Thierry has been blind for almost forty years. As an amateur actor, he reconstructs the memory of a show that shook him up but for which he remembers neither the title nor the names of the characters. A captivating theatre experience about perception, memory and self-construction.
To write this play, which questions the place of images in our perception of reality, Lorraine de Sagazan, fellow at Villa Medici, and the author Guillaume Poix collected testimonies from blind or visually impaired people with the aim of testing their relationship with memory and fiction. Starting out as an investigation into perception, La Vie invisible turns into a disturbing meditation on the notion of point of view, supported by the experience of a blind person.
This play has already been performed many times on the French stage. For its Italian premiere, it invites spectators to a sensory and visual experience in the Grand Salon of the Villa Medici, introducing the audience to the mysterious and singular condition of so-called blind people.
Lorraine de Sagazan
In parallel to her training as an actress, Lorraine de Sagazan studied philosophy. In order to train for staging, she moved to Berlin in 2014 to assist Thomas Ostermeier. Upon her return, she worked on adaptations of repertoire texts: Demons by Lars Noren, Puphejmo by Henrik Ibsen and L’Absence de père by Anton Tchekhov presented at the Nuits de Fourvière, the Centquatre and the MC93.
In 2020, she began a new cycle of work exploring the way in which fiction can respond to reality. This research gave rise to two first shows, La Vie invisible and Un sacre, created at the Théâtre de la Ville, Paris and at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe in Saint-Denis, where she is an associate artist. Her diverse projects, at the crossroads of performance, the performing arts and the visual arts, have been exported both abroad and throughout France.
Guillaume Poix
Guillaume Poix is a novelist, playwright and translator.
In 2014, he published his first play, Straight, winner of the National Aid for the Creation of Dramatic Texts from Artcena and the Prix des Journées de Lyon des Auteurs de Théâtre in 2014, Prix Godot des lycéens and Prix Sony Labou Tansi des lycéens in 2016. Et le ciel est par terre, Tout entière, Fondre and Soudain Romy Schneider (finalist for the Grand Prix de littérature dramatique 2020, broadcast on France Culture in September 2021 – Grand Prix de la Fiction radiophonique francophone de la Société des Gens de Lettres 2022) followed.
Since 2019, he has been collaborating with the director Lorraine de Sagazan. Together, they have created L’Absence de père based on Chekhov’s Platonov (2019), La vie invisible (2020, broadcast on France Culture in March 2021) and Un sacre (2021).
