REVIEW: The Festival d'Avignon Presents TERCES By Johann de Guillerm

Across the Rhône from Avignon, in the picturesque town of Villeneuve, sits Villeneuve en Scène. The site, usually associated with the Festival “Off,” contains food trucks, a bar, picnic areas, and small courts where locals play rounds of boules. Toward the back of the festival grounds stands a green circus tent. For the Avignon “In,” I expect a remarkable variety of spaces (cloisters, quarries, high schools) but I did not anticipate encountering a circus tent in the middle of a field. Inside this tent, Johann Le Guillerm presents Terces, a work that represents the culmination of thirty years of experimentation, development, and obsessive precision. The result is a series of fascinating theatrical vignettes exploring the hidden potentialities of objects, bodies, and physical laws.

The piece is circus, but closer to Cirque du Soleil than Barnum and Bailey. The intimate staging places spectators on bleachers facing one another across a runway stage with a central ring. At intervals, lighting instruments and props are wheeled into place along the perimeter of the playing space. Hervé Gary’s lighting design remains somber and mysterious throughout. Two spotlights move, seemingly of their own accord, from the rafters above, concealed within black accordion-like fabric reminiscent of an antique camera. Alexandre Pique’s score combines ambient sound, vocalizations, and electronic beats, creating a socially non-specific atmosphere of meditative wonder. Le Guillerm enters wearing a gray costume by Paul Andriamanana Rasoamiaramanana. Its carefully structured, soft fabrics reveal his muscular back without reducing the body to spectacle. His performance incorporates acrobatics and clowning, but through an American lens, he appears less a circus performer than a master magician.

Aesthetically, Terces recalls both the material investigations of the Bauhaus and the strange visual discoveries of early silent cinema. Most sections last only a few minutes, and some do not feature Le Guillerm at all. Instead, sculptures emerge, transform, and reveal their own unexpected possibilities. In one sequence, a metal sculpture resembling an enormous jack descends from the ceiling. Suspended from the rafters, it twists and turns slowly, transforming its fall into an accidental dance. Once the string reaches its limit, the object collapses into a series of separate metal bars. Le Guillerm enters, picks up one of the pieces, and unfurls it like a lightsaber, transforming industrial material into a tool of play and imagination.

Other sculptural moments feature Le Guillerm himself performing with an affectless coolness. He rides a beautiful wooden nautilus onto the stage. He sits between two stacks of precisely arranged yet precariously balanced books, becoming a human keystone within their unstable architecture. At the conclusion of the work, he uses dozens of two-meter-long wooden rods to construct three enormous sculptures within the playing space. The first is a gravity-defying wave that stretches across the entire stage. The second is four floor canteleavered tower. Lastly, he constructs a dome that covers the entire central ring. It is large enough for him to sit beneath and stable enough for him to stand atop. After an evening defined by continuous wonder, this final act provides the clearest demonstration of risk. Like Terces itself, the construction reveals the accumulated knowledge of countless experiments, failures, and revisions, culminating in the fleeting moment when discovery appears inevitable.

Photo Credit by Christophe Raynaud de Lage

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