Chalet 1

Denis Plassard offers a choreographed mise en scène of the novel Chalet 1 by André Baillon, composed of a mosaic of short scenes describing daily life in a psychiatric hospital.

Chalet 1, by the writer André Baillon, owes its title to the little chalets of Salpêtrière Hospital. It was written after a time spent on the ward of the petits mentaux, or those with ‘milder’ mental illnesses. ‘Chalet 1’ is a mosaic of short scenes describing daily life in the hospital, with portraits of patients and doctors whose humour lightens the darkness. Jean Martin (a sort of double of André Baillon) is the narrator of the tale made up of short chapters with a restrained, pithy and very spoken style. 

A choreographed choir

The three performers each sit on a stool, as though for a psychiatric consultation or to give evidence. They talk together in unison, or share Baillon’s incisive text through an often musical form of dialogue. The three voices are complementary and contradictory. They give us the impression of listening to the chaotic thoughts of the patient Jean Martin. We follow his racing thoughts, his interminable misgivings and his contradictory points of view on the nurses, his companions or himself. The set is rudimentary: three performers and three stools. The bodies are both the sounding boards of the remarks and the staging of the mental film that is projected. The movement is organised into a demented choreography that is as precise and original as the text. Little by little, the bodies take up more and more space, they upset, contradict or reinforce their words without ever falling into a stereotypical or hysterical gestural representation of madness; on the contrary, they reinforce the humanity and humour of the author. The movements are the music of the text, complementary but never decorative or illustrative. Gestures and words are synchronised with obsessive meticulousness to the point of making the contortions and convulsions seem perfectly natural. With total scenographic sobriety and strictly limited effects, the body and voice of the sick Jean Martin are augmented. At the heart of all this is the notion of ambiguity, of the multiplicity and complexity of the individual. 

The text

I have been haunted by the ghost of a choir of actors, minutely choreographed, for over ten years. Without any idea of the text, the vision of a choral score for both voice and body imposed itself upon me. With this project I am therefore returning to an old love for a text and a choreographed stage play (‘Le Terrier’, ‘Jours’). That said, I am taking a new approach that places the group at the heart of the writing. The discovery of this text by André Baillon was the trigger. It clearly represents an ideal crossover between a long-standing formal desire and my current preoccupation with rift, turmoil and ambiguity. Here, in a limited space, between the walls of the Salpêtrière (or the ‘pétète’ as it was known on the inside), is a little play that is madly human – simply human.