S 62° 58′, W 60° 39′

To the fathers I keep staging

The wreck of a sailboat, a vast icy landscape on the background and a crew of hopeless survivors. S 62° 58’, W 60° 39’ starts with an impossible and frightening situation: to survive. To go back to the life they knew. It is unclear how they got stuck in this predicament. Their GPS coordinates – S 62°58’, W 60° 39’ – indicate their precise location in the Arctic water of Deception Island. But before we get any answers, a performer adresses the director. The story falls apart to reveal something else, a delicate trauma that has fueled the director’s oeuvre. A trauma the performers do not want to play anymore.

In Franck Chartier’s newest creation, fragility takes center stage. A search for truth and authentic emotions takes everyone past their limits. The performers lay bare their emotions and lives, but also fight against the director’s push to go even deeper. After years of sacrifice, willing or forced, they start to wonder what would happen if they refused. Fiction and reality are ruptured in an attempt to escape the vicious cycles of violence. Performers try to stage a revolution, an end to everything, a new beginning. But that might just be another work of fiction.

In a constant rewinding and repeating process of rehearsing trauma, set against an unrelenting Arctic landscape,
S 62° 58’, W 60° 39’ touches on new discussions about what we want to create on stage in this day and age. Is this the only way we can process our traumas? What poetry do we want to leave behind? What message? Or should we actually stop creating for once? Should the director let go of it all?