Actors : Salvador Défendini Siré, Baptiste Uhl
This creation is based on and freely inspired by the documentary film Thun-Le-Paradis ou la balade d’Éloïse,directed by Éléonor Gilbert. This thirty-minute short film follows “Éloïse,” the fictional alter ego of Éléonor, during various train journeys. Through the passing landscapes and stations, including Thun-Le-Paradis station, the audience can hear the protagonist’s thoughts in a voice-over.
She allows herself to engage in introspection, sharing her doubts and fears, her feeling of being overwhelmed by the speed of the world and the omnipotence of technology, as well as her reflections on the relationship to oneself and to others, but also on love, and on the place of nature in our lives.
This combination of simplicity and universal thoughts deeply moved me. I recognized myself in it, as like many people, I sometimes experience moments of solitude in which such questions appear. The film immediately resonated with my own experiences and awakened in me the desire to translate this powerful, intimate, poetic, and visual work to a theater stage and share it with an audience.
My intention is not to reproduce the film identically, but to offer a stage adaptation that extends its poetic dimension. I wanted to give a body to Éloïse’s voice, to invite the audience to loose itselft in her reflections, and to create a dialogue between text and images. Therefore the performance allows a lot of interactions between spoken word and video projection, where the images carry have the same weight as the actors’ performance.
The film’s text has been largely preserved, but I chose to interpret it in my own way in order to create a stage adaptation incorporating video. That is why I decided to personally film, edit and display my own images.
In this way, the projected video, far from being a simple background, becomes a true performing entity, who sometimes extends and sometimes contradicts, what the actors are saying.
The main character is designed as a doubled figure: a young adult, played by Baptiste Uhl (26), shares the stage with his childhood self, portrayed by Salvador (12). Together, they carry a mutual text, a same train of thought, but each brings a different tone. At times it is the child who embodies naivety, at other times the adult. Sometimes the child reveals a surprising maturity, while the adult experiences more candid reflections. This constant switch enriches the narration and offers the audience multiple points of entry.