Fantômas Probablement
Museu da Marioneta
29, 30 May at 10pm
DIRECTION, CONSTRUCTION AND PUPPETEERS Cécile Chevalier and Franck Fedele
MUSIC Géraldine Schenkel, Seby Ciurcina, Marcello
LIGHT DESIGN Florence Guillermin
LIGHT AND SOUND Emilie Poirier
TECHNIQUE Mixed
FOR AUDIENCES OVER M/8
TIME 70 minutes
LANGUAGE French and Portuguese
“Fantômas!
-What did you say?
-I said… Fantômas.
-And what does that mean?
-Nothing... Everything!
-But what is it?
-No one... And yet, yes, it is someone!
-And what does this someone do?
-spreads terror!
Opening lines of “Fantômas”, the first novel in the series.
Puppets from the underworld… A special show, surreal, revolutionary and terrifying, with twenty three puppets and two puppeteers, about the universe of… Fantômas!
Fantômas is the Lord of Terror, the Genius of Evil, the arch-criminal anti-hero of a series of 32 French thrillers written before the First World War by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain. He carries out the most appalling crimes: putting sulphuric acid in the perfume dispensers at a Parisian department store, releasing plague-infested rats on an ocean liner, or forcing a victim to witness his own execution by placing him face-up in a guillotine. Fantômas is the master of a thousand disguises and the leader of a vast army of “apaches” (street thugs). Fantômas is anyone and no one, everywhere and nowhere, waging an implacable war against the very bourgeois society in which he moves with such ease and assurance. “His shadow hovers over the strangest mysteries, and his traces are found near the most inexplicable crimes.”
Dark puppets, from the underground and street thugs, show us their point of view, through their deformed imagination take us in the pursuit of Fantômas, through dark streets, dangerous places, cabarets… Their adventures never end, without logic, its always Fantômas, reappearing with new identities… perhaps the only way to arrest Fantômas is maybe… to become Fantômas!
The company "La Tête dans le Sac – Marionnettes" is a puppet company. A family in constant expansion, like the universe, that has, says unknown sources, twenty three puppets and two puppeteers. It’s difficult to know with precision when they started their puppetry activities. Its members are all creators and actors, artists and thinkers, who work together. They read all the 32 volumes of Fantômas, dividing its 12800 pages randomly. From these exercises, they made a free and collective interpretation of the Fantômas myth, supporting the dramaturgic structure in the words of Apollinaire: “From the imaginative standpoint Fantômas is one of the richest works that exist”.