At the beginning of the nineties, hundreds of journalists from all over the world travelled to Bosnia to report on the war and on the attack on Sarajevo. Among them was the Belgian correspondent for RTBF, Françoise Wallemacq. About thirty years later, based on the radio reports that she delivered at the time, Sébastien Foucault has created a theatrical performance on the responsibility of reporting. For Foucault – who has acted for Milo Rau in the plays The Civil Wars and La Reprise – the play is a springboard for a reflection on his way of practicing documentary theatre and on the limitations of staging a story. Constantly oscillating between journalism and theatre, the work brings to the stage Françoise Wallemacq, as well as the ex-journalist Vedrana Božinović, who reported on the attack on Sarajevo and later became an actress, and Michel Villée, an ex-press officer for MSF Belgium and now a puppeteer. Alternating various performance techniques, the actors use the theatre to transform archive radio reports into artistic material. On stage, Françoise, Vedrana and Michel draw on personal memories as well as the accounts of the local and international journalists that documented the war, and the experiences of eyewitnesses that the Belgian journalist interviewed at the time and who she traced twenty-five years later. These are vivid, personal and original experiences that each of them explores with their own resources, in order to find a way to face the future.
Duration:
120’ without interval
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