Compagnie n°8 – Monstre d’humanités
We attend a drinks and buffet dinner, finger-food, champagne, greedily eaten by eight upper class people. Conniving, cigars on the lips, suits and ties and disdain for the audience. These eight are not poor ones, and they want us to know it.
Slowly, the atmosphere gets out of hand, on the air of Ravel’s Bolero. Our eight larges fortunes begin to coat with a thick greenish cream and to throw white and ochre powder at theirselves. An orgy starts, it comes down to who will be the dirtiest, until the explosion : a big boom, a lot of smoke, and hundred of bank bills flying in sprays. This is the crash. Game over. Here comes the crisis.
Dazed, the eight characters move like zombies, as funny as frightening, until they begin to cross the crowd.
They regroup and perform a short living-dead choreography, and then, one of them grabs a microphone and stops the others. “Well, it was good, everybody gets the idea, that’s it, it’s clear, it was cool, wasn’t it ?”. And they become mockers. They laugh at us because they had got the upper hand over us. The audience is moved, quickly, like a herd, they regroup, for a little speech. “We are very rich people, thanks to you, from the bottom of the heart, thank you so much”.
And they will go on, in the next scenes, they will manipulate us, show us, proudly, what are their values (death and burial of an Iphone...), and how much they can be mad, mad of money, of power, of seduction. Mad and envious, defending their places, even if they have to be violent.
Compagnie n°8 offers a performance with outstanding actors, a beautiful collective work which deals with humour but seriously, with an actual subject, the crisis, and these people who caused it and sometimes get benefits from it.
I have to highlight the impressive capacity of the actors to manage the audience, losing them, moving them, cutting them, without losing the dynamism even for a second. To see and see again, to laugh and think.