Luca Giacomoni

« It all began on a day of violence. » Homer

Homer bequeathed us the two founding gestures of the Western imagination: a war and a journey. In a way, it is exactly what we do in the course of a lifetime: fighting to protect what is dear to us and overcoming a thousand obstacles in order to be able to say one day ‘this is my true homeland’. The opportunity to give stage form to this double movement arose when – in 2015, following the Charlie Hebdo attacks – the cultural director of the Meaux prison asked me to run a theater workshop on the roots of violence.

In a radical Islam prevention programme, I met men who embodied – in my eyes – the heroes and kings of Greek myth. The struggle for dignity and the wait for return suddenly took on a whole new dimension. Two years of work with a group of professional and non-professional actors, prisoners and ex-prisoners, gave birth to Iliad: a theatrical and human adventure that has since set a precedent in the French prison system.

ILIAD
Study on Iliad by Homer
Director / Luca Giacomoni
Translation / Paul Mazon, Françoise Brun
With / Armelle Abibou, Mourad Ait Ouhmad, Samir Ben Malek, Hugues Dangreaux, Laurent Evuort Orlandi, Christopher Firmin, Cyril Guei, Jean-Baptiste Guinchard, Séphora Haymann, Peter Hudson, Brontis Jodorowsky, Sid Ali Hanifi, Lévy Kasse Sampah, Moussa Konate, Eliott Lerner, Ali Marsaoui, Louis Plesse, Bryan Polach, Michel Quidu, Jamal Yatim, Kamel Zada
Singing / Sara Hamidi
Dramaturgy / Marta Fallani
Assistant Director / Giuseppina Comito
Lighting design / Sean Seago

Production Trama & Why Theatre / With the support of the DRAC Île-de-France / With the support of the Ministry of Culture and Communication, Ministry of Justice, Arcadi Île-de-France, SPEDIDAM, Mains d’Œuvres, Les Plateaux Sauvages / Coproductions Centre pénitentiaire de Meaux Chauconin-Neufmontiers, SPIP Seine-et-Marne, DISP de Paris, Théâtre Paris-Villette / With the support of Humanités, Digital et Numérique Foundation and Meyer Foundation for Cultural and Artistic Development.

Duration / 10 episodes of 1h

« He who has been shipwrecked trembles even in the face of calm waters. » Ovid

In 2018, a director friend invited me to propose a theater workshop at the Saint-Denis Women’s House: a shelter, in the Parisian suburbs, for women victims of violence. In order to familiarize myself with the place, I asked to take part in some speech groups: the first one was about excision and female genital mutilation. A sensitive and violent topic, so violent that we prefer to imagine it far away from us. On that day, for the first time, I had the opportunity to hear real people speak first-hand about these forms of torture.

In the group, there was talk of snakes being born in human guise, like children; women being turned into goats, punished for their disobedience. All the participants nodded in silence. These were not tales, allegories: it was their reality. Those people had lived in a world where magic still exists; where mutation is a rational, even necessary process. That encounter brought back my memory of Ovid and his Metamorphoses: the invisible lurking, transformation as the only possible horizon. And as an underlying plot, the constant subjugation of the feminine.

METAMORPHOSIS
Study on The Metamorphoses by Ovid
Directed by / Luca Giacomoni
Translation and dramaturgy / Sarah Di Bella
With / Diariatou Basse, Léna Dangreaux, Laëtitia Eïdo, Clémence Josseau, Hadassah Njengue, Sylvie Togba
Music and singing / Eugenie De Mey, Claire Trouilloud
Assistant Director / Giuseppina Comito
In collaboration with / Nadine Naous
Lighting design / Bartolo Filippone

Production Why Theatre / In partnership with La Maison des Femmes de Saint-Denis / With the support of City of Paris, Meyer Foundation for Cultural and Artistic Development, Humanités, Digital et Numérique Foundation, L’Accompagnatrice Foundation, Les Ailes Foundation, Berger-Levrault Foundation, Adami and Spedidam / With the support of the integration programme of the École du Théâtre National de Bretagne / Creative residencies at Studio Théâtre (Stains), Gare au Théâtre (Vitry) and Théâtre de la Tempête (Paris).

Duration : 1h

When I start a new creation, I first look for the right terrain: where do the Karamazov brothers, Woyzeck or Antigone live today? Who can understand – not abstractly, but through direct experience – the trajectory of Agamemnon or that of Ophelia? To stage Hamlet, I approached people with an experience that psychiatry defines as ‘psychotic’: hearing voices, split personality, perception disorders, memory loss. Since the invisible is the central ‘theme’ of the play – in a musical sense – I decided to work with a group open to this dimension.

This kind of work requires a long period of immersion, almost approaching ethnography. Our goal? To construct a dramaturgical score based on resonances and lines of tension between the medieval sources of Baroque theater and the memories – individual and collective – of the people on stage. Shakespeare says it clearly: theater exists to hold up a mirror to human nature, and to cast a glance at ourselves. In this sense, it is certainly a place of truth. One of the last, perhaps?

HAMLET
Study on Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Directed by / Luca Giacomoni
Translation / Jean-Michel Déprats Dramaturgy / Sarah Di Bella
With / Olivier Constant, Laure Darras, Valérie Dréville, Élodie Franques, Tarik Kariouh, Nathalie Morazin, Serge Nail, Vicente Olivier, Édouard Penaud, Fabrice Pesle, Louis Plesse, Quentin Vernede
Assistant directors / Paola Pelagalli, Leïla Blier
In collaboration with / Agnès Adam and Giuseppina Comito
Knife dance / Davide Monaco
Costumes / Cécile Laborda
Props / Jacopo Leone
Lighting design / Bartolo Filippone

Production Why Theatre / In partnership with the GHU Paris Psychiatry and Neurosciences / Co-production by Monfort Théâtre (Paris) and Festival d’Automne à Paris / With the support of Île-de-France Region, City of Paris, DRAC Île-de-France, Meyer Foundation for Cultural and Artistic Development, Fondation de France, Humanités, Digital et Numérique Foundation, L’Accompagnatrice Foundation / With the participation of the Jeune Théâtre National (Paris) / Creative residencies at Nouveau Gare au Théâtre (Vitry-sur-Seine), at Monfort Théâtre (Paris), at Le Préau, CDN de Normandie-Vire, at La Villette (Paris), at Carreau du Temple (Paris), at T2G – Théâtre de Gennevilliers CDN, at Ménagerie de Verre (Paris)

Duration : 2h15

Woyzeck, Hamlet, Iliad, Karamazov: these stories define the contours of the culture I was born into. They are like crystals of memory and – in my eyes – continue to tell what we are, what we could be. They are now deconsecrated cathedrals that only ask to be inhabited in a different way. Theater is my way of inhabiting these narratives, and bringing them to life – as Ovid writes – mutated within new bodies.

The directing choices align with this perspective: to bring Büchner’s text to life by rooting it in Clichy-sous-Bois, the Parisian suburb where the urban riots of 2005 broke out; to make the artistic team work with a group of voice hearers; to recount the life of  barracks and a military hospital through the metaphor of the world of boxing; and above all, to join seemingly remote points – humiliation and heresy, scapegoating and femicide – to allow other constellations of meaning emerge.

Michael Kohlhaas offers us a close look – as in a laboratory experiment – at the workings of the human being. How can an honest man, deeply motivated by a desire for justice, become – through a combination of external circumstances – the instigator of brutal actions? And how does he manage to align so many people with his cause? In Kleist’s world, the human being is an unstable, non-linear, unpredictable system. A balance built on the brink of chaos.

The famous expression ‘butterfly effect’ has instilled in our imagination the possibility that a small and seemingly insignificant flap of the wings can have devastating effects. In Kohlhaas, a series of actions leading to the destruction of a city is set in motion by the impudent gesture of a local lord, as arbitrary as a throw of the dice. The author invites us to ask: can a single action determine the future in an unpredictable way? And above all, how does a human feeling – according to a precise geometry of passions – turn into its opposite?

KOHLHAAS
Study on Michel Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist
Director / Luca Giacomoni
Translation / Georges La Flize
Dramaturgy / Sarah Di Bella
Assistant Director / Violaine Bougy
Costumes / Cécile Laborda
Lighting design / Bartolo Filippone
Production in progress

The most famous provocation of the 20th century – Gott ist tot, God is dead – has become an unequivocal statement: man has lost his horizon. Our sky is empty, and Dostoevsky described this withering process as few others have done. The difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of believing in the ‘good’ is the cancer diagnosed at all levels of the extraordinary architecture of The Brothers Karamazov. A diagnosis that sadly resonates with the ills of our time.

The stories I choose to tell are like enigmas, containing different forms of answers to a single question: what is a human being capable of? This question – which has guided my work for years – can be understood in two ways: what is our darker side capable of, and what is our brighter side capable of. “Capacity” also in a geometric sense: what is the volume of a human being? How much reality can it contain? Theater becomes a powerful measuring instrument, capable of bearing witness to the breadth of the human spectrum.

KARAMAZOV
Study on The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Director / Luca Giacomoni
Translation / André Markowicz
Dramaturgy / Sarah Di Bella
Assistant Director / Violaine Bougy
Costumes / Cécile Laborda
Lighting design / Bartolo Filippone
Production in progress