Proposition / Show

Kâmasûtra
exactly like a crazy horse

Nov 13 to Nov 18, 2023 and Nov 29 to Dec 1, 2023 > 8:00pm

To approach the text of the Kâmasûtra on stage is to attempt to give song to an epic of desire.
I wanted this project to be like setting out on a journey, one that would patiently shake our opinions and convictions. How does this “little book”, brimming with suspense, humor, poetry and irony, which sets out to teach a knowledge of pleasure through language, and in so doing seeks to channel the all-consuming fire (Agni) of passion (Râga), question our relationship with eroticism, sexuality and love today?
Kâma, god of love, armed with his five flower arrows, was careful to arouse our desire for love…
Here, in Frédéric Boyer’s magnificent translation, I’ve chosen to give pride of place to the role played by the female figure in this “art of love”. Actress of her desire, she acts, tricks, questions and overturns the clichés that sometimes seem to surround the representations we all perhaps have of this treatise.
What if this text, written in Sanskrit probably between the 3rd and 4th centuries by a certain Mallanâga Vâtsyâyana, were more “a parodic and theatrical performance?
So let’s get to grips with these “threads of desire”; let’s debate them, let’s get to grips with them, and let’s venture into these words that carry the impossibility of expressing the totality of pleasure.

Lara Bruhl

“… The Kâmasûtra being a text of the antiquity of India (…) to read it, let’s not have our eyes too blurred with sorrow nor too worn out with disillusionment. It is perhaps the last appointment with a grammar of the desire, combined with the practical idea of a sensual existence, theatricalized, lived with formulas, ruses, syllogisms, recipes or various techniques, and poems… the greatness of this ancient text is not so much, as one believed, in its audacity as in the way it composes with our weaknesses, our wanderings, our cruelty, our impulses… “.

Frédéric Boyer
Kâmasûtra, exactly like a crazy horse
Translation from Sanskrit, adaptation and presentation, P.O.L.

A proposition by Lara Bruhl (creation, direction and adaptation)
Translation from Sanskrit and adaptation by Frédéric Boyer, Editions P.O.L
Sound design: Annabelle Brouard
Lighting design: Emmanuelle Phelippeau-Viallard
Work of the song in Sanskrit: Laurence Maman
Outside perspective: Elise Arpentinier
Visuals and costumes: Sophie Piégelin
Stage Manager: Noufel Elkahia

With: Delphine Augereau, Lara Bruhl

Duration : 1h15

Production: Un bureau de production / Cie de l’Acte / Le Milieu
Communication and broadcasting: Valérie Habert
valerie.habert.ubdp@gmail.com / 06 51 28 51 60
Administration: Stéphane Birman
unbureaudeproduction@gmail.com / 06 89 78 12 20