The place.

The sum of the areas of the place/space with a common identity.

The environment which is inextricably linked to the idea of distance in three dimensions. 

A place through which people, seasons and time pass.

 

Time.

The undefined motion of existence and events of the past, the present and the future, considered as one. Time and space, when united by the presence of one or more people, create memories.

 

The memory.

The place in which they are collected, stored and from which information is consciously and subconsciously obtained. Images, emotions, notions, aromas, sounds and flavours.

There is only one place. Timeless. Fleeting. Timeless.

A gas pump and a few cafeteria chairs. Once as pretty as they are now abandoned.

This is a place where two girls will meet and later a boy, a little before the coming of age, a little after adolescence. This is the place in which they shall meet and this is the place which shall define their evolution.  

 

It probably doesn’t matter whether Irip or Violet should come here, or perhaps someone else. Time rolls on without giving us much thought. Such places exist. They exist in Pikermi, in the South of France, in an abandoned amusement park with a wild west theme.  In romantic movies in provincial America of the 90s, there in the background,  in the wheat fields, there is always some evidence that life was once there.  In bars and cafes which line the motorway of any old place. In Coen brothers movies , in which the hero always goes into a decadent café to buy cigarettes – rarely to stay, in Wim Wenders’ Paris,Texas. Tarantino’s second heroes always have such a hangout, Pierrot le Fou passes by such places and most likely eyes them with optimism… As in Waiting for Godot, the heroes await the savior or the great Other, and so here as well the heroes and even the place itself, are waiting. As two people will listen to one side of a disc for ten minutes and then change sides with reverence and continue to listen. As in a meeting between strangers in a local bar, where both are ready to admit that the evening is pointless, yet nobody makes a move to leave.

 

Escape is mentioned thousands of times and yet someone will always be ready to reject it. Basically, in order to escape, there must be some other place, a place in where you would really want to be. The coast seems like a trip to the moon. Some people have been, everybody knows about it. Paradise is always somewhere else.

Words lose their meaning when the atmosphere presides over them.

A road movie which was abruptly interrupted. The camera froze and the image is visible but doesn’t move.

 

Burn Baby Burn: Here is a contemporary French work which, even judging by the title, is striving to appear less “French” than expected. And so the actress Carine Lacroix (born 1974), the author of the work, suggests at a bizarre blend of narration and action, artistic mood and harsh realism which reminds us of a road movie. A peculiar and theatrical Thelma and Louise, which substitutes the racing speed of the cinema, the incessant chop and change of scene, the crazy pace of the trip for a poetic glorification of escape – which is channeled as much into the plot as it is into the almost independent textual composition of the scenic guides which articulate it. 

 

Here everything is static, nothing moves. We are not in motion, we are in quite the opposite, in stasis. “A derelict gas station / rusted sign-posts, cracked walls, weeds everywhere / Forgotten amongst endless corn fields, on a road which no one follows / Chains, intertwined, melt upon the asphalt”.  It is from this scene of inertia and abandonment, which does nothing but project the inertia and abandonment in each of  their lives, from which these adolescents wish to escape. However initially insensitive and hostile to one another, their chance meeting will offer them the opportunity to share their loneliness, their anger, their sadness at a life that is drowning them and will add fuel and fire to their fantasies of escape.

Up until the moment where reality rears its ugly head in the form of an unsuspecting young man, “a lively soul, warm and sure of himself” whose arrival shall spawn panic. Without wanting to, his very existence accentuates even more harshly the “void of love”. Now escape becomes a necessity rather than a fantasy. Now the two heroines are literally at the edge of the cliff and their only hope lies in one another.

 

A truly fascinating example of contemporary dramaturgical exploration – thanks to scenes composed of poetic language as well as lively, hilarious dialogue – which is sure to capture the Greek scene, as it did that of Europe, provided the direction maintains a distance from the stereotypical elements of the plot.

 

Carine Lacroix states that her life began when she was 10 years old, when her parents decided to abandon Paris for a year away from the routine, to travel across Europe in a caravan. In order to replace traditional schooling she would write, play outdoors, invent languages, visit archaeological sites and sleep outdoors. This was her defining year and greatly influenced her interests as concerned literature, travel and her innermost desires. After a decade in acting, she now dedicates all her time to writing; mostly plays. Burn Baby Burn is staged for the first time at the Comédie Française, the Deutsches Theatre of Berlin, in Prague and in Munich. It has been translated into many languages and obtained the Beaumarchais-SACD scholarship, the Days of the Writers’ Award, in Lyon. The play Le Torticolis de la girafe is being staged at the Rond-Point Theatre. She also writes for radio stations such as France culture and France Inter.  Since 2010 she has organized, along with Moreau (Frédéric Mauvignier’s pseudonym), readings in a bar, in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, called the Train de vie, inviting different writers once a month. Her last publication:  the play Une fille sans personne to be staged at the Avant-scéne theatre.

 

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