Baubus is one of the most mysterious characters in the Greek Orphic tradition. Her story is intertwined to with that of Demeter, goddess of fertility and harvest. Who, distraught over the loss of her abducted daughter Persephone from Hades, god of the underworld, withdraws from the world, causing the rivers to dry up: nothing will grow again. To lure the goddess out into the open, the priestesses throw a party with music and dancing. Nothing, however, seems to shake Demeter's lethargic grief. Until to when an elderly nurse, Baùbo, approaches her. Amid jokes and vulgar stories, the woman lifts her robes showing her sex to Demeter, who bursts into liberating laughter, and with that she returns to the world.

Text by Laura Zangarini

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The myth of Baùbo is the inspiration for the new creation of Jeanne Candel, a French actress and director born in 1979, who after the success of Demi-Véronique and Le Crocodile trompeur / Didon et Énée (2022), returns with her company la vie brève to Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto with Baùbo / on the art of not being dead. Not a literal representation of the myth, but an opportunity to wander through the ardors, contradictions and unpredictability of the heart. A "reverie about passion," Candel calls it, composed by weaving together fragments from the works of Buxtehude, Musil, Schütz and other materials, a musical and theatrical traversal between the extreme states into which passion throws us in its different forms. "We have all experienced the end of a love affair, but we all react differently" - the actress and director begins. "However, there is a moment when our state changes, when life takes over. This was what I was interested in addressing, the transition into another state, another world." Baùbo / on the art of not being dead, Candel continues, "is the story of the rebirth of a woman (played from Pauline Huruguen) who has descended into her deepest inner hells and tries to to overcome them. The play is composed from two parts, evoking the story of this woman who has just experienced a great love affair, a devastating passion for a man, a man she cannot to let go of. She is stuck, grieving. Filled with suffering. It is as if she cannot move beyond this love, almost as if it were an inner death. In the second part of the creation, however, there is a reversal, we find ourselves in another form-actually it is just another perspective on the same theme, another way of staging passion no longer as a fable but as a path to the discovery of what the tale hides. We enter another world, into the story of Baubus, a Greek mythological figure (but tracks of the myth can also be found in the Sumerians, Egypt and even ancient Japan, ed.), a priestess who meets the goddess Demeter, in despair at having lost her daughter Persephone, kidnapped and offered in marriage to the god Hades. Demeter, sunk in grief, wanders in a state of sadness through all the lands, searching for Persephone. Until Baubus appears to her: he wants to snatch her from the melancholy that numbs her, he wants to restore her to life."

Baubus, the director continues, provokes the goddess "with an incongruous, discordant gesture: she lifts her skirt and shows her sex to Demeter. An obscene gesture. That releases the light. Demeter bursts to laughing, a salutary shock that restores her joy of life, that returns her to the living. An allegory that embodies the power and persistence of desire, the power of laughter as a life drive and instrument of rebirth." So the priestess has led the goddess back to life with a symbolic gesture that represents to once fertility, desire, creation; but that is also funny, comical. Observes Candel: "I wonder, what made Baùbo to lift her robe, to make that provocative gesture? I found it crazy and totally absurd." In the darkest and darkest moments of our lives, life always finds a way. Baùbo's act, the artist argues, "is the equivalent of a creative gesture. I believe that artistic creation has the power to awaken, to stimulate certain forces within us, to to which we pay no attention, however. With Pierre-Antoine Badaroux, music director of the project, we enjoyed to working in the intersection between these worlds, conscious and unconscious. There are different colors and textures in the show, a spectrum of emotions, of suggestions that together form a very particular polyphony."

An important part of the soundtrack to Candel's production is opera by Heinrich Schütz (1585 - 1672), among the masters of the German Baroque, author of a music to at once austere and luminous, freely reworked from Badaroux and the musicians for a heterogeneous ensemble consisting from violin, saxophone, classical and electric guitar, double bass and percussion. to it is accompanied by the carnal, velvety voice of mezzo-soprano Pauline Leroy, capable of softly blurring the song into silence. After all, in her theater, the director points out, "the text is one material among others. In Demi-Véronique, a creation based on Mahler's Fifth Symphony that I brought to the Festival two years ago, for example, the words were spoken only during the prologue. Everything else was music, bodies, gestures. Mine is not a theater of text, but a theater of images and movements." Tableaux vivants that emerge from "an inner chaos that for me" - Candel points out - "is something very fruitful. When I create, I like the vertigo of the risk of going toward what I do not know. "
The themes that run through his creations are "universal," such as mourning and desire. "In Baùbo there is also disobedience, something more provocative. What interests me," the actress adds, "however, is to be able to 'play' with the viewer, so when I work I do not ask myself what I would like the audience to wonder about: I want it to be what is on stage to awaken, agitate, excite, provoke the unconscious of the viewer. With this creation I try above all to open inner landscapes that put the viewer in front of his visions, his suggestions." Does art save us? "If there was more art, if we put art everywhere the world would be a better place"-the director states without hesitation. "If I didn't believe that I would stop making it, because I think art can change lives. Every form of art: literature, poetry, music, film, painting. But it is also true that, to sometimes, I am so desperate that I wonder what is the point of making art. A question that I think interrogates everyone. Perhaps the joyful, life-filled bodies we see on stage, the sharing of this collective ritual that is theater, can help us to find an answer. I was a teenager when I first saw a work by Pina Bausch on stage. It was a shock, I was going through a difficult time and her art had the power to save me, it changed my life. Seeing that performance pushed me toward the great desire to create." A rebellious vitality that continues to burn in Candel.