For all February events, tickets will go on sale starting Tuesday January 17th (Tuesday, January 10th for subscribers)
Readings and Encounters
Pedro Kadivar, Lands of Exile, Lands of Writing, 2
Thursday, February 2nd at 6:30 pm.
Iranian Writer in residence at the l’Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe
Opus 2, Violent Voyages
Guest writer: : Mathias Enard
Paris, April 9th, 1951. The Iranian writer Sadegh Heday committed suicide in his room on the rue Championnet by sealing off all exits and vents and then opening the gas. Writing in Persian, fluent in a number of living and dead languages, father of the modern Iranian novel, he was close to the Parisian surrealist milieu and in particular, André Breton. The latter highly praised his novel The Blind Owl.
Sixty years later, drawing inspiration from the figure of Hedayat, Pedro Kadivar, a French-Iranian author and director, offers us a series of readings and debates on notions of exile and creation. For the occasion he is working on a personal writing project and during each of his performances, he will read texts on these themes and then discuss and debate them with a guest writer. The series will be completed with a reading/performance at the Ateliers Berthier.
> Théâtre de l’Odéon – Salon Roger Blin / All tickets: 5€
Philosophers in love
by Raphaël Enthoven
Heidegger and Hannah Arendt
Saturday, February 4th at 3 pm.
Love, on the outside of the world
With Michelle-Irène Brudny, Philippe Cabestan, philosophers, Georges Claisse (casting and guest list incomplete)
Why did Socrates refuse to sleep with Alcibiades? Through what sleight of hand can one justify the fact that two people who love each other, do not make love? What is hidden behind the transparency that Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir brandished for all to see? Can we say that Zarathustra is the offspring of Nietzsche and Lou Salomé? Is Hannah Arendt’s political thought a means of adding onto Heidegger’s philosophy, “the intermediary space of the world” that was lacking in their own love affair? Is philosophy, as its name indicates, the “love of wisdom”, or else, as its practice has demonstrated, a wisdom of love?
All these questions, and many others, will be knocked about on the big stage of the Odeon Theater during a series of encounters and debates about philosophers in love and their intimate correspondence (two voices will be doing the reading). The goal is not to reduce a whole system of thought to simple love stories, but to show how love, for better, is always, in the end, a philosophical principle.
Co-produced with France Culture
> Théâtre de l’Odéon – Grande salle / Ticket price 5€
followed at 5:30 pm with a reading in the Salon Roger Blin:
"Dialogue” by Martin Heidegger
Read by Olivier Py and Cécile Zervudacki
Previously unpublished translation from the German by Cécile Zervudacki
> Théâtre de l’Odéon – Salon Roger Blin / All tickets: 5€
Philosophical Crossroads
How can one cross over a catastrophe?
Thursday, February 9th at 6:30 pm
Discussion and debate hosted by Jean-Marie Durand
With Pierre Zaoui.
Reading of texts by Samuel Beckett, Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Guyotat, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche
How can one survive “life”? Because as we all know, life ends in disaster, and often, it is “lived” disastrously as well, with break-ups, pain and suffering, mourning, sickness and finally, death. How does one cross all of these catastrophes? With the help of faith, which gives meaning to that which is nothing but suffering? But what about the atheist? If he wishes to be faithful to his “faith” he must believe in the absurdity of life, the only thing that truly matters. The essential question then becomes: why bother living at all?
Professor at the Université of Paris VII-Diderot, Pierre Zaoui is a member of the International Center for French Philosophical studies and program director at the Collège International de Philosophie. In 2010, Zaoui published with Seuil, La Traversée des catastrophes. Une philosophie pour le meilleur et pour le pire: Crossing Catastrophes. A Philosophy for Better or for Worse.
In partnership with Seuil and the Inrockuptibles
> Théâtre de l’Odéon – Salon Roger Blin / All Tickets 5€
Leonis’s Music at Noon
Bloed & Rozen, concert
Friday, February 10th at 12 am
The Leonis Quartet will perform a musical program in echo to the performance
With
Guillaume Antonini Violin 1
Sébastien Richaud Violin 2
Alphonse Dervieux Alto
Jean-Lou Loger Cello
> Théâtre de l’Odéon – Salon Roger Blin / All tickets 5€
On the edge of the Stage
Bloed & rozen, an encounter
Saturday, February 11th at 5:30 pm
Round table discussion hosted by Laure Adler
> Théâtre de l’Odéon – Salon Roger Blin
free admission upon reservation present.compose@theatre-odeon.fr or 01 44 85 40 44
Special Event
An Evening with Algeria.
Monday, February 13th at 8pm.
In memory of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Algerian War.
Screening
Mediterraneans a film by Olivier Py
France – 2011 – 32 min
directed and written by Olivier Py
edited by Lise Beaulieu
sound Jean-Noël Yven
« The whole of my work in film as well as theater is a long interrogation on the meaning of a “Mediterranean” identity.» Olivier Py
Unearthed after twenty-five years, a series of super 8 films lead to a meditation on the destiny of one family and a whole generation. Méditerranées is an auto-fiction, the story of a couple, of a family, that merges with the History of Algeria and of France in the 1960’s. Olivier Py looks at it with a mixture of lucidity and nostalgia. Production Sombrero Films and Canal+
Performance
The Contrary of Love by Mouloud Feraoun
with Samuel Churin and Marc Lauras (cello)
stage version and stage direction Dominique Lurcel
lighting Céline Juillard
scenography Gérald Ascargorta
costumes Angelina Herrero
Fifty years later, Mouloud Feraoun’s Journal (1955-1962) looks today, like the slow construction of a tomb to all of our illusions; that of the “civilizing” discourse, of impossible harmony, of a future of reconciliation. But also as a formidable lesson of intellectual courage, a safeguard against the omnipotence of irrational thought, words that cannot be reduced to mere sham and pretence, wherever they come from, words that stand and face silence, confront all of the dark places and shadows that still weigh upon us.
Created on March 16th, 2011 at the Théâtre de l’Intervalle – Lyon
Produced by: Passeurs de mémoires,
with the financial aid of the Conseil Régional d’Île-de-France, of Aralis/Traces immigrées en Rhône Alpes, of la Maison des Passages and of Sixième Continent – Lyon
> Théâtre de l’Odéon – Grande salle / Tickets: 12€, 6€
Why does one love?
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
Tuesday, February 14th at 18h30
A contemporary writer savors a classic.
Hosted by Daniel Loayza.
«I say that the cruel law of art is that people die and that we ourselves die, exhausting all of human suffering so that the grass, not of forgetfulness but of eternal life, the thick grass of fertile works, shall grow under foot ...» (Remembrance of Things Past)
Julie Wolkenstein is the author of several novels published by P.O.L., including Happy End (2005) et L’Excuse / The Excuse (2008).
In partnership with Flammarion and Evene
> Théâtre de l’Odéon – Salon Roger Blin / All tickets 5€
Musical Reading
Marianne Faithfull
Wednesday, February 15th at 8 pm
Shakespeare’s Sonnets
A musical reading, accompanied by Vincent Segal, cello.
Shakespeare’s sonnets have given birth to much controversy concerning their autobiographical significance and the nature of relationships between the poet, the young beloved aristocrat and a perverse dark-haired woman.
These sonnets express, in the lyrical mode, all of the aspects of a love passion, and, for the most part, the object of this love is a man. Indeed, even though twenty-six of Shakespeare’s sonnets are love poems addressed to a married woman (only known as the “dark lady”), one hundred and twenty six of them are destined to a young man (known as the “fair lord”). The amorous tone of these latter poems, which concentrate on the young man’s beauty, have been interpreted as proof of Shakespeare’s bisexuality, even though others believe that these sonnets only express a deep and intense friendship, a platonic love.
> Théâtre de l’Odéon – Grande salle / Tickets : 32€ to 6€
Enlightenment in the Present Tense
– a Philosophical Dictionary
Nature
Thursday, February, 16th at 6:30 pm
with Jean-Christophe Bailly and Xavier Papaïs
hosted by Pascal Sévérac
What remains of Nature today? What remains of Nature understood as the standard of life? Inherited from the Enlightenment, a certain idea of nature has helped us to judge that which is morally or politically desirable: but has this idea of nature become obsolete?
What remains of Nature understood as an environment for life? Nature today is invested with ecological worries: the preservation of natural resources, a politics of “sustainable development”, preoccupations with what and how we eat. Which Nature is it that we confront today, in our plates, in our countryside, in our political commitments?
From the Enlightenment, we have inherited the problem of the autonomy of Artifice as opposed to Nature: what are we to do with such an inheritance?
Jean-Christophe Bailly, is a poet, a playwright and a philosopher.
Xavier Papaïs is program director at the CIPH and professor at the ENS where he conducts a seminar on the anthropology of Magical rites
In partnership with the Collège International de Philosophie
> Théâtre de l’Odéon – Salon Roger Blin / All tickets: 5€
Encounters
The Republic of Translators
Third annual edition
Wednesday and Friday, 15th at 3pm and 17th February, 2012 at 6pm.
By Jacques Le Ny
Epilogue to the program on multilingual translations of Lumières du corps / The body illuminated by Valère Novrina (publication of the proceedings from the 16th and 17th of December, 2011)
The inauguration of a digital workshop on the French translation of a text of Greek poetry, with the participation of Greek translators and French writers.
In partnership with l'Atelier Européen de la traduction / European Translation Workshop
> Théâtre de l’Odéon – Salon Roger Blin / All tickets 5€
