The worlds of Laurent Gaudé

Born in 1972, Laurent Gaudé studied Lettres Modernes and Etudes Théâtrales in Paris. In 1997, he published his first play, Onysos le furieux, with Théâtre Ouvert. This first text was staged in 2000 at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, directed by Yannis Kokkos. This was followed by years devoted to writing for the stage, including Pluie de cendres, performed at the Comédie Française Studio, Combat de Possédés, translated and performed in Germany, Médée Kali, performed at the Théâtre du Rond-Point, Les Sacrifiées, premiered at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, Caillasses, premiered at the Théâtre du peuple in Bussang, and Danse, Morob, premiered in Dublin.

His first novel, Cris, was published in 2001. In 2002, La Mort du roi Tsongor won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens and the Prix des Libraires. In 2004, he won the Prix Goncourt for Le Soleil des Scorta, a novel translated in 34 countries.

Since 2008, he has worked regularly with contemporary composers for whom he writes texts or opera librettos: Roland Auzet (Mille Orphelins), Thierry Pécou (Les Sacrifiées), Kris Defoort (Daral Shaga), Thierry Escaich (Cris) and Michel Petrossian (Le Chant d’Archak).

He is also the author of two collections of short stories, Dans la nuit Mozambique and Les Oliviers du Négus, and books in collaboration with photographers: Oan Kim (Je suis le chien Pitié) and Gaël Turine (En bas la ville).

Since 2013, he has also been traveling (Port-au-Prince, Iraqi Kurdistan, the Calais jungle or Dhaka), which has given rise to reportages. From these experiences, he will also draw a first collection of poems, De sang et de lumière, published in 2017.

His tenth novel, Salina, les trois exils, was published in 2018, and the following year he published the long poem Nous l’Europe, banquet des peuples, which was adapted for the stage by Roland Auzet and premiered at the 2019 Avignon Festival.

In 2022, he was awarded the Prix des écrivains du Sud for his novel Chien 51.

With Terrasses, published in 2024, he returns to contemporary tragedy in a choral account of the Paris attacks of November 2015. The text was brought to the stage by Denis Marleau at the Théâtre de la Colline in Paris.

Laurent Gaudé, Mariette Navarro and Laura Vazquez have in common that they explore several forms of writing, and deploy their worlds through theater, narrative and poetry. With orality at the heart of their writing, all 3 of them like to make their works resonate and read in public. This exchange will be an opportunity to delve into their protean writings, to hear them sound, and to question the place that the breath and rhythm of words take in them.

Mariette Navarro

Isabella de Maddalena

Mariette Navarro was born in Lyon in 1980. Trained as a dramaturge at the Strasbourg National Theater School, she has worked since 2007 for numerous theaters, companies and reading committees. Since 2016, she has been co-director of the Grands Fonds collection at Editions Cheyne, where she is the author of two texts of poetic prose, Alors Carcasse (Prix Robert Walser 2012) and Les Chemins contraires. In theater, with Quartett , she has published Nous les vagues, Prodiges®, Les Feux de poitrine, Zone à Etendre, Les Hérétiques, Les Désordres imaginaires and Impeccable… Her first novel, Ultramarins, was published by Quidam in 2021 to great acclaim (Prix Senghor, Prix Frontières-Léonora Miano, Prix des Mémoires de la mer 2022, etc.). She has just published her 2nd novel, Palais de verre (Quidam éditeur).

Laura Vazquez

© Élise Blotière

Laura Vazquez is a poet and novelist. Her books are published by Editions du Sous-sol, Cheyne éditeur, Points, and various independent poetry publishers. In 2023, she was awarded the Prix Goncourt de la poésie for her body of work. In 2021, her novel La semaine perpétuelle received the special mention of the Prix Wepler and the Prix de la page 111. In 2014, she received the Prix de la Vocation for her book La main de la main.

His poems have been translated into Chinese, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, German, Romanian, Italian and Arabic.

A resident of the Villa Médicis in Rome for 2023, Laura Vazquez regularly gives public readings of her texts around the world: Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai (China), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Musée d’art contemporain de Genève (Switzerland), Norsk Litteraturfestival (Norway), Festival Voix Vives de Tolède (Spain), Amsterdam Perdu Art Center (Holland).

She regularly collaborates with artists such as Rebeka Warrior, Lorraine de Sagazan, Philippe Quesne, Sivan Eldar…

She also runs weekly online writing workshops.

She co-edits Muscle magazine with Roxana Hashemi.

Embark on an exceptional musical journey to the Orient of Alexander the Great!

To the sound of the Persian zarb and the Indian santour of the talented multi-instrumentalist Keyvan Chemirani, Laurent Gaudé offers us, on stage, the recital of an unpublished text, entitled “Un battement de cils et je meurs”. In it, the novelist depicts the figure of Alexander the Great and the epic last days of the famous conqueror’s march eastwards… Will he give up his dreams of the end of the world?

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Keyvan Chemirani

Stéphanie Moussay

Keyvan Chemirani grew up in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence region of France, steeped in oriental and Mediterranean music. His father and master Djamchid passed on traditional knowledge to him. Keyvan plays the zarb, the percussion instrument used in Persian art music, and the Indian santour, a struck string instrument.

Together with his father Djamchid and brother Bijan, he formed the Chemirani Trio in the late ’90s, which has performed all over the world. While drawing on Persian poetry, the Chemiranis compose and develop modern forms that emphasize polyrhythms and the multiplicity of sounds; the trio unveils to its audience the infinite possibilities of Persian percussion.

A curious musician, Keyvan has toured the world’s music, improvising with numerous artists, singers and instrumentalists: Breton Erik Marchand, Irish-Cretan Ross Daly, South Indian Ragunathan, Sephardic Françoise Atlan, flamenco composer Juan Carmona and his brother Bijan. These improvisations grasp the particular characters of the different traditions and reveal astonishing similarities, showing how Iranian percussion can approach the sound of the Indian tabla, how the Breton language sounds almost Mediterranean. His various musical encounters (flamenco, Ottoman, Greek, Arabo-Andalusian, Carnatic, jazz) have enabled him to grasp both the particular characteristics and the similarities of these different traditions.

Alfred and Laurent Gaudé have Italy in common. For the duration of a meeting, they take us to their respective literary Italian lands, taking us through contemporary history and perhaps back to the ancient period.

Alfred and Laurent Gaudé are also both passionate about Lebanon, and invite us to combine their words and strokes for a reading drawn along the Mediterranean.

Alfred

© Chloé Vollmer-Lo

Alfred was born into a family of artists. Years of fanzining and micro-publishing forged his character, before he began publishing with Éditions Delcourt in 1997. In 2007, he won the Fauve Essentiel and Prix du Public at Angoulême for Pourquoi j’ai tué Pierre (screenplay by Olivier KA). In 2008, he moved to Venice for three years, where he developed his illustration and theater poster work. At the same time, he increasingly explored live drawing on stage, embarking on several theatrical and drawing adventures with artists such as Brigitte Fontaine and JP Nataf. In 2010, with Lewis Trondheim, he founded the virtual Atelier Mastodonte, which appears weekly in Spirou.

In 2014, he received the Fauve d’Or for Come Prima at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Several exhibition and live performance projects follow. In the same year, and for the next three years, he worked with singer Etienne Daho on the making-off drawing for his latest album. In 2019, he is the guest of the Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image in Angoulême, which gives him carte blanche. The same year, he publishes Senso with Delcourt. Maltempo, the final opus in his Italian trilogy, is published in November 2023. Creation of the exhibition ENDROITS INCERTAINS at the Espace d’Art Contemporain Villeglé, in which he continues his “drawn harvest” of his own memories.

It follows part of Arthur H’s tour, through a backstage diary.

Salomé Kiner

Born in 1986, Salomé Kiner is a journalist, literary columnist and novelist. With a degree in literature and a diploma from the Centre de formation des journalistes (CFJ), she is interested in the notion of marginality. She co-authored 50 Summers of Music with Arnaud Robert (Textuel, 2017). Her first novel, Grande couronne (Christian Bourgois, 2021), portrays a teenager whose ebullient dreams collide with a modest lifestyle, and was shortlisted for the Prix Inter, Prix Stanislas, Prix Flore, Prix Envoyé par la Poste and awarded the Prix Zadig.

Published in August 2004, Le soleil des Scorta was awarded the Prix Goncourt in November of the same year, just 20 years ago. To mark the occasion, Laurent Gaudé and his 2 children read excerpts from this novel, which is intimately linked to their family history.

“The Scortas were born into disgrace because their lineage was founded on rape. In Montepuccio, their small village in southern Italy, they live in poverty, and won’t die rich. But they vowed to pass on, from generation to generation, the little that life would leave them as an inheritance. And apart from the family’s modest tobacco shop, created with what they call “New York money”, their wealth is as intangible as an experience, a memory, a piece of wisdom, a spark of joy. Or a secret. Like the one that the elderly Carmela – whose voice here is interwoven with the objective chronicle of events – confides to her contemporary, the former parish priest of Montepuccio, for fear that words will soon fail her.
A sunny, profoundly humanist novel, “Le soleil des Scorta” (The Sun of the Scortas) depicts, from 1870 to the present day, the existence of this Apulian family to which each generation, each individual, tries to bring, according to its own destiny, the pride of being a Scorta, and the revelation of happiness.”

Voices: Jean-Claude Acquaviva, François Aragni, Jean-Do Bianco, Petr’Antò Casta, Paul Giansily, Maxime Vuillamier

Orality, multiplicity of voices, forms and inspirations: to close these 2 days, Laurent Gaudé invites A Filetta, a Corsican vocal ensemble renowned for its polyphonic repertoire. For over 40 years, this vocal sextet has been criss-crossing the planet, going from encounter to encounter and building up repertoires that are widely disseminated.

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Armand Luciani

The repertoire produced by A Filetta today is a faithful reflection of its forward march since the early 80s: a trajectory outlining a movement initiated in a secular orality and asserting itself in the meanders of an uninhibited writing style freed from any filial obligation. These include sacred and secular songs of diverse influences, film music by Bruno Coulais, compositions for choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, excerpts from the chorus of an ancient tragedy, and pieces from a requiem commissioned by the Saint-Denis Festival.

A music at the service of a vision of the world that unambiguously rejects any identitarian withdrawal, and whose philosophy could be summed up in René Char’s beautiful aphorism: “The purest harvests are sown in a soil that does not exist; they eliminate gratitude and owe only to spring”.