Théâtre

In 2010, while he was working on God is a DJ by Falk Richter, Fabrice Murgia took off  to  venture along the legendary Route 66 which crosses the United States from East to West. The backbone of the great American body for many years, Route 66 saw its lights go out in the 1970s when a faster and more practical motorway was built. The motels are run-down, the towns are dead, but the people remain, of course. And Fabrice Murgia fell in love with this “ghost road”. “I see in it a double metaphor, both that of the decline of the USA and that of the failure of our economic system,” he stresses. “You have to see some of these abandoned towns, they are almost the Pompeii of our civilisation, whose inhabitants don’t live in our era at all. This speaks to me of the end of the world, a subject which fascinates me.” In June 2012, Fabrice set off once more along the route, with musician and composer Dominique Pauwels, the actress Viviane De Muynck and the cameraman Benoit Dervaux, to listen to the special vibrations of these abandoned sites, and to seek out the substance of a new work to be created around a journey. The images of the journey, shown on the stage, will join the other elements of the drama, in which Jos Verbist will collaborate. “It will be very musical, almost an opera, but very simple: a monologue which will respond to the images, with songs for illustration,” Fabrice announces.

Ghost Road has also been devised as the first part of a trilogy: Fabrice will later leave for Chile, to the former mining town which served as an internment camp under Pinochet’s dictatorship, and then, in 2015, for Fukushima. After the economic death of the Ghost Road, the death of commitment and the “Geocide” or the death of the earth. “The three shows will be designed as so many monologues which have to respond to each other,” hopes the director, on the threshold of a personal adventure which can doubtless only add substance to his art.