LA DÉPÊCHE DU MIDI / 11 February 2002

KINGS

The UFO – Deliberately unidentifiable

(…)
Not new but relevant, the unbearable habit of giving market value to everyone is displayed, proven and condemned as well as the permanent public exhibition and the resulting identity loss. There goes the message that could be one of the first manifestation of powerful irony. Now the means: different dances, theater, happenings, photographs and screening, music, recitatives, readings, diverse movements, unexpected apparition of a security guard and his dog, of a prop person, meetings, unoccupied artists waiting for performances or nothing. Artists? To be discussed. Because in the patchwork that looks like a broken mirror, everyone is shown for who they are, under their real identity, with their disgrace, their talents and their banalities, in a simultaneous game or showing and hiding to the audience, amateur actor of its own role.

The audience listens, sighs and laugh at the role of testimony, lets itself be deceived with indulgence, doubts (finally) about the truth of the intermission, of the end of the show, of the opportunity to applaud. Intelligent, troubling, sarcastic and exhilarating, KINGS literally screws with us. With just the right touch of compassion not to fall into the grumpy vanity of conventional critics and to make of us all, poor people, princes and kings.

Jacques-Olivier BADIA