This Wednesday evening in September, the Comédie-Française is expected at the factory. Or, more precisely, in a hall of the Friche la Belle de Mai, an emblematic third place in Marseille, where 240 spectators settle down on either side of a stage that has become a storage space on the occasion of the first Marseille performance of 7 minutes. Performed last fall in Paris, this play by Stefano Massini, directed by Maëlle Poésy, landed in the Marseille city for six dates, taking on board seven members or residents of the French joined by four other actresses.
A new experience “outside the walls”
“Giving this show in this place resembles Marseille in its protest side”, estimates Dominique Bluzet, director of the Aixo-Marseillais ensemble Les Théâtres, which brings together the Théâtre du Gymnase, the Jeu de Paume, the Grand Théâtre de Provence and the Theater des Bernardines. “If the first of these places had not been closed for works, it would undoubtedly have hosted the event”, recognizes the one who constituted this pole between 1993 and 2015.
But that would have amounted to depriving oneself of a resonance between the working-class past of the Friche, where the cigar makers of the Tobacco Factory founded a union in 1887, and this closed session in which eleven workers from a textile factory are confronted with a Cornelian dilemma: accept or decline the offer of new bosses to reduce their daily break by seven minutes in exchange for saving jobs. This would have amounted to depriving oneself, too, of a new experience “outside the walls”, as Les Théâtres have been organizing since 2021 via the “Aller vers” operation, which takes the performing arts on a journey to cafes, churches, schools and building courtyards in the towns and villages of the Bouches-du-Rhône.
Like a hyphen between the two cities
“My adventure was able to begin because at that time, the theater was not a political issue, analyzes Dominique Bluzet. In a few years, by their interweaving, we have made four provincial structures a national body capable of discussing with the largest institutions”, he rejoices, proud of the prestigious opening of the 2022-2023 season. In addition to the Comédie-Française, the Theaters also received 55 dancers from the Paris Opera at the end of September for five performances. A trip that is part of a partnership agreement signed for three years, allowing the development of projects on the scale of the Aix-Marseille metropolis. “We even set fire!” exults the director.
For the Biennale of art and culture in Aix-en-Provence, Les Théâtres have indeed invited the Carabosse company to set ablaze a route of thousands of pots of fire linking the Jeu de Paume to the Grand Théâtre de Provence. Nearly a decade earlier, this same company had illuminated the Old Port for Marseille Provence 2013. A path of flames like a hyphen between these two cities, both sisters and rivals, that Les Theaters strive to bring people together despite mutual mistrust.
“If, today, the economic dynamism is rather Marseille, excellence and safety are more associated with Aix. But these two cities need each other because the first is threatened with downgrading while the second risks becoming a museum”, judges Dominique Bluzet, who invites to “get out of fantasies”. “In the cultural attractiveness for which we are fighting, there is what the character of Blanche in 7 minutes talks about: this question of dignity. This territory has the right to have a look that is dignified and not caricatural. .”