ORBIT

Repeatedly labeled a vagrant, outsider, homosexual, thief, and rebel, Jean Genet (1910–1986) remains one of France’s most renowned and arguably most controversial writers. Imprisoned, Genet began writing from his prison cell and went on to become an icon of French literature. His literary thinking and writing continually return to the time he spent as a youth in the notorious penal colony of Mettray—a prison without walls.

In eight tableaux morts, motifs from Genet’s writing are explored like a landscape. Instead of a linear narrative, physical, spatial, and psychological states intertwine to form a dense dramaturgy of music, electronics, text, bodies, and video. The work engages with Genet’s aesthetics of unreliability, homelessness, and subversion: the oppressive shadows of Mettray, the existential feeling of being imprisoned and excluded, the constant interplay between reality and fiction, the inversion of values, an eroticism suspended between violence and tenderness, and the strange relationship between an incredibly rich language and a profound sense of emptiness.

“There were no walls there, but hedges of laurel and rows of flowers; […] We were the victims of an apparently harmless foliage which, at the slightest daring movement on our part, could turn into an electric thicket, charged with such tension that it would penetrate deep into our souls.”
From: Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose, Merlin Verlag

“Mettray suddenly takes the place – not of the prison in which I sit – but of myself; and just as once on my plank bed, I embark upon the wreckage of the barge that lies, without masts and almost completely destroyed, among the flowers of the great quadrangle at Mettray.”
From: Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose, Merlin Verlag

Performance rights for the text excerpts used from the Jean Genet collected works, Volume 2 “Miracle of the Rose” and Volume 9 “Essays/Interviews”: Merlin Verlag, Gifkendorf.