Le Théâtre des Sciences
Le Théâtre des Sciences
Michel Valmer
Since their origins in ancient Greece, theatre and science have maintained complex, passionate and fertile ties. William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Molière, Cyrano de Bergerac, Diderot, August Strindberg, Sacha Guitry, Jules Romains, Bertolt Brecht, Edward Bond, Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carrière or Bob Wilson, to name but a few, bear witness to this phenomenon.
Combining theoretical reflections and field experience, Michel Valmer seeks in this work to describe the effects produced by science on theatrical art when it evokes science, outside of any reductive popularisation. After having identified the constitutive principles and figures regularly at work in scientific theatre — the duo of the Madman and the Scientist, the theatre-machine or the actor-object… — and having revealed a specific type of distancing (reflexive emotion) or even a particular status of true and false, he analyses three stagings of texts by Strindberg, Kleberg and Gatti and interviews contemporary theatre practitioners (Benedetto, Bourdet, Gatti, Jourdheuil, Nichet, Paquet, Peyret, Régy, Sivadier, etc.) who included science in their work.
In doing so, he shows that the science/theatre encounter leads scientific theatre to adopt production rules that force theatre to question itself, more generally, about its future, its aesthetics and its dramaturgy.
Available
2005
2-271-06379-5
Study
CNRS Editions
Michel Valmer is the director of the Science 89 theatre company, based in the French city of Nantes.
The author of several articles on the relationship between theatre and science, in 2002 he defended his doctoral thesis “Le théâtre de sciences vu de la scène” at the University of Burgundy.