Fragile balance

after texts by Jean Genet and other writings in French literature

CAST:

one-man show with Mircea Silaghi

About

Premiere: January 26, 2023, Studio Hall
Duration: 45min.

12+ Rated

Fragile balance is a new version of the co-production made by the Târgoviste theater together with the François Jacob Company, 12 years ago (2011), and which enjoyed a real success in France. The initial editing was directed by François Jacob, head of the co-production company. The current version of the show bears the signature of the actor Mircea Silaghi and is dedicated to the memory of François Jacob, who disappeared from us too soon.

This version of the show is performed in three languages: Romanian, French and English.

Theatre, dance, acrobatics, reflections on the artist’s relationship with the world, the loneliness and ambivalence of the actor – here are just some of the themes proposed. The border between glory and anonymity, between appearance and reality, between the profane and the sacred, between life and death is as thin as the wire on which the acrobat dances, and walking on this fragile line involves as many risks as dancing on the wire.

The story of this show begins with the director, actor, leader of the François Jacob Company (which he also founded), François Jacob. He trained professionally in internships with some of the most important pioneers in the theater of the 20th century: Peter Brook and Yoshi Oida (1977), Jerzy Grotowski (1978) and Eugenio Barba (1980). He staged dozens of plays with plays by Strindberg, Ibsen, Molière, Lorca, Pirandello, Gogol, Chekhov, Beckett, Aristophanes, Brecht, Genet, Sophocles, Fassbinder, Peter Weiss, etc., made adaptations after Lautréamont, Trakl, Dostoevsky and staged texts by some of the great contemporary playwrights such as: Thomas Bernhard, Heiner Müller, Yannis Ritsos, Peter Turrini, Lars Noren, etc. Unfortunately, in 2020 he passed away, leaving the legacy of the Fragile Balance show in the hands of actor Mircea Silaghi.

This dramatic poem is, on the one hand, a declaration of love and, on the other hand, a subtle metaphor addressed to the world regarding the position of the artist in our society.
Through the delicate crossing of the arena, of life, the artist coming from nowhere and nowhere, dares to defy this embarrassing abyssal mystery.
“The work of art is a perfect crime”.
But the work of art and its executor, the artist, are, above all, a frantic search for the self. This search will be mostly marked throughout the text.
The actor’s game will follow the imaginary race with the steel wire as his only partner and will find the right balance between the realism of the text and the symbolic meaning.
To achieve this, he will avoid any simulation of the real, he will communicate this incurable loneliness of being as if it were the echo of the creative act itself. It will perform without causing a particular effect and, finally, it will make the act of creation resonate like a distant song, almost imperceptible to the one who will listen carefully.

Francois Jacob
Director