Montaigne

A good conversation between friends, a fragment of life, this is what Koen De Sutter promises us. With the warm and embodied presence that characterizes him, a life dedicated to the stage, he summons around him the people he loves. Some authors accompany us for a whole life, sharpen our doubts, console our worries, refine our visions. Koen De Sutter has been in dialogue with Montaigne since “almost always”. What they have in common is a taste for exchange, the possibility of being contradicted, of retracing their steps, of preferring the hypothesis to the pontificating certainty. Koen De Sutter offers us the possibility of perceiving a monument of classical philosophy in another light: simply a man who, throughout his life, wrote to try to grasp his own existence. Going against all dogma, all system, Les Essais, which mainly compose the text of the show, are a form of self-portrait in motion. And if Montaigne were speaking to us directly, through the centuries, soothing our contemporary torments? In a minimal space, Koen De Sutter, the only actor on stage accompanied by his son on the guitar, deploys a variation around the narrative of self. The show takes the form of a joyful conversation with the people he loves: the public, his son, Montaigne. No soliloquy here, but a relational richness that questions truth, friendship, filiation, doubt, death, what is just, the relationship to the other.