"Journey, story of life. Stéphanie Lupo seeks life, life in its inaugural power, before it is mishandled, betrayed, until being broken by these remarks of reality -(...) Marked by Anatoli Vassiliev during his studies at the Ensatt in Lyon at the time when he was head of the directing section, Stéphanie Lupo was close to him as an actress. But upon leaving her studies (twelve years in total, she was also an academic), she broke away from the world of school and wrote (a lot). Traveled. Outside of the marked circuits for public nursery plants, she invented her own path.

 

Solitary and yet, carrying a utopia, that of bringing together a group of artists met over the years... This paradox between singularity of character and aspiration for community makes up the explosive dialectic of Stéphanie Lupo's thought. Lonely. Fundamental for her to experience the set, to be herself on stage. She said it again during the meeting organized by ZOA at the Lodge on October 4 on performance. If she started with the words of Duras which she playedHiroshima my love in several variations including one at Bellone (Brussels) - since she seeks a place of interior truth, which with the events of life and the movement of her thought evolves -, if she went through those of Chekhov (The story of a stranger, L’Atalante for the ENSATT school outing), she today affirms the need to use her own words. Devoid of means, and almost without support, solely guided and carried by her desire, by an imagination of theater and a thought of theater as art, she persisted and createdI want to talk about youth who fell for the GRü (TRANS, in Geneva, then led by Maya Bösch and Michèle Pralong) in February 2011. ThenSunBlood at the CNES Sidération festival last March. ResumingI want to talk about youth which falls, it presents a performance significantly different and augmented in particular from the images of previous performances, which makes it a creation. The first textual corpus is only a final part of twenty minutes when the rest of the performance synthesizes his thoughts from other texts: some written before likeThe naked act (reflection on the act of actor) and others afterwards such as that relating to his meeting in Poland with young theater artists and his research on the theatrical community. (...) Alternating moments at the table where she reads more reflective texts (always incredibly poetic) nourished by quotes from artists (Nietszche, Debord, Tarkovsky, Bataille, Julien Beck…) and those where she creates an image by performing a stage act, Stéphanie Lupo creates a space between real life and art. How the two communicate (or not). His own sensitivity, his dazzling inner truth, proving a possible passage, a link: which does not give in to the world (and does not hide by swallowing its revolt). Which gives his presence on the set, his voice, a penetrating force. Criticism of cultural society. Stéphanie Lupo comes up against an observation, that of a world of culture as disoriented and toxic as the rest. (...)

 

Quoting Tarkovsky, Stéphanie Lupo recalls that art must enlarge desire, maintain the sacred fire. To excite a disposition towards life (and to transmit the critical ferments necessary to struggle with Eros and Thanatos) and not the other way around. (...)  Beings of desire. The enemy, Niezsche said, is resentment against life. It is against this resentment that Stéphanie Lupo lives, writes, thinks and imagines theater. (...) Of our secret, solitary struggles. Stéphanie Lupo stages a thought, and a movement, through these alternations of moments at the table and those where she enters another state, of pure life. Moments of solitude dedicated to thinking (to stay in the movement, because thinking is walking from thought to thought to resist petrification), and those where she seizes the stage to perform an act. With body paint, water, fire, earth; with his nudity; especially with his internal fever; with punk music (the Cure for example); with videos (of Julian Beck, of Ginsberg, of an extract from Zabriskie Point, the end of this film by Antonioni (1970) where the latter blows up not the earth but a bourgeois house on the hills of LA, and this filmed through the eyes of the heroine, a woman therefore); with clothes that speak of the woman she is and the joyful fantasies of seduction. Unforgettable moment where naked, she dances with a scarf (...) the emotion she summons is that of a sovereign feminine amorous joy. (...) The woman, as if confused, delighted. A source within her resurfaces, it is childhood that returns, the very origin of desire. Stéphanie Lupo can do that, go through that again on stage to remind us what a happy woman is. Its energy, the extreme opposite of resentment against life. And yet, desire in its essence is not social, not progressive, it is elsewhere. Creator, utopian. The smile, the others. Stéphanie Lupo creates a space in which she is not the center. She leaves the center empty. This is the place of our projections; it is not her, her ego, her narcissism that would come into play. It is only the vector of a thought larger than itself and in which many can find themselves. (...) To dream of a community, to dream of desire, to dream of theater even when we know that everything is impossible, is to live in spite of everything, against all odds. It’s not giving up, going all the way. Stéphanie Lupo is driven by this awareness."

 

Excerpt from an article by Mari-Mai Corbel, after the performance piece “I want to talk about falling youth”