Georges

With support by L'échangeur-CDCN Hauts-de-France (FR), Internationales figuren.theater.festival Erlangen (DE), Fitz! Zentrum für Figurentheater Stuttgart (DE)
 

Première 2018, Festival d'Avignon
Running time 30 minutes.

Concept and realisation Mylène Benoit, Julika Mayer
Off-voice Vesna Vončina
Video designer Marko Jakopanec

Georges is animated and inanimate.
Georges performs.
Georges raises his voice.
Georges is articulated.
Georges tells "dead people stories."
And what if those dead people had a presence, a spirit, and a sense of humour?

Georges, a visual-performative etude with puppets, was created when Julika Mayer, a puppet artist from Stuttgart, met Mylène Benoit, a choreographer and visual artist from Lille. It plays with biography and fiction, and looks at the invisibility of the dead in Western civilisation, through the art of dance and puppetry. It turns out that "some living are able to welcome the presence of the dead". What if the dead support us, even console us? What if they are present here with us, with their spirit and sense of humour? 

Julika Mayer & Mylene Benoit are recycling puppets from shows no longer "living" to be re-animated in a new context: puppets created by artists Arnaud Louski-Pane, Ingo Mewes, Antje Töpfer, Janusz Debinski & Paulo Duarte. These puppets come out of their boxes as if in a sacred ritual.   

In October 2019, Mylène Benoit and Julika Mayer are developing the inter-generational project Moving through time at the Maribor Puppet Theatre. The project is financed by the Franco-German Cultural Fund and is organised in cooperation with the French Institute in Slovenia and the Goethe-Institut Ljubljana. The assisted-living facility Dom Danice Vogrinec and Tone Čufar Primary School (both from Maribor) participate in the project. 

Mylène Benoit, a plastic artist and choreographer, makes dance resonate like a plastic object. After winning a residency at the Villa Kujoyama, she created La Maladresse (Clumsiness) and Gikochina-sa in 2018. She is an associate artist with the Phare CCN and in a long-term residency at L’échangeur-CDCN Hauts-de-France.

Julika Mayer is a puppeteer. Her work focuses on the relationship between the body and the space, the object, and the puppet. In 2011, she won a residency at the Institut français in Berlin. She returned to Germany to be co-director of the puppeteering department at the State University of Music and Performing Arts in Stuttgart.