Austerlitz

The show takes its title from the book of the same name by German author W. G. Sebald. However, we won't be following the main character's investigation - whose name is Jacques Austerlitz - into a past of which he knows nothing, but the shape of his wandering: that of his failing memory, the scattered pieces of which are painstakingly pieced back together, by accidents and slippages, and which Sebald unfolds into a strange jigsaw puzzle, studded with black-and-white photographs. The oblique wandering of Austerlitz, made up of digressions and obscure associations, is here that of the seven people on stage: a kind of collective autobiographical project studded with archival images (personal and general), linking filmmaker Agnès Varda to American post-modern dance, art historian Aby Warburg to the serpentine dances of dancer Loïe Fuller, choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky to psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, colonization to amnesia, the Second World War to German punk, and so on. - The story (written and recorded in voice-over by Gaëlle Bourges) is punctuated by songs composed for the occasion.

Directed by Claire Ananos