No One

Cut off from the world, without any network, Rosa tries to contact roadside assistance. This could all very well end… except that the only phone, their only means of getting help, disappears without a trace.

Hostilities begin between a suspicious Roland, a mysterious helmeted motorcyclist, a mother overwhelmed by her crying child, a drunk young driver, and an angry group of tourists.

Someone will have to pay for the others…

The group will choose its scapegoat !

But who ?

A teenager hanged himself because he had red hair and was the class scapegoat. His name was Matteo, and it happened in France last February. Valentin, a young disabled person, was beaten by 3 people from his circle and thrown alive into the Meuse River, it happened in Liège, not long ago.

Just trivial news stories ? Or recurring tragedies ?

Today, we affirm : we are daily confronted with the figure of the scapegoat and the principle of lynching. Even in our lives, close to our habits. Clearly, the scapegoat is not a disappearing animal, just as tragedy is not a thing of the past. The theatre of cruelty is everywhere : in playgrounds, in open-plan offices, on the streets, among friends on Facebook, and with virtual persecutors. But also, media lynching, political lynching : condemning without trial, with an urgency to satisfy a sense of revenge and a hunger for violence.

Faced with this, countless questions overwhelm us : why is the figure of the scapegoat, for always, and seemingly for a long time to come, such a familiar and habitual mechanism ? What is at play in this process ? For the individual ? For the group ?

We quickly decided to base the writing of No One on the tension between the individual and the group. It is the creation of a spontaneous group, its mechanism, and its force that motivates our writing. Our intention is to dissect the mechanisms that lead to the dilution of responsibility and the designation of a scapegoat within the group. But also the power of the group when it leads to the worst : the lynching of the designated victim.

In this new wordless theatre creation, we choose not to attack the persecutors or the persecuted, but to depict and stage the weakness of humanity as a whole in the face of the temptation of scapegoats.

In a society of distrust where the other seems primarily a potential threat, it is the general lack of attention to our humanity that questions us in our individual and collective behavior. Because, we believe, each time, the lynched expresses a reality that the lynchers refuse to see. The scapegoat dies because they voice the truth of their desire to people who do not want to hear it. Because when they symbolically take on the blame, they allow the avoidance of asking the right questions, of seeking the true responsibilities.

Our theatre aims to awaken thought; it may help us face our own lives, shake them up, triggering an inner war that sets us in motion. However, we want to go beyond the " showing " and observing of the phenomenon, by experimenting on stage with the mechanism of the scapegoat in a sensory experience both on the stage and in the audience. Our theatrical writing seeks to be a visceral and existential experience meant to counter indifference.

In No One, we revisit themes that have obsessed us like a leitmotif since our first projects : the infinite precariousness of existence and the fragility of the human condition. Over the course of our creations, without words, we depict a world where everything is going terribly wrong, where bodies and nerves are laid bare. We question a world deprived of all speech, where humanity, threatened, tries at all costs to find meaning and necessity.

With these intentions and convictions, we now embark on the creation of No One. It is a story for 5 actors and 10 extras :

A sweltering summer night.
In a gas station in the middle of nowhere, a motorcyclist will endure the barbarity of an angry crowd.