He put in so much work that his goal to enter the professional sphere became in reach. But his destiny was brutally crushed when he hurt himself and was forced to change directions. He landed in a theatre almost by chance, and now dedicates his life to it with the same diligence. He is swept up by the force of language and poetry, of the human relations deployed on stage. Yet his love for the field and the team are still there, crouched in a corner of his soul, alongside the intoxicating feeling aroused by scoring a goal or by making a ball alive and wondrous, bitterly persuading himtheatre is merely a substitute for his first love. Paul-Émile is shown at different ages, coming and going between the field and the stage; he thinks he is done with football, but it quickly becomes clear he hasn’t reached his goal yet.
With Marie Rémond and Sébastien Pouderoux, Clément Bresson created André, a piece on tennis player André Agassi, then Vers Wanda (Towards Wanda) on American actress Barbara Loden. For this solo piece, he dug through his experience as a young football player at the Reims stadium, especially the Championnat National U17 matches he played against future French stars. The character he crafted is a “child who wants to show the world that football is an art form”, intertwining the two fields with humour and passion. He talks about how lonely it can feel to train intensively in the hope to attainperfection, how admirative he is of great artists who can transcend technique into excellence. As his life reaches half-time, young actor Paul-Émile is writing his goodbye note to football.

NEW PRODUCTION

Text, direction and performance: Clément Bresson
Lighting: Thomas Veyssière
Original music and sound: Samuel Robineau
Artistic collaboration: Ariane Dumont-Lew

With the voices of Guillaume Gallienne, Julie Sicard, Didier Sandre, Danièle Lebrun, Yoann Gasiorowski, and Philippe Collin