Ivona, Princess of Burgundia

While working on this performance, I undertook two tasks:
- creating a theatrical performance in an atypical, non-theatrical space, on a playground for children filled with huge, inflatable structures, which will be a symbol of unreal and immaturity, childlike character,
- carrying out a kind of theatrical experiment and casting a different actress in each of the performances playing the role of Iwona.

Why a children's playground?
The manor house imagined by Gombrowicz is a court of spoiled kids pretending to be adults, playing into adulthood, whose uncontrolled behavior, often cruel and merciless, brings us to bitter memories of the school playground, where two forces are opposed: strong and weak, aggressive and compliant, girls and boys, executioner and victim ...

Watching children play in a group in this specific, delimited space is an amazing spectacle in itself. In it, I recognize all social mechanisms with their positive and negative interpersonal behaviors: relationships that are created and cease to exist in the blink of an eye, laughter that unnoticed turns into a dramatic cry that turns into laughter again unexpectedly, and finally a childish dictatorship, imposing one's will on others, and outright injustice, breaking newly established rules, which is not accompanied by any feeling of shame or embarrassment. Regardless of the subject of play, at war, at home, at school, at a doctor, children's play exposes the dominant-dominated relationship and usually ends with screaming, crying, physical violence and finally submission of the weaker. By working on the stage on Gombrowicz's text in a space intended exclusively for children, I wanted to paradoxically show the world of adults, decamouflage our hidden instincts and shameful desires.

Iwona - performative role
Yvonne appears outside like a plum in a compote. It is supposed to be an unknown, different creation, but it is absorbed, blended into the background. She comes out of nowhere and everyone scoffs at her unknown origins. He will then awkwardly wander in a strange world, not knowing and not recognizing the social codes around me, choosing silence and passivity in order to avoid mistakes. She becomes the scapegoat, the martyr of the bored royal court and, like a puppet, gives to perverse games initiated by the prince and his friends.

The state of mind in which Iwona follows her dramatic path makes me think of a dream, a nightmare: I am in the theater to play in a performance that I do not know, neither the text, nor its title, nor the character I am to play. Someone pushes me brutally into the middle of a stage that I have never seen before, everyone is looking at me, they expect something from me, I am filled with a huge emptiness, I am terrified, I am dying of shame ... In this dream I found the key to the character of Iwona.

In each of my performances, the role of Iwona is played by a different actress, who has never met the other actors before, has not participated in rehearsals, so she does not know all the directing assumptions. Each time everything is done for her for the first time. Each time a directed spectacle is played out for her, around her and with her. The actress becomes an object. She gets involved and thrown into the whirlpool of stage events. The engagement of each new actress to the role of Iwona takes place at the place where the performance is presented and according to strictly defined criteria: freedom of improvisation, open attitude towards one's own body, the ability to adapt to a new stage situation, the acting sense of a partner ... Before each presentation, I devote time to the chosen actress, I outline the dramatic matter necessary for her to enter the character and rhythm of existing, directed stage actions. I individually update the frames of the performance and the game itself, but also define the areas of acting freedom. Only then, during the meeting with the audience participating in this theatrical experiment, the artistic risk is taken: Yvonne, throwing herself into a consciously created void, affects everything that has already been determined, directed, frozen.

Edith Amsellem A performance for viewers from the age of 13.