Yohann Metay "Solitoudinée"

"Solitoudinnée" (working title, bizarre but explicit... right?) A tragicomic solo performance inspired by the novel "The Waltz of the Shy."
Why write another one-man show when there's so much to say and so much pleasure to be had in collective creations? Because solitude means freedom of tone and rhythm; it means being accountable to no one except the audience and one's own dignity. A solo performance is the guarantee of truly doing what you want, of giving form to the intimate.
But what hell this solitude is! These doubts, these questions we ask the mirror and it throws the same questions back at us. What a stupid mirror! Madness is never far away when your own voice answers itself to answer itself to... shh, shut up! To avoid becoming a mad hermit, there's nothing like a collective!
Ah, the collective! It's exchange, complementarity, the assurance of not blindly locking oneself onto a path, a sharing of emotions, failures, and joys. The collective opens each person's blinders, explores larger spaces fueled by more neuroses, boosted by varied desires. And then this confrontation with others that confronts one's Self with the World and vice versa is real life, the one that creates society and an individual's identity. We only build the I in the We.
But the group, how terrifying! It's the obligation to submit to collective agreements that we find stupid, it's agreeing to slow down to wait and be overtaken by those crazier than oneself. The little old lady who drops her suitcase just outside the train, mmmm; the family who presses against the baggage carousel at Orly, grrrrr; The reception team at a cultural center who didn't read the technical specifications properly, aargg... but I digress.
It's the constant negotiation over everything and nothing, and having to put up with the fact that others don't understand what's going on in your head because they're not there, busy being in their own. How boring these neuroses that clash, these anxieties that trample each other, these clumsy capoieras of identical solitudes.
This solitude that throws us, asphyxiated, starving infants, into the abysmal cold of the unknown and makes us dependent on others for survival. And throughout our lives, we will attempt to assert an identity that does not exist without others, at the heart of a human group that does not know itself and searches for itself in this continuum of solitude-crowd in an attempt to live in balance. Between the large festive gatherings where the illusion of being thousands of similar people vibrating in unison creates new churches and the workshops and advice on the art of withdrawing from the world to find oneself, we are lost.
The portraits would be numerous, too many to describe and embody all the forms of solitude that make up our world. There is almost one for everyone; it is made up of our deepest identity and our social functions. In this new story, I would like to explore this fundamental subject: the feeling of solitude that is in each of us and its confrontation with the desire for a collective but also with the anxiety of being devoured, drowned by this same collective.
It is almost a third epic tale, part of an "existentialist" triptych. After the one about this solitary race amidst a herd of humans, searching around his pride for something greater than himself (The Tragedy of Bib 512) and that of the man who isolated himself to escape who wakes up to try to conquer an inaccessible star, the one that everyone else will look on in amazement (The Sublime Sabotage).
A new adventure, then, burlesque, on the road to the Self.

Show less