Poste Restante Stopovers on the line
immersive scenographies by
Cécile Léna Cie Léna D'Azy
at the Théâtre des Gémeaux from March 8 to 22, 25
as part of the MARTO Festival
at the Théâtre du Rond-Point from March 28 to April 13, 25
from Tue to Fri 6 p.m., 7 p.m., 8 p.m. - Sat 5 p.m., 6 p.m., 7 p.m., 8 p.m. - Sun 2 p.m., 3 p.m., 4 p.m.
Estimated total duration of the tour 45 minutes
Since 2008, Cécile Léna has been enchanting audiences with her immersive installations, true miniature architectures that she populates with stories told in voiceover. She immerses the viewer in an experience at the crossroads of theater, cinema, and radio fiction where the imagination has pride of place and all the senses are on the lookout. After Radio Daisy created at the Maison de la Radio in 2023, she returns to Paris with Poste Restante - Escales sur la Ligne on the extraordinary epic of Aéropostale, including the inauguration in 1918 of the famous Toulouse-Santiago de Chile line. Like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, she invites us to retrace its journey through stopovers, 7 miniature settings that come to life, and a life-size finale in the cockpit of a legendary "bush" plane. An extraordinary boarding that is like a waking dream ***
7 "boxes" and 1 airplane cockpit, miniature or scale cases, all dizzying in sensory beauty, for a very lively show in the footsteps of men and women, all heroic, who defied the skies! An extraordinary story, in substance and form, around the Aéropostale.
With "Poste Restante", her tenth creation, Cécile Léna offers new immersive scenographies with the Aéropostale as a common thread: the first transatlantic air line dedicated to the postal service. A 12,000-kilometer route, linking Toulouse to Santiago de Chile, initiated by Pierre-Georges Latécoère in 1918.
This journey is imagined in the form of eight scenic spaces, animated miniature architectures crossed by sound, light and voice. Each of these “Stopovers of the Line” carries a story - those of Saint-Exupéry, Kessel, Mermoz, and the cities along the Aéropostale route.
At each stopover, the public meets these sky adventurers, real or fictional characters, pioneers of aviation, transporting letters at the risk of their lives. The journey ends in the cockpit of an airplane, inviting the public to experience the epic of these heroes up close.
Immersed in a sound universe where dialogues, sound effects and music blend, the public embarks on a motionless journey at the crossroads of theater, cinema, radio fiction, often upsetting what it touches intimately in each of us.
texts by Cécile Léna and excerpts from the work of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry with the kind permission of the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Foundation for Youth and the publisher Gallimard with the voices of Diego Asensio, Philippe Bozo, Françoise Cadol, Enrique Fiestas, Marjorie Frantz, Jacques Gamblin, Kevin Goffette, Cécile Léna, Thibault de Montalembert, Charles Morillo, Stéphanie Moussu, Mayte Perea López, Jean-Philippe Pertuis, Pierre Tissot, Célestine Valladon with the participation of Étienne Klein.
Since 2008, Cécile Léna, visual scenographer, artistic director of the Compagnie Léna d’Azy, has been staging stories in her living architectures, traversed by sound, light and voice. Memory and dreams are the starting point of her creations. Her spaces are the real and unreal reflection of imaginary places. She works on memory, a memory that is built by layers, recollection, memories, imagination and revelations.
For Cécile Léna, intrigued by this duality between the durability of places and the ephemerality of our lives, the question of time is crucial. Everything is in the unspeakable. By working on the physical absence of the body, she reveals them through the voice to invite the spectator to live the character and become an actor in the installation.
Cécile Léna creates spaces, plays with eras, imagines stories nourished by passions and emotions. She gives herself the freedom to design scenographic spaces without respecting a particular scale. She frees herself from the question of space and time. This temporal distortion is written with the traditional tools of theatrical illusion: trompe-l'oeil, patinas, mirrors, tulle, etc. and with sound and video techniques that create an intense immersion to serve the purpose. All these ways of telling stories stimulate the spectator's unconscious, slipping him clues so that he can, if he wishes, also write part of the story.
Her latest creations are: Échelles Célestes, Le Bureau d'Hemingway, Permanent installation Hôtel Le Splendid - Dax, Radio Daisy...
ROYAL ARTS VISIONS; Poste Restante Stopovers on the line