La Compagnie Vahram Zarya et l'Ensemble Regards se sont réunis pour faire découvrir par la musique contemporaine, performance et le mime contemporain, une recherche sur le concept de l’oblique. Librement inspiré par des poèmes de Frédéric Parcheminier, le spectacle « Oblique cycle 1- Attracteur Etrange » – est une performance interprétée par un quatuor spécial : deux musiciens et deux performeurs. Dans Oblique cycle 1, l’accordéon est tour-à-tour le double du performeur et de l’acrobate aérienne, hybride avec l’électronique live, et plus intime avec des arrangements de chants venus d’Arménie, de Galice du Japon et de Pologne.
Musique: Vincent TROLLET, Conception et mise en scène : Vahram ZARYAN, Informatique musicale: Hiromi WATANABE,Vidéo: Auguste DIAZ et Vahram ZARYAN, Lumière: Cédric HENNERE, Conseil dramaturgique : Laurent MUHLEISEN, Collaborations artistiques : Karen HAKOBIAN
Avec: Pauline NADOULEK, Vahram ZARYAN (performer, mime contemporain) Jean-Etienne SOTTY (musicien, accordéoniste), Victor HUGUENIN (musicien électro-acousticien), Production et administration : Florent BRACON et Jana JASENKOVA
Production: Compagnie Vahram Zaryan et Ensemble Regards, Diffusion : Est’ Nova Production,Coproduction: Atelier du Plateau à Paris (Scène Nationale de Quartier).
OBLIQUE’ Cycle 1 est soutenu par la DRAC Ile-de-France, La Ville de Paris, Spedidam, Sacem, Institut Martin Luther. Avec l’aide d’Arcadi Île-de-France, dans le cadre des Plateaux solidaires.
French-Armenian
mime artist Vahram Zaryan holds a unique place in
today’s performance world.
A graduate
of Armenia’s National Conservatory in Yerevan and the École internationale de
Mime de Paris, he has performed on world stages throughout the United States,
Russia and Europe. He has where he studied with many legends across a range of
disciplines. To master the artistry of mime, he learned from the master, Marcel
Marceau, a French actor and mime most famous for his stage persona as “Bip the
Clown.” For dance, he studied with Yves Casati at the l’Opéra de Paris, and the
technique Etienne Decroux, he learned from Ivan Bacciochi.
Zaryan’s
experimental nature has led him to invent and champion the concept “No-mime”—an
attempt to push the boundaries of mime and make it relevant to the contemporary
stage. With his Compagnie Vahram Zaryan, he and a small group of
fellow artists continue to conceive of new productions, as well as give
workshops and master classes, along with his production company Est
Nova. It was my pleasure to sit down with him and to get to know this
wonderfully erudite and unique performer better.
***
Christopher
Atamian: Vahram,
you’ve led a rather peripatetic life and resided in several different countries.
What did your travels teach you and how did they influence your identity and
your art?
Vahram
Zaryan: Travel
has been an important means of self-discovery. Each trip that I’ve taken has
also been a journey in self-knowledge. It has represented exile, as well.
Travel and being in contact with different cultures has paradoxically brought
me both closer to my own self while distancing me from it, as well. I’ve always
felt 100 percent Armenian and 100 percent French simultaneously. Countries were
made in order to be explored, after all. You should never stop moving. And I
personally feel that I was born not once but several times, each time in a
different place. I was born a first time in Armenia in Shirakamut (formerly
Nalband) Village. I was born a second time buried under the rubble of an
earthquake whose reverberations I still feel down to my very core. And then I
was born a third time when I met my mentor and teacher Marcel Marceau. I
experienced yet another birth performing on the stage. I am born and I die each
time that I perform, with each story that I tell and through each one of the
characters that I create. I’ve often discussed this in my work, most notably in
“Mater Replik,” which I premiered in New York City at the Richmond Shepard
Theater.
C.A.: How did you train in order to
develop your particular contemporary version of mime and performance?
V.Z.: My training as a mime is informed by
all of the different forms of contemporary art: it is in dialogue with all of
the arts. I studied theater arts at the National Conservatory in Yerevan and
later with Marcel Marceau. I also studied classical and contemporary dance, as
well as music and traditional theater. Mime is an ancient and well-known art
form, yet it is rarely performed. Marcel Marceau is an iconic figure, his work
is unique.
C.A.: What led you to this particular
contemporary performing art form? I ask, because you have great respect for
your craft but you also insist on shaking up many of its existing norms.
V.Z.: Today my latest creations such
as Oblique Cycle 1 confirm what I have felt intuitively for
several years now, that is to say that a process has developed which involves
the disappearance of a formatted, purely social body destined to please
society’s gaze, in favor of a more organic and free body. This gives the modern
mime today access to a primitive, primal body.
C.A.: You are a proponent of “No-mime,” a
new and creative vision for gestural theater. Can you explain to us what this
involves?
V.Z.: I develop and create work with a team—along
with my dramaturg Florent Bracon—that exists at the crossroads of video, music,
and poetry. We are involved in rethinking the fundamentals of contemporary
mime: Our work is cross-disciplinary. Everything I experience influences my
work. I have brought together a group of artists who have purposefully moved
away from traditional pantomime. One of “No-mime”’s objectives is to do away
once and for all with the clichéd idea that mime is only about imitation. A
certain vision of art must be done away with in mime—the way it happened in
painting, for example. I am doing away with the superficial body and replacing
it with a body that resounds with organic interior beats/pulsations.
My
performances, and their dramaturgy, are never illustrative. When I interpret a
performance, my body undergoes a change that gives it access to these vital,
passionate, violent, torn pulsations, which establish a rhythm to our
relationship with the world. That body goes beyond thought: in a way, thought
only watches the body from a distance—the interior sense of touch. Seeing
always mean seeing from a distance and seeing the distance itself—the interior
sense of touch, which replaces vision, puts the body in contact with itself and
transcends the distance of thought.
I have great
respect for Marcel Marceau, but I constantly push myself to go beyond his work.
To me that is the greatest way to pay homage to him. He opened the way and
popularized the art of mime, and he did it poetically. But art has changed, and
poetry has as well, and in order to be relevant to the world today and to
dialogue with it, the art of mime must also reinvent itself.
C.A.: What is your next important
performance and what will be its major themes?
V.Z.:I presented “Mater Replik” in New
York, which deals with exile and the inner echoes/trauma that it produces,
followed by “With One’s Head Down,” based on a novel by Noelle Châtelet, which
deals a man who is born a hermaphrodite, another sort of violent shock. And
last year in collaboration with the contemporary composer Vincent Trollet
and Ensemble Regards I created “Oblique,” the first part in a
triptych. Oblique Cycle 1, subtitled “Strange Attractor” is
currently on tour, and my company is going to perform soon in Spain and
throughout Europe and Russia. I also created Oblique Cycle 2 which
will be presented in 2019. This piece will mix contemporary mime, music, video
and poetry, all world premiere/new works. Its major themes revolve around
identity and the body’s ambivalence: on stage forces seem to dictate to the
performer how to walk and move. These forces include morality, propriety,
aesthetics, the family, etc. But interestingly enough the road that our
movements take is never the one we expected. Even under constraint the body
always deviates from its assigned trajectory. I would say that compared to
morality and aesthetics for example–which are external demands, “it never
works”, “it’s never perfect.” Well I think it’s because the body screams
through these minute deviations that I make visible throughout the performance.
The body cries out that it wants to be free, it never corresponds to an ideal.
C.A.: What would you like the reader to
know about you, your art, or your performances?
V.Z.: I want to make readers and audiences
alike understand that mime is a necessary art in a noisy and talkative world.
The mime’s silence doesn’t say “nothing”: it is instead a contrast with the
endless noise in a world that doesn’t know what to say. It’s the mime’s silence
that makes speech important again.
C.A.: Finally, is there an Armenian
context for your art?
V.Z.: My entire story tells the story of
my country, my land is always a part of me. the more lands one has, the more
food one has which feeds one’s development. And one learns what it means to go
away, to leave, and to return. It’s a passionate love story: by that I mean
“corporeal, without thought, real and immediate.” “Mater Replik” tells this
story in fact, that your homeland follows you wherever you go and how it can
give you strong roots, or on the other hand weight you down. At the same time
the traditional arts. which are closer to my origins, paradoxically bring me
closer to my contemporary creations. There is something organic in them. Also
in my works, the contemporary is always accompanied by references to tradition
as well. These roots are like the roots of a tree that are deeply ingrained,
except they point towards the sky…
