Proposition / Work in progress

Kâmasûtra
exactly like a crazy horse

13, 14 April 2023 > 8:00pm

To approach the text of the Kâmasûtra on stage is to attempt to give song to an epic of desire.
How does this “little book” overflowing with suspense, humor, poetry, and irony, which undertakes to teach through language a knowledge of pleasure and thereby seeks to channel the devouring fire (Agni) of passion (Râga), questions today our relationship to eroticism, sexuality and love?
And first of all, what do we know about love? Can pleasure be taught? Is there an art to love?
Kâma, god of love took care, armed with his five arrows of flowers, to excite our desire for love.
And if this text, written in Sanskrit probably between the third and fourth century by a certain Mallanaga Vâtsyâyana was more “a parodic and theatrical performance?
For this project, I wished to approach the magnificent translation and adaptation that Frédéric Boyer offers us, as a departure on a journey, a journey that would shake our opinions, our convictions, with patience.
I chose to give a primordial place to the role of the female figure in this “art of love”. As an actress of her desire, she acts, cunningly, questions and upsets the clichés that sometimes seem to surround the representations that we all may have of this treaty.

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 (choice of texts and direction)
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

With: Delphine Augereau, Lara Bruhl

Estimated duration : 1h15

Production: Cie de l’Acte / Un bureau de production / Le Milieu
Communication and broadcasting: Stéphane Birman
unbureaudeproduction@gmail.com / 06 89 78 12 20