“There, across the way is the Stromovka Park. Would you go there from time to time and take a walk for me? I so loved this beautiful place. Maybe if you look into the dark water of the ponds, one day, you will perhaps perceive my face.”

Austerlitz p. 248

Jérôme Combier's about this project :

On the one hand, there is the staging – a rather cinematographic set design – a priori, an imaginary soundtrack. The soundtrack for a film for which there is no preexisting image.

On the other hand, there is the inquiry about a book, its only character and its author: Jacques Austerlitz and W.G. Sebald

On stage: an actor and 7 musicians (a conductor). Stage and video equipment, a stereo sound installation (4 loud speakers).

Preparation for the project entails travel; a journey through several European countries that will be like an inquiry, collecting sounds and images. In counterpoint to the biography of Jacques Austerlitz written by Sebald (in German), is my composition journal about the overlapping footsteps of the character and the author.

Who is Jacques Austerlitz? Did he really exist? And, where exactly do all of these photos come from? They are scattered though the book as if to verify the character’s remarks and, perhaps above all, to foster this strange closeness to him.

W.G Sebald

The initial meetings between Sebald and Austerlitz took place during 1967, numerous times, in various places in Belgium: the hall of the Antwerp train station, several days later in Liege at a tavern in the industrial zone, in Brussels that same year on the Courthouse steps. The book by Sebald is laid out according to the rhythm (and the location) of these unusual and always fortuitous meetings: Brussels, Zeebrugge, London, in general, the places where Austerlitz lived. Little by little, as these meandering discussions progress, the portrait of Austerlitz comes to life.

Jacques Austerlitz was a historian, in charge of courses at an art history institute in London, who specialized in the history of architecture, particularly that of train stations. He was in the habit of taking pictures of the places he studied with an old folding Ensign camera, which explains the numerous photos found throughout the book.

After 1975, the two men lost contact but met again in 1996 accidentally as usual at the Great Eastern Hotel on Liverpool Street, in London. From then on, the narrator would regularly visit Austerlitz, at his home on Alderney Street, in the East End. At this point, Austerlitz began to tell the story of his life more precisely and the two narratives — that of Sebald describing the meeting and that of Austerlitz relating precise elements of his life to Sebald — tend then to become confused.

Several events in the life of Austerlitz

A childhood in Wales, at Bala, adopted into the home of a protestant minister. He discovers his real name, not Dafydd Elias but rather Jacques Austerlitz, while studying at Oxford and after the death of his adoptive parents. Several days of vacation spent at Barmouth on the coast of Wales. Then, the search for his origins that leads him to Prague where he learns that he was born before 1939. The enigma of his father who fled the Nazi regime in France, that of his mother, whom he learns was deported to Treblinka. Finding Agatà again, the old neighbor from Sporkova Street. The route taken during his childhood when his mother chose to send her son away from Prague with a transport of children to London, at the time that Nazi Germany was about to invade Czechoslovakia.

What is troubling about this tale is the visual evidence that Sebald gives us, the photos of places, but also of people: Austerlitz himself as a child, a photo of his mother, that of his friend Gerald Fitzpatrick…

Did Austerlitz really exist? And, if not, then who are these people? How did they all find their way back to Sebald? Who took the photos that we are told belong to the author’s personal “archives”.

Theme

The primary subject of this project is memory in its concomitance with oblivion.

Many of the places mentioned are laden with a past that tends to fade away: the Breendok Fort, the house in Barmouth where as an adolescent, Austerlitz spent several summers, the city of Theresienstadt peopled by ghosts… whose presence lives on, due solely to the simple fact of mentioning them, naming them, describing them.

Austerlitz, a historian himself, sees his past being erased from his own memory. He later learned that no one knew what had become of his father. To that is added the quantity of people in the book who have been photographed, and we can only measure as if by refraction, their effacement into oblivion.

The second subject is roaming, once again between memory and oblivion, but also through many languages (both the narrator and Austerlitz converse in French, and then in English, with the book being written in German) and many European countries. In the extension of that idea, there is a reflection on chance (the person who brings Sebald and Austerlitz together several times) and on empty spaces (those in the cities where Austerlitz gets lost) that particularly grips me.

Counter-inquiry

I imagine a third voice, my own, which would be a continuing perspective on that first continuing perspective. I plan to keep a journal that would keep track of my research, my encounters and my path in the footsteps of Sebald/Austerlitz. This journal will be written in the first person, in French and will appear from time to time, interspersed into the discussions between Sebald and Austerlitz, reframing my own inquiries and investigation.

Voices

The actor will have several voices. As yet undetermined, because at the start, there is German, the book’s original language, and then the languages that the two characters, Jacques Austerlitz and the narrator, converse in; first French, then English after 1996. My journal will be written in French.

Places

Along the path of Sebald/ Austerlitz are the following countries, and possibly the following places:

Belgium: The hall of the Central Antwerp Station / the industrial zone in Liege / the Mont de la Potence in Brussels (the courthouse) / Zeebrugge (promenade and ferry)

Great Britain: London (Bloomsbury), London (Greenwich Park), London (Alderney Street) Wales the odd names like Bala but also Llanwddyn, Vyrnwy, Abertridwr

Czechoslovakia: Prague (a hotel on Kampa Island), the state archives in Karmelitskà , 12 Sporkova Street, Stromovka Park.

France: Paris (Le Havane bistro on boulevard Auguste Blanqui), Paris (rue Barrault)

Stage set

Proposition made to Pierre Nouvel: 3 spaces.

1/A long screen, like a cinema screen onto which images filmed by Pierre Nouvel will be projected, retrieved from places visited, which harbored the presence of Sebald /Austerlitz: the industrial zone in Liege, Greenwich Park in London, the building at 12 Sporkova Street in Prague. These images will be retro-projected.

2/ A space for the musicians to be determined, stage right or stage left, or perhaps if possible in the central axis behind the screen.

3/ A virtual space, a in-between space, in front of the screen where the actor will perform either in a fantastical form of projected holograms — offstage and filmed in real time — or actually “live”.

Contact

Emilie Delorme, Festival d'Aix-en-Provence,
Lukas Pairon, Ictus director
Editions Lemoine, Benoît Walther, + 33 1 56 68 86 74,

A production of the Festival Aix-en-Provence, in a coproduction with the Opéra de Lille and Ictus

Music : Jérôme Combier

Scenography : Pierre Nouvel

Light design : Bertrand Couderc

Stage direction : Jérôme Combier / Pierre Nouvel

Actor : Johan Leysen

Musicians : Ictus, 6 musiciens (clarinet, trombone, prepared piano, flute, viola, cello )