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REPUBLIC OF THE BEES

PRESS CONFERENCE with Céline Schaeffer,
July 19 at 11:00, cour du Cloître Saint-LouisPEDAGOGICAL FILE
Pièce (dé)montée produced by Canopé, available on festival-avignon.com
YOUNG AUDIENCE SHOWS
Young Yacou, Yakouba Konaté, July 13 to 17, Collège Joseph Vernet
CINEMATIC TERRITORIESJuly 6 to 22, cinéma Utopia-Manutention
VISITS FOR THE FAMILIES
July 7 to 22, departure place du Palais des papes
informations and booking at visitejeunesse@festival-avignon.com/ENFor Céline Schaeffer, the space that surrounds us is a world in and of itself,
at once matter and colour, image and sound, body and voice, near and fear.
It can transform, reconfigure itself, swell with air, or empty itself. Here, the stage
is a breathing “super-organism” she calls “the spirit of the beehive,” where
thousands of beings are in service of a collective intelligence. What is the secretof the bee, seen today as a look-out who can tell us much about the state of theworld as well as its organisation? To tackle this question, the director, who loves
art as much as she does nature, imagined a documentary tale, performedand danced, magic and mysterious. A show that plays with the sensations ofthe audience to better accompany them through the life of this hive which,from swarming to the founding of a new colony, revives the cycle of seasons
and reactivates our link to the very small in all its greatness.

YOUNG SPECTATOR’S GUIDE
available in all Festival venues

CÉLINE SCHAEFFER

TOUR DATES AFTER THE FESTIVAL

After training as a plastic artist, Céline Schaeffer created her first dramatic
installation, inspired by the work of Georges Perec. As an assistant director,
she worked with Claude Buchvald, then starting in 1999 with Valère Novarina,
in particular on L’Acte inconnu (The Unknown Act), created for the Festivald’Avignon in 2007. In 2012, for the Sujets à Vif of the Festival, she directed
Stanislas Roquette in Valère Novarina’s L’Inquiétude (Anxiety). Today, shecontinues her work at the intersection of theatre, language, and painting.

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October 6 to 8, 2019, Théâtre d’Aurillac
October 15 to 18, Théâtre Montansier, Versailles
October 22 and 23, Théâtre Maurice Novarina, Thonon-les-bains
November 13 and 14, Théâtre Forum Meyrin (Switzerland)
November 21 to 23, Le Grand Bleu, Lille
November 26 to 28, Le Grand R
Scène nationale de La Roche-sur-Yon
December 10 to 20, Théâtre Nouvelle Génération
Centre dramatique national de Lyon
January 10 and 11, 2020, Théâtre de l’Olivier, Istres
January 14 and 15, Thêatre Le Forum, Fréjus
January 19 to 21, Scène nationale du Sud-Aquitain, Bayonne
January 24 and 25, Théâtre national de Nice
January 29 and 30, Scènes Vosges, ÉpinalFebruary 2 and 3, Créa Festival Momix, Kingersheim
February 6 to 8, Centre dramatique national de Normandie-Rouen
March 1st and 2, Théâtre-Cinéma Paul Éluard, Choisy-le-Roi
March 12 and 13, La Méridienne Scène conventionnée de Lunéville
April 6 to 10, Théâtre Olympia Centre dramatique national de Tours73rd

EDITION

MAURICE MAETERLINCKA poet, playwright, and essayist, Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) saw theatre
as a place where the soul faces destiny, and symbolism as the poetic form thatwould allow us to understand the world by looking past appearances. He wasawarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work in 1911.
La Vie des abeilles by Maurice Maeterlinck,
published by Abeille et Castor, is on saleat the bookshop in the Maison Jean Vilar.

In order to bring you this edition, over 1,700
people, artists, technicians, and organisational
staff, have worked tireless and enthusiasticallyfor months. More than half of them arestate-subsidised freelance workers.

#FDA19FESTIVAL D’AVIGNON 73rd

JULY 16 17 18 | 20 21 22
CHAPELLE DES PÉNITENTS BLANCS

INTERVIEW WITH CÉLINE SCHAEFFERThis is the first time you’ve directed a show for children. Is there adifference? Why did you choose this text by Maeterlinck?
Céline Schaeffer : I didn’t try to create a show for children, but rather ashow for everyone aimed primarily at children. In 2005, I read Maurice
Maeterlinck’s work and discovered The Life of the Bee, written in 1901,
which tells the story of a year in the life of a beehive: swarming, nuptial
flight, creation of the wax city, etc. This text struck me because I found in it
the same focus on nature that exists in my relationship to art. I think of landartists like Wolfgang Laib whose interventions aim to show and reveal othervisible faces of nature. I also discovered the wonderful world of apiculture,
the life of a beehive. It made me want to learn more about the world of bees,
about what it says of the relationship between man and his environment.
Bees are like sentries, they tell us what’s going on in nature. For the past
couple years, it’s become a much more important subject in society at large;
it was the right time to talk about it. I started by bringing together a team towork on the light and the sound, and I tried to read The Life of the Bee while
thinking about the way the very idea of the beehive touches our senses,
our history. Maurice Maeterlinck’s writing is very metaphorical, not always
scientifically accurate, but it gave me the fantastic feeling of being a childagain who is told an incredible and mysterious story over a hundred million
years old. Poetry to talk about a beehive, that’s what I liked about the text.
I like this language full of wonder, beautiful and concrete. He doesn’t say
much about the relationship between the bees and flowers. Rather, hedescribes the ideal beehive, with many anthropomorphic figures. He createsa relationship of identification to society, even though it’s difficult to compare
the organisation of a beehive to that of humanity. I’m more interested in“the spirit of the beehive” and how it allows us to question the way we live
together and make decisions for the greater good in an environment that’s
constantly changing. How is all that organised and controlled? The Life ofthe Bee in a way is an attempt to discover the secret of nature, the secret oflife in nature.
You changed the title and replaced the word “Life” by “Republic.” How
did you adapt this text for the stage? How did you choose what tohighlight in what you call a documentary tale?
I started by selecting passages, sentences, and moments which I foundbeautiful and understandable by children. I also worked on other sources,
like those verses from book four of the Georgics in which Virgil talks aboutswarming: “So when the cage-escaped hosts you see/Float heavenward
through the hot clear air, until/You marvel at yon dusky cloud that spreads/
And lengthens on the wind, then mark them well…” I wrote the show inspiredby these different sources: by Maurice Maeterlinck and the people I’d met,
my experience, my readings, my research. I wanted to tell the story of thelife of bees over the course of a year of beekeeping, linked to the seasons,unspooling the thread of the story from spring to winter, thus creating a sortof loop reminiscent of nature’s cycle. When I read Jürgen Tautz’ The Buzz
about Bees, I realised I also needed to treat the hive as a whole, a superorganism. I chose the word “republic” because of the social dimension of
those insects. The hive is a single thing made up of many others. It’s a being
with its own way of working, its own balance. A super-organism made upof thousands of individuals inseparable from one another. Talking about arepublic allows me to talk about the life of the hive and its organisation as amirror to our society. The spirit of the beehive, the way in which all beings
within it are linked together, its collective intelligence, all echo a sort of idealrepublic. Ever since Antiquity, beehives were a subject of observation andreflection for intellectuals, researchers, and philosophers. Maybe because
the hive is a form of society which can adapt to problems and learn lessons
from them to find solutions and escape both climate-related threats andinvasions by dangerous Asian hornets. The link to the fairy tale, with its terror
and wonder, can be found in the life of the bees itself. That’s why I gave theplay the subtitle “a documentary tale.”
As a plastic artist, your writing always includes a reflection aboutspace. Can you tell us more about the relationship between the text
and the scenography?
This show is the result of an encounter with Maurice Maeterlinck, but alsowith the space of the hive, which is very rich and inspiring from an artistic
point of view. All my shows always begin with the scenography. I start withspace. I wonder how to represent it. When I look at a beehive, I see space
growing and decreasing. There’s what you can see and what’s hidden.
I began by drawing black-and-white sketches of the inside of the hive. Thencolour came to tell the story of the life of the bees within the hive. I thenasked myself questions about the scenography: how to figure the hive? Witha hexagon, with images, with sounds? I wanted the scenography to change
in front of the audience along with the story. With my team, I imagined fivepanels of different shapes and sizes: five very thin metallic structures whichallow us to play with transparency and with the movements of the performers
within them, but also to show the way a hive empties and fills by adjusting
the space. They also serve as support for the projection of lights, of images
which depict the inside of the hive, the seasons, the landscape, the wind,movement, noises, sounds… Sound also plays a large part. Whereas
images show, sounds evoke, and give the audience more freedom whenit comes to interpretation. They make the hive perceptible to the senses
beyond the text, and allow us to find a sensory link to nature in a concreteand tangible relationship of shared understanding.
–Interview conducted by Francis Cossu
and translated by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach