Duration : 45 minutes. All audiences from age 11.

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Possession is a magic-meets-puppets show that immerses the audience in the far edges of their darkest thoughts. A suspended time where insanity and strangeness are incarnated by Antonin Artaud. This is an invitation to meet one’s ghost through the mirror…

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“But however loudly we clamor for magic, in fact we are afraid of a life that might grow out of genuine magic. I accuse the author of Jabberwocky of intending to enter a void that did not want to be possessed.” (A. Artaud, letter to A. Parisot)

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This project came about with the discovery of an interior monster, or the double possession of Antonin Artaud through his “prefigurative plagiarism” of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky. When Artaud discovered Carroll’s text, he was positive that it was not Carroll’s but his creation. Through this devouring insanity, he then attempted to obliterate any connection between Carroll’s and his work, to blend into this text, and in the process, create his own version of Jabberwocky while feeding his own “monster”.

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“Real theatre – because it shifts and uses living instruments – keeps waving shadows where life has ceaselessly stumbled (…). And theatre, which does not attach itself to language and forms, thereby destroys the fake shadows but paves the way for a new birth of shadows around which the show of life gathers (…). This enables us to reject the usual limitations and powers of man and make the so-called boundaries of reality boundless.” (A. Artaud)

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With this outlook in mind, reawakening those “shadows” becomes a compelling challenge.  To question the inhabited/incarnated/possessed self is to go to this fuzzy place where magic and puppetry can meet, a place where the impossible is challenged by the confusion of the audience’s usual frame of reference.