VIDEOBAR #75 : ” La Folie d’Alekseyev “

The Semaine de la Poésie, the Service Université Culture, the bookstore Les Raconteurs d’Histoires & VIDEOFORMES present :

VIDEOBAR #75 : ” La Folie d’Alekseyev ” by Jean Baptiste Cabaud & Christian Jeulin

AV performance, theatrical poetic narrative

Friday June 21, 2019 | 6:30 pm > 8 pm
Chapelle de l’Oratoire
Free access

 

 

Reading : Christian Jeulin & Jean-Baptiste Cabaud
Text and video editing : Jean-Baptiste Cabaud
Musical composition : David Champey

 

“The Madness of Alekseyev”

In a scientific city in northern Siberia, in 1957, the Soviet engineer Rostislav Evgenievitch Alekseyev experiments with the first of the ekranoplanes, these strange prototypes on which he will work for twenty years. At his side, Yevgeny: his assistant, friend, advisor, confidant and test pilot. A few hours before the first takeoff of a machine that will mark the world of aviation, Alekseyev speaks, confides, tells of his efforts, his visions of the future, dives and digs into his memory to go back to the sources of this passionate creative fire that has guided his existence since adolescence. Bound together by the gigantic work already done in the service of this very real adult dream, the two men share the immense enthusiasm of this grandiose project.

This staged reading is a stage adaptation of Jean-Baptiste Cabaud’s long poem-narrative La Folie d’Alekseyev, published in 2017 by Dernier Télégramme.

It features two actors who, through a game of suggestions, seem to embody Alekseyev and Evguéni, the protagonists of this story. One (Christian Jeulin) stands and gives voice to Alekseyev’s speeches and monologues. The other (Jean-Baptiste Cabaud), seated at a table filled with instruments and computers, listens and manages the musical and video part of the show. Superimposed on the text, in fact, punctuating and giving rhythm to the whole reading, live video and musical interventions, interludes, Soviet archive images from the 1960s showing the real engineer Alekseyev at work in his design offices in Gorki (now Nizhny Novgorod), testing his planes on the northern steppes or on the Caspian Sea… Alekseyev speaks, in a language of great poetry; he speaks about himself, about his machines. And between memories, future projects, organization of the first flight of his prototype, reveals all that this project had of humanly magic to build…

 

Jean-Baptiste Cabaud

Jean-Baptiste Cabaud is a writer and poet from Lyon born in 1970. After ten years spent in graphic design, he has devoted himself since 2005 entirely to poetry, written, spoken and drawn. He gives regular readings and performances of his texts in France and abroad
He regularly gives readings and performances of his texts in France and abroad (Germany, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia…) in solo voice or within the poetry-electro group Saint Octobre that he set up with the musician David Champey.
More information: http://www.jeanbaptistecabaud.fr/

 

Christian Jeulin

Christian Jeulin was born in 1976 in Seine-Saint-Denis. He moved to Lyon in 2002 and joined the commercial department of the cultural newspaper Le Petit Bulletin while developing with François Beaune the literary and artistic review Louche and starting theater workshops. As an actor, he met in 2006 the team of the Lyon theater L’Instant T with whom he collaborated for 3 creations until 2008. He then worked on different projects with the directors Olivier Mocellin, then Nicolas Zlatoff, before founding in 2011 the company ETC with Meissoune Majri Pégeot and Eline de Lorenzi. 8 creations later, played in different theaters in Lyon, the company continues its road with serenity.

 

Media partners : Radio Campus Clermont and Kinic

 

 

Crédit photos : Aurane CHAUVET