By Stéphane Patrice *
Close your Eyes, Mister Pastor is a recreational theatre of illness, an art therapy of genealogy, in which the disease is examinated to produce an autofiction – not only a theoretical theatre but a theatre that confronts intimacy and culture, a culture that integrates and explores the ancient myths, Greek and Roman texts, Euripides and Seneque, and which attempts to win the disease over.
Gilles Pastor makes theatre with disease; he tries to reduce pathos while staging it, exhibiting it, while showing intimacy, and becoming aware that this intimacy can be shared with the audience, and can be accepted in a prestigious filiation (Heracles). If disease usualy isolates people, theatrical play gives sense to life, in a complexity that the medical or family surroundings do not suspect.
Gilles pastor invites his family in his theatre; he invites us to discover his story, his imagery, his questions, his doubts; this story is built, made from other stories, other images and then reveals an art which goes through literacy, theatre, sculpture, pictures, cinema, music… But Close your eyes, Mister Pastor also meets our story, our actuality.
Close your eyes, Mister Pastor : the title sounds like a goodbye, while the performance is a gamble whose purpose is to show a way of life at the heart of epilepsy, that most of the contemporary societies use to individualise so as not to admit the social truth it represents.
Close your eyes, Mister Pastor is a stimulating performance which displays an aesthetics of body that leads us to Greek beauty.
*Stéphane Patrice teaches theatre history and philosophy at the Evry Val d’Essonne university .
