Archived: Sylvia

Sylvia World Theater Festival – Fabrice Murgia

CIE ARTARA, Brussels, Belgium

Director: Fabrice Murgia

Music: An Pierlé

Director and camera of the film: Juliette Van Dormael

Set design: Rudy Sabounghi

Costume design: Marie-Hélène Balau

Research and Dramaturgical Collaboration: Cécile Michel

Video and light design: Giacinto Caponio

Assistant Director: Justine Lequette

Set design assistant: Julien Soulier

Video design assistant: Dimitri Petrovic

Production: Cie Artara

Co-productions: National Theater of Wallonia in Brussels, Theater Namur, Central – La Louvière, Mars- Mons Arts de la Scène, Mons Foundation 2025 –Biennale 2018 -2019, Printemps des Comédines Montpellier, Comédie de Saint-Etienne- Center Dramatique National, Theater Jean Vilar de Vitry-sur-Scène, le Carreau –Scène Nationale de Forbach i l’Est mosellan, Theaters in Dracénie-Draguignan and Coop asbl, Shelter Productions

Performers: Valerie Bachau, Clara Bonnet, Solene Cizeron, Vanessa Compagnucci, Vinora Epp, Léone François, Magali Pignalut, Ariane Rousseau, Scarlet Tummers

Quartet: An Pierlé (vocals and piano), Keon Giessen (bass clarinet, saxophone, guitar and percussion), Hendrik Lasure (keyboards and computers), Casper Van de Velde (percussion)

ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE

Fabrice Murgia has studied the diaries, short stories and essays of Sylvia Plath in search of the soul of this brilliant artist. The resulting play is in the form of a pop opera for the singer and nine actresses, composed by Belgian pianist and singer An Pierlé, and performed with the accompaniment of her quartet. Beautiful melancholic music builds and enriches the emotive portrait of Sylvia Plath. As a leading figure in feminism more focused on poetry than concrete engagement, Sylvia Plath has struggled all her life with the need to write and fulfill the American dream of the 1950s and 1960s in the form of the perfect mother and wife. These two deeply contradictory concepts of life also led to her death. The result of that struggle was the novel Glass Bell, published in 1963. To evoke that female voice, Fabrice Murgia created a layered piece, structured from numerous levels and conflicts within the person of this great American poet. Murgia spreads the image of Sylvia Plath by connecting her with other writers such as Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, Emily Brontë and others.

The originality of this play lies in the mixing of genres; theater and film. During the performance, the viewer sees the creation of the film in real time on the big screen. The camera is in the hands of the virtuoso Juliette Van Dormael, who dissolves the writer, following the movements of different parts of Sylvia’s personality from the beginning to the end of the play.

Fabrice Murgia

Fabrice Murgia, born in 1983 in Verviers, Belgium, graduated from the Liège Conservatory, in the class of Jacques Delcuvellerie. After graduation, he performed as an actor in theater, television and film. He is currently writing and directing for the theater, and recently made his debut as a film director. Murgia is the founder and artistic director of CIA ARTARA. In 2009 he wrote and directed his first play entitled Les Chagrin des ogres, and in the same year he became a permanent external collaborator of the National Theater of Wallonia in Brussels, where in 2010 he directed the successful plays Life: reset-Chronique d’uneville epuisée / Life: reset – The Chronicle of the Exhausted City and Dieu est un DJ / God is a DJ, to whom he shaped a unique stitch, using modern stage vocabulary to address present generations. In 2012, he wrote a play entitled Exils, which launched the ambitious European project Villes enscène / Cities on Stage, which brings together seven European directors in a production that deals with how to live in multicultural European cities. He staged his text Children of Nowhere at the Santiago Festival in Milo in 2014 in collaboration with the LOD music theater. For the Avignon Festival, he staged a play based on his own text Notre peur de n’être / Our Fear of Non-Existence, while at the Limoges Opera he staged the circus opera Daral Shaga in collaboration with Feria Music. In 2016, he became the artistic director of the National Theater of Wallonia in Brussels, and in the same year he wrote and directed the text Black Clouds for the Naples Theater Festival …