LES FURTIFS

Les Furtifs stages a dystopian France where everything —from cities to the most intimate spheres of life— is controlled by market power. The characters hunt furtives: metamorphic creatures made of sounds, (almost) elusive and invisible, capable of hiding in the blind spot of human perception. The world of control and mass surveillance forms the backdrop against which beings struggle—less concerned with overthrowing it than with building an alternative: a beyond, a blind angle to inhabit, an archipelago to experiment with.
Les Furtifs invites us to outpace surveillance capitalism covertly —not in the race of machine speed, but through a journey, a turning point toward a new sensitivity, fully open to human beings and to the living world.

From the book to the oratorio:
 The ontology of the furtives is based on sound. Yet there is a complicity between sound and time, flight and freedom.
 Like these over-living creatures, we propose, in our furtive variation, an alternative to the panopticians —to those who produce images in order to fix imaginations, traces, people; to identify them and profile them. The image is a form of expression heavily invested by systems of control, meticulously studied to manipulate us neurologically. We therefore place our trust in the spectators and in their desire to produce their own images.

One should never impose an imaginary that prevents the spectator from working through their own. And to awaken the imagination, nothing is more fertile than a sound.
 Les Furtifs seeks to reactivate a sensory listening, ready to welcome the emergence of the new, the unheard, the never-before-perceived.

Alain Damasio questions what “being alive” can mean in an era given over to sad passions and cut off from the living world. All his narratives carry this question: what can we aspire to today? Let us move beyond the intoxicating and illusory fantasy of eternal youth. Toward vitality! To experience the gift of being alive in its full breadth, with the learning and encounters this implies. To stand in the open.
How do we activate this vitality within us? How do we awaken our childlike part, that moment when life is buzzing, creative, playful, vibrant, furious and gentle?

Our offering is the furtive Oratorio: an orchestra of thirteen musicians and actors within a drifting cradle of lights, opening every possibility to live a sensual and sensitive experience, privileging the listening of this extraordinary narrative.

Laëtitia Pitz