French theatre director Aurélien Bory, celebrated for his boundary-breaking productions, speaks to Jasper Rees about his beautiful and powerful portrayal of a woman in pursuit of her dream.
Every January, the London International Mime Festival reveals fresh extravaganzas from the world of visual theatre. Offering an intoxicating mixture of the beautiful and the strange, the wondrous and the baffling, the festival has for several years brought to these shores the work of Aurélien Bory and his Toulouse-based troupe Compagnie 111.
Past shows have included More or Less Infinity (2005) and Plan B (2013), both deploying mostly French performers to meld the playful grammar of circus with theatre’s commitment to a meaningful story. Perhaps his most remarkable work was seen at the Barbican in 2009. Les Sept Planches de la Ruse was a mesmerising ballet featuring a group of Chinese performers wielding a series of geometrical shapes.
The result is What’s Become of You? – a portrait of a woman who has given her life to a dance form. ‘I wanted to escape from all the clichés of flamenco,’ Bory explains, ‘and to do something more specific with this woman. How is it possible that a French girl based in Toulouse studying to be a lawyer suddenly starts to enter deeply into the flamenco world and finally to become a great dancer?’ As ever with Bory, he has given his performer a tricky environment in which to work. Fuster’s blood-red dress has a mind of its own, while the set is a physically constricting box that the audience observes as if through a window. She also has water to contend with.
The three acts – a structure Bory has favoured before – mimic the narrative of birth, life and death. Bory chose the confrontational title – which in French is Questcequetudeviens? – as an allusion to the question Fuster asked herself on deciding to stop her studies completely and commit to flamenco: ‘Why am I doing this?’
But perhaps it also encompasses the self-examination underpinning all art, and possibly even life itself. Although physical theatre is akin to abstract art in the way it permits limitless interpretation, Bory hopes that audiences may see their own story reflected back at them in the portrait of a woman in passionate pursuit of an elusive goal. One woman who saw What’s Become of You? in Paris certainly thought as much. ‘She came to me and said, ‘I just wanted to tell you that this woman is me.’ I was very pleased,’ says Bory, ‘because that’s exactly [the way] I think about theatre.’
Originally published in the January 2014 Guide.
What’s Become of You? (Questcequetudeviens?) will be in the Theatre, 30 January–1 February 2014 as part of the London International Mime Festival.
