Cendres

After a remarkable appearance at the last Festival TransAmériques, the play Cendres, freely adapted from Terre et cendres, the famous novel by Atiq Rahimi, settles in at La Chapelle for one week. Its director, Jérémie Niel, is well known at La Chapelle; he has been its production director and assistant artistic director for several years. In addition, since 2008, his company Pétrus has benefited from a permanent residency within its walls. Abandoned by both men and gods, an old man continues forward, slowly and silently. Accompanied by his grandson, he sets out to tell his son, who works at the mine, that everyone in the village has died. Cendres tells the story of a quest that human beings create for themselves in an attempt to find meaning where it has become too scarce; one wandering among many others. Adapted by Jérémie Niel, the novel Terre et cendres by Afghan author Atiq Rahimi, winner of the 2008 Prix Goncourt, becomes on stage Cendres, a tragic and pure work that makes words resonate in the empty space of theatre and the world. For this production, Jérémie Niel collaborated with filmmaker Denis Côté, whose film Curling, currently in theatres, closed the Festival du nouveau cinéma last October, and whose film Carcasses was presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009. Together, they established an aesthetic dialogue between stage and screen that reveals the inner worlds—terrifying in their emptiness—of men lost upon an overly exposed landscape.