A web series designed by the Toulouse CDN
For some years, Galin Stoev incorporates video images into his shows, questioning their usefulness for acting and dramaturgy. In the fall of 2020, when writing the new artistic and cultural project that he was submitting with a view to renewing his mandate, the director of the ThéâtredelaCité–National Dramatic Center Toulouse Occitanie had moreover mentioned the wish to develop an audiovisual creation activity and digital. He did not know then that the pandemic was going to offer him, sooner than expected, the opportunity.
Forced to cancel performances ofUnbearable long embracesby Ivan Viripaev, scheduled for January 2021 in Toulouse, Galin Stoev decided to design one digital object. If its staging – where the video makes it possible to embody the appearance of ghosts as well as the thoughts of the characters – lent itself perfectly to it, a frontal capture was however discarded in favor of a mini-series, who would marry its codes. “More relevant in the eyes of Galin Stoev, this format also corresponded to the new cultural practices that appeared during confinement, in particular the unbridled consumption of films and series in streaming”, explains Stéphane Gil, co-director of the ThéâtredelaCité. As of December 2020, the CDN has moved closer to National audiovisual school from Toulouse and mobilized its entire team, immediately excited at the idea of embarking on this unprecedented adventure; which in particular favored very fruitful exchanges between live performance and audiovisual technicians. On the
€100,000 necessary for the production, the theater invested €75,000 (resulting in large part from credits provided for the operating deficit of the play, due to added equity) and received aid in the amount of €25,000 granted by the National Office for Artistic Dissemination (Onda) as part of the Living Screen scheme.
After three weeks of filming, followed by several months saved in editing and post-production, the series, made up of 6 episodes of 15 minutes was posted on May 4, 2022 on CDN’s YouTube channel. “We brought it like any other event, through the purchase of advertising space in the press”, specifies Stéphane Gil, who has already seen a large number of views for the first episode.
Audiovisual production is now included in the ThéâtredelaCité project, a new creation should soon see the light of day. Galin Stoev thus designed around his last show – The Double Inconstancy, by Marivaux – a 14-minute short film, by offering to theaters to broadcast it in the event of cancellation of performances. ” Our freedom of invention will be total, led Stéphane Gil. We could as well start from a show to imagine a production, which we inspire with a digital object during the passage to the set. »