"La jeune fille à la bombe"

Christophe Fiat is an intellectual à la française : this philosopher, poet and fiction writer crosses over with equal ease between academia, the arts and popular culture. His references range from Christopher Marlowe to William S. Burroughs via Nijinsky. His areas of interest include the Balkan conflict, the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, porn stars and mangas. His writing pays equal homage to Batman and Brecht. He jams on an electric guitar. His over a dozen performance pieces, attempting to lend a plastic construct to his writing, boast such didactic titles as “If Carrie White wasn’t the heroine of a Stephen King novel, she’d be a terrorist” and “Isidora Duncan is a crack-snorting dancer”. Tout un programme! And that is about all one can fairly say upon being liberated from Fiat’s most recent piece, “La jeune fille à la bombe”, though his stated objectives are reasonable enough: to alert audiences to the repression of individual freedoms in the new world of the declared war on terrorism. If the medium is the message, however, than what is to be inferred from what is offered on stage: two hours of a monotonal, collective reading of an ironic, karate-chopping, punk kidnapping story with locales in Afghanistan (a love affair with Massoud), Geneva (for a midnight DNA sample) and Fiat’s native Franche-Comté (radioactive vegetables and self-destructing cars)… with the performers’ backs turned to the audience nearly the entire time? Fiat claims the right to an imaginative life in a world, he says, that has “dynamited imagination itself,” to which menace he ripostes by his young woman with a bomb : a brave reclaiming of that freedom, according to Fiat, for whom King’s Carrie is the courageous heroine of anti-establishment liberties in our pop culture world.

Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d'Avignon