LA BALISE – J’ai pas fermé l’oeil de la nuit

"In the cellar of a sinister manor house, a mad doctor cuts open his dead wife's stomach to extract the palpitating, stunted foetus of the man who will become the Embalmer... Smile! It's a tale! Sordid, yes, but a tale all the same. Because Yannick Jaulin is a storyteller, whose destiny (in this case, a fatal one) is to delve into the murky depths of human memory and, at the same time, bring to light what he discovers there and put it on show, in the glare of the spotlights and the laughter of the audience.

Still, the storyteller is a little taken aback when he comes across such morbid things. A storyteller gifted with the power of speech, which now gives him the strange ability to be both there, on the road, with these inhabitants who are pulling their village behind them to take it towards a future of progress and happiness, and to watch them go by, with the eye of a wise man, or the eye of a madman, which he shares, in complicity, with the audience. Then he realises that the villagers have taken everything but their cemetery. A tightrope walker, balancing on the thread he has stretched between the world of the dead and that of the living, Yannick Jaulin becomes the ferryman.

Alone in the cemetery, he observes, listens and opens the graves. He tells of the chewers, the buried standing, those who left without having realised their dreams, those who were buried next to their worst enemies, those who didn't get their share of love, those who still have scores to settle, the widows, happy or inconsolable, the suicides and the executed, the hanged and the shot, the drowned and the murdered, the dead for their country, the dead for their ideas, the dead in exile, the victims, their executioners... He reconstructs the living past of the vanished village, turning the cemetery into a joyous pandemonium where the dearly departed meet up, reminisce, chat, laugh, say bad things about their neighbours, still desire each other, clash and take revenge. He laughs at death, turning our anxieties inside out like old socks, leaving us, at the end of the show, with nothing but a tremendous desire to live." - Bernard Prouteau

Running time: 1h30. Ages 9 and up
Price: €24, Reduced: €20, Youth: €10