has created three variations that punctuate the narrative of the blacksmith, carried by an actress.

To compose this show, we selected a few essential signs which, by creating an organic whole, give concrete expression to the poem’s dramaturgy. This is why our action takes place in a ring: the audience is invited to sit on either side of our stage, in a bi-frontal installation. The ring is not only a space for sporting combat, but also a place where power relations are put on show.

THE COMPANY TEAM
Text: Arthur Rimbaud
Director: Pierre Hoden
Assistant director: Maria Cadénas
Choreographer: Olivier Chanut
Trainer: Sam Berrandou
Acting: Katell Borvon
Dance: Emma Brest
Lumpini boxers: Sam Berrandou, Loïc Delmestre, Séda Dolbachian, Stephane Dolbachian, Pauline Faure, Alamein Filali, Adam Salhi, Cécile Thiebault
Stage manager: Deyan Bussière
Costume: Agnès b.
Set design: Pierre Hoden

DURATION: 50 minutes
All audiences, ages 12 and up.

SUPPORTS