In the theatre, the poetry of the plastic bag inflated by the wind

The plastic bag, this formless, impure object, which takes more than four hundred years to decompose and return to nature, seemed a priori on the wrong track to offer a great moment of poetry. And yet, director and performer Phia Ménard did it, with a small cult show created in 2008 and which, since then, has not stopped touring everywhere: The Afternoon of a Foehn.

When we discovered it, it was a delight to see this cloud of colored sachets become a corps de ballet, with its strange and graceful little creatures, like aerial bibendums dancing to the music of Claude Debussy – Afternoon for a faun, but also Nocturnes and Dialogues of the Wind and the Sea. The show provoked a very particular emotion, in which undoubtedly entered both eco-anxiety and nostalgia for a world where we did not ask ourselves so many questions as today, and where the bag plastic was a sort of extension of the hand.

How did Phia Ménard pull off such a prodigy, people wondered, amazed to see these faunas of industrial times evolve with a freedom worthy of their mythological ancestors, without anything or anyone, apparently, guiding them? We may know, when we are interested in the art of the puppet, that any material can be animated, giving life to plastic bags and making them autonomous beings was not obvious. Because, here, the creatures are not connected to any wire, any rod, any hand.

Depressions and air pockets

There is, however, a great manipulator behind the jinns of Phia Ménard: the wind. And, to manipulate the wind itself, there is human intervention. before imagining The Afternoon of a foehn, Phia Ménard had created another show, Doggy Bag (2007), in which she created a fabulous snowstorm with white plastic bags. It is moreover with Doggy Bag that the director has honed the technique which she then deployed in The Afternoon of a foehn : a device made up of fans arranged in a hexagonal manner, and whose breaths of air are more or less directed by a puppeteer equipped with an umbrella and a long coat. With these objects, the manipulator creates depressions or air holes that allow controlling the trajectories of the puppets without having to touch them.

Phia Ménard: “I like plastic: it’s a material that offers endless possibilities for making, transforming and playing”

There is therefore nothing but very artisanal and empirical in this show, at the start of which we see the puppeteer making the creatures on sight, with three strokes of scissors and adhesive on the bags, and these come to life and begin to dance in inflating with air. ” Of the Doggy BagI wanted to recreate a kind of dream, with industrial materials, Phia Ménard remembers today, at a time when his show is about to leave for a new season of touring. Like all artists, I think, I love plastic: it’s a material that offers endless possibilities for making, transforming and playing. The plastic bag has become the symbol of the worst of our consumer society. He’s our new pariah, and as such he’s interesting. Several generations of humans have lived with this object in their most daily lives, it was a sort of friend-object linked to basic needs – to eat, to move around, to move one’s food… – and, now, we take aware that it is destructive and that we will have to do without it. It questions the trace we leave, too. The poetry of this material is its contradiction. »

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