Les ailes du désir

Poetry gives voice!

A season of poetry, expressing the world as it is perceived, imagined, and moves both outside and within each of us.

But also exploring how poetry is created, what shapes it takes, how it filters into our everyday lives, spreads, and encounters the synchronicities that, day after day, make us sensitive to its signs, its calls, its urgency.

A poem is movement: the movement of words, rhythms, silences, the music of a voice, the cadence of a breath. A poem carries images, sensations, and free thoughts. It speaks to every individual and to everyone, because it is free from the obligation to explain. It is its own message, with form and meaning entirely intertwined.

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Across these four evenings devoted to a singular, unconventional world, poised between sharpened reality and limitless imagination, contemporary poets and poets of all time, together with the artists associated with Théâtre de Calanques, have chosen to get straight to the point: words make meaning and give the world of the senses the color of a strong humanity. They are also struggle, appeal, love, and cry. Wonder or uncertainty.

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Around the themes “poetry by women,” “desire,” “poetry and humor,” and “love,” four carte blanche evenings will take shape, with actors and musicians making themselves available to the selected poets.

Second session: Les ailes du désir by Camille Noyelle and Blaise Pettebone

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For Les ailes du désir, we chose to follow the path opened by Rimbaud—because desire brings color to life.

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Through French and international voices, mostly contemporary, we explore the thousand faces of desire: the desire for absence; the desire for freshness and radiance; the desire for flesh and blood; the desire to travel, or desire’s own journey, through the words of Maram al-Masri, Margaret Atwood, Alain Damasio, Rupi Kaur, and many others.

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These texts take shape through the voices of Camille Noyelle and Blaise Pettebone. A woman’s voice and a man’s voice—one French, the other French-American—so that desire can also be expressed through the distance between languages and cultures: the accent that comes from elsewhere, a different way of pronouncing love and longing, as if desire itself were always a little foreign to us, always setting off toward another language, another body, another shore.

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Two voices answering, searching for, and brushing against each other—as desire always seeks the other in order to exist.