Jean Cocteau is a difficult personality to grasp, hardly fully comprehensible, whose dilettantism, in different artistic fields, poured out like fragments of a particularly dense poetic world - incomplete, unrefined, rushed, reminiscent of nobody, like nothing at all.
He was a playwright, a poet, a painter, a draughtsman, a prose writer, a graphic designer, a music manager, a boxing manager, an opium addict, a brawler with André Breton, but a good friend of Igor Stravinsky, Marcel Proust, Nobel Prize winner André Gide, Pablo Picasso or Erik Satie.
The suicide of his father, the influence of Catholicism and Surrealism, the parallels between boxing and ballet, his opium addiction, his journey around the world, his hobby of playing the piano, his friendships with the most extraordinary artists of the time and his work, his poetry, his drama, his prose, his cinema, his theatre, his circus, his music and everything else are the main themes in Cocteau's life, which become the main focus of an audio-visual intermedia narration that is developed on a laboratory scale.
The work freely improvises on motifs from Jean Cocteau's graphic and artistic works, poems, the novel Opium, the play The Human Voice, and the films The Poet's Blood and Orpheus' Testament, as well as his biography.
"The material of the performance becomes Cocteau himself, conceiving of him as an interdisciplinary artist, and more so, a montage of different media and disciplines. By dividing these disciplines (cinema, surrealist objects, music, literature, fashion, etc.) and giving them to each of the members of the creative team, we aimed to break this montage back down into separate media and reassemble it into intermedial numbers that are harder to recognise in smaller details and easier to recognise in larger details. The team and I looked for indirect connections, parallels, poetic paradoxes that would establish a symbolic kinship between themes, images and symbols that have nothing in common outside the work. We did this by using media art, animation, dramatic acting, mechanised set design, puppet and object theatre, sound space and other contemporary theatre tools," - Žilvinas Vingelis, director and playwright of the play.
Important information:
Accessible for people with reduced mobility;
Not suitable for the hearing impaired;
No late arrivals will be admitted once the event has started;
If you have purchased a discounted ticket, you will be required to present your pupil/student/pensioner/disabled person's certificate at the entrance to the control desk along with the ticket;
Photographing and filming will be carried out at the event.