Lorraine de Sagazan

La Brèche is a company founded in 2015 by Lorraine de Sagazan. La Brèche’s work is characterized by the exploration of a possible extra-living and embodying theater, acting constantly in the present, constantly introducing reality into the works of fiction brought up to the stage.
Our staging questions the place given to spectators, the codes of representation and the need to tell the story of human beings in our time, their difficulty in existing, in living together.

Lorraine de Sagazan studied philosophy and trained as an actress from 2006 to 2010. At the Studio-Théâtre d’Asnières - Centre de Formation des Apprentis comédiens (now ESCA), she learns to create collectively, thanks to a work-study program. It was here that she met the men and women who are still her acting partners and peers today. She decided to turn to directing in 2015. At a time when there was only one directing course at the École Nationale du Théâtre de Strasbourg, Lorraine de Sagazan asked those who inspired her to follow them for the duration of a creation. In 2014, she went to Berlin to assist Thomas Ostermeier at work on The Marriage of Maria Braun after Fassbinder, conversed with Marius von Mayenburg, met Falk Richter and observed Romeo Castellucci in rehearsals for the plays he presented in Paris in 2015 and 2016.
After presenting Ceci n’est pas un rêve (2014) at La Loge - Paris, her first collective work with four Studio-Théâtre acolytes, she was invited to take part in the Fragments d’Été Festival in Paris, for which she chose to work on an adaptation of Lars Norén’s Demons. The company La Brèche was founded on this occasion, in 2015. This manifesto piece reveals her focus on both the author’s gesture and the status of the spectator, his place, his gaze, his state. It marks the beginning of what has come to be known as a first cycle devoted to the adaptation of texts from the classical and contemporary repertoires, and to the way in which “the fiction of a work confronts reality”.
In 2016, Lorraine de Sagazan signed the second part of this cycle with an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, accentuating the search for what, today, reactivates the shock of past masterpieces. Supported in particular by the Scènes Nationales network, she has deployed her company La Brèche throughout France and is now looking to international. In 2017, she directed the winning text of the Prix RFI Théâtre 2017: La Poupée Barbue (“The Beard Doll”) by Édouard Elvis Bvouma, the first show for young audiences to tour eight African countries. In 2018, commissioned by the Conseil Général du 93, she created Les Règles du jeu (“Game rules”) by Yann Verburgh, a second project aimed at young people. That same year, in Vienna, she staged an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya with Austrian actors. She closes her first cycle in 2019 with L’Absence de père (“The Missing of a Father”), based on Anton Chekhov’s Platonov, an adaptation she co-wrote with author and playwright Guillaume Poix. which marks the start of a second creative cycle focused on collecting testimonies and exploring how, this time, fiction responds to reality.
Guillaume Poix co-wrote the following plays with Lorraine de Sagazan, who was an associate artist at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe - CDN de Saint-Denis and a member of the Ensemble Artistique de la Comédie de Valence, Centre Dramatique National Drôme-Ardèche.
La Vie invisible (“The Invisible Life”), presented at Théâtre de La Ville in January 2022, questions the spectator’s gaze, decides to meet those who can’t see and invites a blind amateur actor on stage. Caught up in the upheavals caused by the pandemic since March 2020, she abandons the project of staging Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Le Décalogue to “radicalize” the previous gesture by going out to meet and question as many people about reparation as there are days in a year. This writing project conducted with Guillaume Poix deepens the experience of a subtle metatheatricality that was already apparent in Lorraine de Sagazan’s early research. Un Sacre (“A Sacred”) will be premiered in 2021. Accompanying this piece, Mater Orba, written as a testimonial for an actress, is a small form destined to be performed in situ in non-dedicated venues.

Considering artistic encounters as “a remarkable tool for emancipating the greatest number of people, and a powerful lever for popular education in a given region”, she and her team offer regular workshops for teenagers, amateurs and young actors, as well as frequent cultural actions and advanced or professional training programs.
In 2022, as part of the Chantiers nomades program at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe, Lorraine de Sagazan led a workshop on two fundamental aspects of her research: experience and the invisible. As part of the Nuits de Fourvière festival, she presents a very free adaptation of Lars Norén’s Category 3.1 with students from various disciplines graduating from ENSATT. That same year, during the Douze heures des auteurs organized by ARTCENA as part of the Avignon Festival, Lorraine de Sagazan directed a reading by Talents Adami performers of a text written by Guillaume Poix following the collection of anonymous testimonials about “L’auteur ou l’autrice qui a changé ma vie” (“The author who changed my life”). With Julie Deliquet, she co-directs Fille(s) de (“Girl(s) of”), by Leïla Anis, another associate artist of the Théâtre Gérard Philipe, a collective creation for young girls, teenagers and women from Saint-Denis who take part in the CDN’s amateur workshops.

In Rome, Lorraine de Sagazan, resident at the Villa Medicis for a year from September 2022, was conducting her research and meeting the men and women she will write with Guillaume Poix, LEVIATHAN, which will premiere in July 2024. In keeping with her immersive writing style, she hopes to “invent a ritual of justice through theater”.

In January 2024, she also created Le Silence (“The Silence”), based on the work of Antonioni, at the Comédie Française - Vieux-Colombier.

(Mélanie Jouen for Artcena)