Posted Oct 3, 2022, 12:00 PM
“In the Bad Place at the Bad Time”: we all, one day, dared to use this expression. Alice Barraud does nothing else, choosing to make it the title of her creation. Except that in her case, it takes on a very particular tragic meaning: this bad place is Le Petit Cambodge, the bad moment, November 13, 2015. An evening of an attack in Paris of which she is a survivor, protected by her brother at the bottom of the restaurant.
Alice gets away with two operations in the evening and “an irresistible urge to pee”, she blurts out in a bit of scathing humor. Except that one of these arms goes through it, bad luck for the hand-to-hand flyer that she is. “Five post-traumatic years in one hour of show” such is the challenge of “In the Bad Place at the Bad Time”.
Everything is there or almost; the appointments with the shrink, the nightmares and, sometimes, the laughter. Back on stage? Don’t think about it, Miss Barraud, however, strikes a surgeon. “It would be better to find a “real” job”. Facing us, on the stage of the Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, Alice crosses the mirror, in her own way, imagining a new way of expressing herself. And to fly away in a beautiful aerobatic number. Helped by two accomplices, the musician Raphaël de Pressigny and the director Sky de Sela, she is going on tour again these days.
Sincerity
The virtuosity is evacuated in favor of a reflection on oneself with for only decoration this hospital bed of which the interpreter makes an improvised apparatus. He bends and Alice Barraud with it, in a surprising pas de deux. The show sometimes seems to seek the right rhythm but the essential is elsewhere, in this proven sincerity. The presence on set of Raphaël de Pressigny, from the group Feu! Chatterton, a gifted multi-instrumentalist, brings another dimension to this “recital”.
From “V13”, the book by Emmanuel Carrère, to “Revoir Paris”, the film by Alice Winocour, the attacks of 13-11-2015 are once again becoming hotly topical. For live performance, this is undoubtedly a first. Alice Barraud gives substance to pain, her own, and just as much to courage. On the edge of life.
