World premiere july 11, 12, 13, 15 and 16 - Festival d'Avignon
Artistic direction and performance: Steven Cohen
Dramaturgy: Agathe Berman
Technical direction and lighting creation: Erik Houllier
Animal trainer: Guy Demazure
Costumes and props: Steven Cohen
Video assistant: Anthony Merlaud
Production Director: Maria-Carmela Mini
Production assistant: Sarah Demailly
Production: Latitudes Prod – Lille
Coproduction: Avignon Festival, BIT Teatergarasjen, Bergen, Latitudes Contemporaines (Lille), NEXT Festival, Eurometropolis Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai-Valenciennes [FR/B], La Bâtie, Geneva Festival, Bonlieu, scène nationale (Annecy)
With support from: the city of Lille and the programme Lille City of the Arts of the Future, the DRAC Nord-Pas de Calais, the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, the Institut français and the Transdigital Project (FEDER/Interreg IV France-Wallonie-Vlaanderen) and of lille3000 Fantastic
We are invited to join Steven Cohen underneath the stage of the Cour d’honneur of the famous Palais des papes. This is a secret space, normally hidden from the audience, an area steeped in memory and bits of fiction. A space outside the theatre and the traditional performance framework. Because what happens in the performance installation of Steven Cohen is pitched somewhere between testimony, investigation and poetic ramblings.
Costumes, videos, phosphorescent lighting and rats are the signposts for a venue voluntarily not situated in a particular time or on a particular continent, on the very edge of History and the imagination. There is however one essential thread: the discovery by the artist of a diary, filled with writing and sketches, written betwen 1939 and 1942 by a young Frenchman, a Jew. How does this memoir become historical material, available for appropriation and transmission? How does a seventy-year old document circulate until the 21st century, crystalising our questions about the failings of humanity? How to make these notebooks into material for an artistic piece? The story of this young boy, whose trace we abruptly lose in 1942, resonates with the life experience of Steven Cohen, a Jewish South African, white, gay, “oppressor and oppressed,” as he himself says. By multiplying his movements between found objects and his own subjectivity, between the Shoah and apartheid, the artist confronts facts and concepts: inside/ outside, intimacy/ history, private/ public, trust/ betrayal. Based on considerable work in documentation, Title Withheld (For Legal and Ethical Reasons) goes far beyond the memoir itself. The diary, whose discovery was the genesis of the project, cannot be reduced to the status of a mere archive: it flows through the years until it reaches us, moving and disturbing all those who learn of it today, through the delicacy and presence in the work of Steven Cohen. RB (Excerpt from the programme of the Avignon Festival)