Solely directed by Fabrice Michel, on stage along with French actress Julie Garance, the stage show Odysseia is an attempt to travel to the heart of the flesh of D’Agata’s work by using his own words. There will only be three shows of Odysseia in Hong Kong on 8, 9 and 10 May 2018.
Odysseia is an associated project of Le French May 2018.  
 

Text: Antoine D'Agata
Adaptation and direction: Fabrice Michel
Performance: Julie Garance, Fabrice Michel
Duration: 55 minutes

​

Director’s note

 

Antoine d’Agata is a legendary photograph. He writes too, and his words are, in my eyes, a magnificent complement to his images, illuminating differently the universes and extreme situations that he has crossed. As a drama director and writer, his texts inspired me for decades.

 

I am extremely happy with the opportunity to work directly this dense and instinctive literary material, thanks to the invitation of CHARBON as part of the exhibition CONTAMINATION.

 

It is a sensitive and auditory experience to which I propose the audience to participate : a work with two voices (a man and a woman) to enter as deep as possible in the lightning, the perdition, the lucidity of the thought of the artist. A choral work thus opening on a field of possibilities and combinations echoing his visual work.

 

I worked the language as close as possible to the raw meaning, the absolute  thought, in a speech perverted by the drugs and the limit experiments, to show the deep and radical quest of THE OTHER, which is the true fuel of the work of Antoine d’Agata. 

 

With Odysseia, I want to let d’Agata’s infinite and desperate song of love explode.                                                           Fabrice Michel, Paris, April 2018

​

Extracts

 

"... the civilized world ignores the tragic beauty of passion, he dies in resignation ..."

 

 

"... the abject promiscuity is the only outlet for the alienation of the bodies and minds generated by capitalism to engulf the energy of man in the work, and to make a docile subject of his castrated body …."

 

"... under the make-up of girls, on the oozing walls of hotel rooms, in the thick air of dark corners, the asphyxiated spirit plunges into an exacerbated reality; under the influence, damaged and worn out  bodies abandon themselves to the fatality of debauchery, let themselves be devastated by the desire that preys them; the flesh, tainted and painted, touched by the grace of abjection, opens and drains through gaping wounds, tearing penetrations, aphrodisiac discharges and nervous excrescences …"