Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

Philippe Quesne is a French scenographer who has designed sets for various plays and operas. About 5 years ago he gathered about seven actors and a dog, and together they started making their own productions under the name Vivarium Studio, among which was D’Après Nature (2006) and L’Effet de Serge (2007). The company goes by a few remarkable rules: the same sets reappear in several plays, they always use a smoke machine and every piece begins with the image the previous play ended with.

According to Quesne, traditional text-based theatre does not succeed in questioning society as it should. He wants to develop a contemporary dramaturgy playfully, one that does revolve around dramatic conflict or intrigue, but takes man’s microcosm as a starting point. He constructs his story with elements that he borrows from reality: interview excerpts, articles, poems, song texts and word lists. He then proceeds to work in a scenic manner, with plenty of attention for the relationship between space, set and body, without a psychological elaboration of the characters.

In the witty performance La Mélancolie des Dragons we see six hard rockers driving around with a small mobile theme park in the trailer attached to their Citroën. On the way their car breaks down, leaving them stranded on a snowy road. Quesne takes this realistic everyday situation as a starting point. He doesn’t work towards a dramatic climax, but lets this amusing story develop slowly. As a result, you see a couple of absurd, yet poetic scenes that cleverly portray ordinary life. The main characters in the piece don’t build impressive attractions for their mobile theme park, but create something special out of the small things. This way, La Mélancolie des Dragons is also a criticism of modern consumerist society and the Disneyfication of a world in which everything revolves around massive events and show.
“Great theatre, guaranteed” (Klara).