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L’Oratorio d’Aurélia is inspired by the magic of music hall, variety and circus, conjuring up a concoction of theatrical mystery and dream-bound delirium. In this upside-down world of improbable encounters and incongruous characters, nothing is what it seems. There is no beginning and no end, just the myriad pieces of a visual puzzle, governed by the strange logic of our imagination.
Victoria Thierrée Chaplin directs her daughter Aurélia in this piece of fantasia mixed with dance, music, acrobatics, puppetry and illusion. A performance which brings dreams to life and takes the audience on a journey to a place where the impossible can happen.
Aurélia Thierrée has been performing on stage since early childhood. She began her unusual career in her parents’ celebrated „cirque imaginaire” and „cirque invisible”. During recent years she has worked with diverse film artists, including Milos Forman, Coline Serreau, Jacque Baratier. For several years, she toured with the London cult band The Tiger Lillies, in The Tiger Lillies Circus. She has also worked in variety and cabaret (mainly in Berlin). Aurélia collaborated with her mother, Victoria Thierrée Chaplin, to create L’Oratorio d’Aurélia for the stage. L’Oratorio was inspired by medieval drawings that depict worlds upside down and inside out.
Directed and created by, sound and stage design, costumes: Victoria Thierrée Chaplin Choreography: Victoria Thierrée Chaplin, Jaime Martinez, Armando Santin Lighting design: Laura de Bernadis Lights: Olivier Brochart
Actress: Aurélia Thierrée Dance: Aidan Treays Photography: Richard Haughton
Supported by: Budapest Spring Festival, French Institute, National Cultural Fund, Theatre “L’Avant-Scène”, Cognac
About the Thierrée–Chaplin family – A vast realm of imagination and visual genius
A word from David Gothard...
References of a lecture he gave at the ICA in January 2005 as part of the London International Mime Festival
A creative explosion of visual theatre in our time has surprising antecedents. Many of them are visual geniuses, to deliberately use that precious word. They would include the likes of Grimaldi, the bridge from Elizabethan clowing, and Little Tich in Music Hall. They are often as surrealist as Spike Milligan, let us say, yet always of the people. Always, they express beauty. All are assumed to have disappeared with their visual and comedy language to the land of dodo. Frederico Fellini himself, in his final films, recorded the waning of the visual joy in variety and music hall (a quintessential English term despite Paris), for example. Indeed it is as if their relative weakness as great films was born of the elusive nature of the subject matter that Fellini, like his sensitive audience, seemed to believe would never again be seen in any recognisable form under the takeover bid of technology as entertainment. For Fellini, the desire to capture for us all and forever the poignancy and transience of this was on a pair with Tarkovsky’s quest to capture spirituality in film language. We now sadly realise that the relationship is a fine one. The issue at the heart of the matter was the impossibility of the magic of performance if technology, particularly television, over-exposed the familiarity of the nuance including its edge with the audience. The subtle humanity of the séance, if you like, explodes with the neon.
Ironically, Fellini’s elegiac celebration in his own television film, Clowns, nips in amongst the legendary families over generations of the greatest circus artists, a young couple Victoria Chaplin and Jean-Baptiste Thierrée in a successful attempt to add youth and hope to the line-up of matriarchs and patriarchs. His casting and judgement were superbly accurate, of course. The former was from no circus family; gypsy and sad casualty of music hall more like. The latter was a leading classical and film actor adored by Roger Planchon and Alain Resnais and his Burgundy country folk were not so far from the roots of Genet.
A few decades on, like Franca Rame and Dario Fo their lives are packed with intensive touring in European theatres and beyond to Japan and America in small towns and big cities where they help to keep alive the crucibles and jewels of performance, the very buildings themselves. You have only to imagine the touring opera houses, the eighteenth century theatres of Bari, Mantua, Florence, Hamburg, Stockholm, a hundred others and their modern counterparts. All of them need the oxygen of their touring. Above all, the mystery of the performance remains.
In recent years they are celebrated as the blessed godparents of what is seen as “new circus” in Europe but their kingdom of the imagination is far broader. It is neither “new circus” nor “new vaudeville”. It is not even circus nor vaudeville without the “new”. As Fellini understood, it happens in the moment and purely as live performance that creates beauty and magic for everyman. It is then gone till the next tour. Franca and Dario know just how to keep alive the same secret, night after night, stand up after stand up, giving us the closest we shall ever see to what “commedia” really meant. In them all we are blessed. We never thought to see their likes.
Soon after the appearance of the young couple in that film, two pairs of bandy legs appeared with them through battered suitcases, running around the stage just a couple of times before their father, Jean-Baptiste, picked them up and dumped them in the wings to get on with their homework. Those tiny legs became a Hammersmith institution year after year at Riverside Studios in seasons shared with Kantor, Miro, the Bread and Puppet Company and a thousand other bastions of the world’s visual performance. A plaque should mark the spot. Thus was born the magnificence of Aurélia and James Thierrée.
