"The Bridegroom Suites II" (extract)
by Émilie Renard

In "Bridegroom Suites II", Guy de Cointet is at the center of other artists’ attention, who are bound to him through this text, via the signs he left behind and the paths he opened up. For them, it is a matter of taking in hand a heritage, to extend it, enter into an indirect relationship with it, but without deciding who is contacting who during this transmission. How, then, to take in hand a play which is unfinished, unstable and fragile?

The play can be envisaged as a material, a source offered up to artists’ interpretations and which introduces itself into their work. This unfinished play now exists thanks to a succession of interpretations which have been made with it. It might be said that the source becomes lost as its reiterations are being deployed, and that its archives are alive. For the point is not to try to give back this play some kind of original dimension, nor to complete it, but rather to experiment with extensions, shifts, even the application of reparative actions.

The event brings together a succession of propositions of different natures: performances, videos, props, publications… What they have in common is that they use the text and respect its integrity, by presenting two characters or their equivalents, one of whom is mute and who is associated or assimilated to a mask.

Each of the guest artists has a particular relationship with “the life and death of works of art” (the title of the book that Christophe Lemaitre published in 2016), is attached to the commentaries about the work, acts as a go-between towards other artists, and takes into account the place of biography in the artists’ work. All of them, in their own way, become exegetes of others’ work and of their own, whether they literally absorb it, or analyze it at a distance, as something alien.

(...)
For her proposition, Béatrice Balcou has taken an interest in the material nature of the play’s archives – original manuscripts and typescripts, videos, masks… - as well as the person who takes care of them: Hugues de Cointet. The dispersion and instability of the archives chime with the interchangeable nature of the characters, who still have, over and above the permutations of their names, relationships based on the family bond of an uncle and a niece. As the nephew of the artist, and also a nephew of the brothers and sisters who set up the Guy de Cointet Society, Hugues de Cointet / Decointet associates several roles: he is the person who looks after this oeuvre, its memory, its circulation, its administration and its affiliations. He is the successor, go-between, registrar, exegete, and also the co-curator of "The Bridegroom Suites". He is also an artist (under the name Decointet). It is these different, conjoined relationships which Béatrice Balcou deals with, through the mute, physical presence of this multiple personality alongside the rest of the archives. The text will neither be acted, nor read out. This silent proposition is attached to the choreographic aspect of the play and makes it possible to observe the way in which the mime’s body glides and shifts towards the objects of Béatrice Balcou’s attention.