“In accordance with the message Cocteau left on his tomb — ‘I remain with you’ — Théophile Choquet has succeeded, through the stained-glass windows and his own creation, in allowing ‘Cocteau’ to remain and resonate within us and among us.”David Gullentops, director of the Cahiers Jean Cocteau and professor at the University of Brussels
A play written by Christian Schmitt, adapted and performed by Théophile Choquet
A tribute to Jean Cocteau’s stained-glass windows
An artist of metamorphosis, light, osmosis, movement and rhythm, Jean Cocteau created stained-glass windows of exceptional quality for Saint-Maximin Church in Metz during the final two years of his life, from 1962 to 1963. Fourteen bays containing twenty-four windows, they are all imbued with a rare poetic intensity and bear witness to a startlingly prophetic artistic vision.
The Man with Raised Arms takes its audience on a journey through the extraordinary story of the windows of Saint-Maximin Church in Metz, Jean Cocteau’s final masterpiece. For the artist, these windows combine Greek and Roman mythology with pagan and animal figures, forming a link between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
Calling upon theatre, music, dance and physical action to evoke the forces of nature and the spirit, the performance draws the audience directly into Cocteau’s mystical world: a dreamlike realm in which the sacred and the profane mingle, seeking not to solve the mystery of the world but to make us experience it fully.
The staging, designed especially for Saint-Maximin Church in Metz, allows spectators to move through the building during the performance and contemplate Jean Cocteau’s stained-glass windows.
The Man with Raised Arms was the first public event devoted to the windows of Saint-Maximin, created by Jean Cocteau in the early 1960s. Long overlooked, Christian Schmitt’s play seeks both to redress an injustice and to bring this twentieth-century masterpiece to wider attention.
First performed on 17 September 2016
A theatrical challenge
The creation of Christian Schmitt’s play The Man with Raised Arms at Saint-Maximin Church in Metz was one of the most important artistic adventures in which I have had the opportunity to take part. It was an immense challenge on several levels. The preparation of the performance required me to adopt an entirely new approach.
I already knew Saint-Maximin well, having regularly performed literary recitals there with musicians. This time, however, I had to reconsider the space and its possibilities in relation both to the play’s dramatic structure and to the one Jean Cocteau had chosen for his windows.
The freedom of Cocteau’s visual narrative and its wealth of symbols led me to develop an unconventional, mobile, site-specific staging. The aim was to present, in a series of tableaux, nothing less than a rite of passage from the earthly world to the hereafter, moving between the central choir and the Gournay Chapel. The nocturnal illumination of the windows — an integral part of the performance — also required the audience to move physically through the church.
To make the many correspondences between the windows easier to follow, Christian Schmitt and I agreed upon an adaptation of the narrative. In the first act, an ageing Jean Cocteau stands before the audience and begins a shamanic ritual, consisting of a dance followed by a passage through a state of symbolic death. The second act plunges into the mythological world: Cocteau, now immortal, tells the audience that his quest for eternity has succeeded.
In terms of performance, the challenge lay both in adapting sensitively to the church, with its physical and acoustic constraints, and in allowing mythological and esoteric figures to flow through my body as an actor. The working process, derived from my collaboration with the Brazilian company Taanteatro in São Paulo, culminated in the use of “corporeal writing”: bringing Cocteau’s graphic universe to life through bodily movement, with gesture becoming a line drawn in space.
Many other stages of reflection could be mentioned, for the performance required different dimensions of work, aesthetics and thought to be brought together.
I would like to thank everyone who helped make the production possible: Robert Scholtus, parish priest of Saint-Maximin, for his support and trust; the City of Metz; and the team of the Sites et Monuments de Moselle association. Together, they enabled us to offer a “theatrical tribute”: an ephemeral celebration of Cocteau’s longing for beauty and a journey into the magic and flamboyance of his poetic world.
Théophile Choquet