Text Caroline Guiela Nguyen with the whole artistic team
Director Caroline Guiela Nguyen
Artistic collaborator Claire Calvi
Set designer Alice Duchange
Lighting designer Jérémie Papin
Costume designer Benjamin Moreau
Sound and music designer Antoine Richard
Composer Teddy Gauliat-Pitois
Dramaturgy and surtitles Jérémie Scheidler and Manon Worms
Translators (Vietnamese/French) Duc Duy Nguyen, Thi Thanh Thu Tô
Cast Dan Artus, Adeline Guillot, Thi Trúc Ly Huynh, Hoàng Son Lê, Maud Le Grevellec, Phú Hau Nguyen My Chau Nguyen thi, Pierric Plathier, Thi Thanh Thu Tô, Anh Tran Nghia, Hiep Tran Nghia
Production Les Hommes Approximatifs
Executive Producers La Comédie de Valence, CDN Drôme-Ardèche
Co-producers Odéon théâtre de l’Europe, MC2: Grenoble, Festival d’Avignon, CDN de Normandie-Rouen, Théâtre national de Strasbourg, Centre dramatique national de Tours – Théâtre Olympia, Comédie de Reims-CDN, Théâtre National de Bretagne - Centre européen théâtral et chorégraphique, Théâtre du Beauvaisis, Scène nationale del’Oise en préfiguration, Théâtre de La Croix Rousse-Lyon
Financially supported by Région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Conseil départemental de la Drôme, Institut français à Paris
Other sponsors Institut français du Vietnam, Université de Théâtre et de Cinéma de Hô Chi Minh-Ville and of La Chartreuse, Villeneuve lez Avignon – Centre national des écritures du spectacle
Duration 3 hrs 20 (with intermission)
Language French and Vietnamese (with Lithuanian and English surtitles)
Marie Antoinette is a vietnamese woman who came to France in 1954. She is working in Saigon, one of the 979 restaurants in France with the same name. Visitors come to Saigon to speak Vietnamese and mourn by singing love songs for all the broken relationship and lovers left behind. Sometimes Marie throws away her cooking apron, changes to her most elegant dress, picks up a microphone and starts singing nostalgic ballads in Vietnamese (sometimes French), accompanied by keyboard instruments. The workers and clients of Saigon are all either French, Vietnamese or Vietnamese-French. The restaurant's atmosphere is frozen somewhere between nowadays France and Saigon city in his fifties; people meet each other with a feeling of nostalgia.
This restaurant reflects many other restaurants in France where the visitors unintentionally get used to meeting each other, coming for a lunch, drink, dance or simply a sense of love – all these components help to celebrate their lives. These people are like all of us – today’s human beings marked by the constant changes and inevitable adaptation to them. SAIGON is a wounded edge, a restaurant which no longer exists, yet at the same time the place where visitors can find their shelter, combining their past with the ever-changing present.
The major challenge facing our company is to know which narratives to present in order to describe the world we live in. We wish to consider the capacity of theater to be porous to the issues that worry and traumatize us, those things that keep us awake or otherwise and, finally, that which consoles us. We consider that we have this responsibility more than ever in today’s world, as well as the duty to free our imaginations in order to represent the world as it affects us in all its reality and mystery.
Les Hommes Approximatifs
CAROLINE GUIELA NGUYEN
After studying sociology and performing arts, Caroline Guiela Nguyen enrolled in the school of the Théâtre national de Strasbourg to study direction in 2005. She founded the company Les Hommes Approximatifs in 2009 who nowadays brings together Caroline Guiela Nguyen (artistic director), Claire Calvi (artistic collaborator), Alice Duchange (scenographer), Juliette Kramer (manager), Benjamin Moreau (costume designer), Jérémie Papin (lighting design), Antoine Richard (sound designer) Jérémie Scheidler and Manon Worms (dramaturges). After several performances of classical texts, they began to work with their own original plays, which focus on those who don't often get to be seen on stage. In these stories, the voices of forgotten people come out. Since then, they've never stopped populating the stage with the world around them.
This performance is a part of SIRENOS festival
arts printing house | black hall
tickets: 27,64 EUR | tickets at the box offices of TIKETA (buy online here)
