MY FLOORBOARDS

 

MY FLOORBOARDS  is a musical performance for an actor and a modular synthesizer. It’s based on the well-known piece of outsider art “Le Plancher de Jeannot”.

 

Jeannot le Béarnais was a farmer with a tragic story. Physically abused by his father, who went on to commit suicide in 1959, he slowly unraveled while living in his family home. Some people said Jeannot became acting weirdly after a very painful break up. The first sign of trouble was when he fired some shots into his neighbors' house on the command of unseen voices. Following this incident, the man refused to leave home. After his mother died in 1971, le Béarnais insisted she would be buried beneath the stairs, and moved his bed to the dining room to be closer to her. At this point, he began etching messages into the wooden floorboards. His cryptic screeds referenced a vast church conspiracy including Hitler, the Popes and technology. The crudely written manifesto was a window into le Béarnais' schizophrenia and intimate obsessions.

 

The work was discovered after his death in 1993, and the floor was removed from the home to be preserved. For a time it traveled around various art exhibitions as an unvarnished work of accidental art, before finally finding a permanent home outside of the Saint Anne Psychiatric Hospital in Paris.

 

This play is not a dramatization of Jeannot’s text, but an attempt to replicate his deliriums and peculiar dynamics by creating an original theatrical experience. In PATCHES (my floorboards), the main character (He Pierrot) can also be seen as a madman or as a disillusioned comedian. He’s talking to us and giving us a glimpse of his world. In a me against the world perspective, he’s trying to recollect and reconnect the missing pieces of his broken mind, but the lines are blurred and reality is flickering.

 

We will listen to him, though, because he want us to do so, let us no other choices but to watch him: he’s deeply involved into what he’s doing, he knows some poems by heart and he’s got a lovely singing voice (his grandma told him so). In front of the audience, he plays, acts, performs and manipulates his strange synthesizers whose connections define a proper space and bounds between a man and a machine.

 

It could be seen as paradoxical: a man in his room, a short glimpse of one’s intimacy exposed to the public eye, but it’s nothing more than a real contemporary paradox. I mean technology and especially social Medias such as Instagram or Twitter gave us tools to depict our torn egos and to promote our skills.

 

We live in a world where fictions are everywhere (that’s what they call “storytelling”, don’t they ?) ; Pierrot’s room, even if it’s messy, strange and noisy, is nothing more than a today’s room. But there’s no pale lit screen, but just a body in motion, a fragile human being, a misfit trying to become a machine to cure his pains, because machines don’t feel.

 

So he’s a kind of extremist geek, a maniac and a technology maniac, a prophet speaking in codes, a message and a messenger. Technological issues are here dealt with the dramaturgy itself and the machine is neither an incidental artifact nor as a simple contemporary gimmick: it’s a key to understand the whole performance.