With a fairground booth stuffed full of soft toy animals, two lecturers and an electric guitarist, Thierry Bédard creates a theatrical interpretation of the work of Liège-based philosopher Vinciane Despret, generating an ironic confrontation between the human and animal worlds in a carnival of eye-opening behaviours.
Picture a fairground booth transformed into a theatre stage, swamped by hundreds of soft toy puppets, two lecturers and an electric guitarist. This is the unlikely backdrop for Thierry Bédard’s latest theatrical creation, based on the work of philosopher and contemporary ethologist Vinciane Despret, who specialises in animal rights. In this study into the behaviour of animals and humans, soft toys and hilarious machinery representing chimpanzees, monkeys, sheep, wolves, parrots and crows soon overpower this lecturer in “emotional ecology” and her assistant. Long Live the Animals is funny, festive, ironic, skilfully educational, sharp and uplifting, thanks to the actors’ brilliant performances and the subtle humour of Vinciane Despret’s writing.
Director Thierry Bédard drew inspiration from the contemporary writings of Belgian philosopher and ethologist Vinciane Despret (from the Universities of Liège and Brussels) to create this fantasy fairground attraction in an unlikely booth inhabited by some one hundred soft toy animals. Long Live the Animals focuses on key philosophical questions (do animals suffer, do they experience fear, uncertainty, hesitation, doubt?), in the form of an academic lecture by a philosopher (Sabine Moindrot), with the fumbling help of her assistant (Julien Cussonneau) and an electric guitarist and singer (Jean Grillet).
This game of mirrors turns human and animal societies upside down, challenging our perception of intelligence, socialising and empathy, as chimpanzee, monkey, sheep, wolf, parrot and crow soft toys take over the stage while the actors quote anthropologist Deborah Rose, primatologist Thelma Rowell and biologist Bernd Heinrich. This new creation by the Notoire company is funny, off-the-wall, ironic and as sharp and subtle as Vinciane Despret’s writing. Its educational content and humour is found in the intense confrontation between humans, non-humans and animals.
Since 1989, actor and director Thierry Bedard has been working on “specifications” within the company Notoire, leading him to work primarily with contemporary authors, and present works (shows for the “general public”, research shows, performances and shows for children and teenagers) in the form of thematic series (Pathologies verbales, Minima Moralia, Argument du menteur, Bibliothèque Censurée, Eloge de l’analphabétisme, de l’étranger(s), Notoire la menace) featuring dozens of creations. He has also recently worked on Arts Improvisés (2012) with Camel Zekri, SoaZara (2014), a creation in Réunion, La Controverse with Marie Charlotte Biais (2016) and Les maîtres du monde according to Jean Ziegler (2016). He began working on Long Live the Animals (2017) after discovering the writings of university researcher Vinciane Despret.
Vinciane Despret was born in 1959 and is a researcher, philosopher and ethologist, and professor at the University of Liège and the Université libre de Bruxelles (Brussels). She has written around fifty works (essays, articles, lectures, various contributions) on animals, initially following on from the work of philosophers Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour. She is a free and rebellious spirit who continually works somewhere between the disciplines of philosophy, ethology and psychology, and has also studied the notion of “grief” in recent years.
With the support of : Bernard Aujogue, Espace et Cie, Franz Clochard, Mécanique Vivante.
With the artistic participation of l’ENSATT and the support of SPEDIDAM.
With the complicity of : Bernard Aujogue, Espace et Cie et Franz Clochard, Mécanique Vivante.