![]() | Born in 1924 in (Monaco). Died im 2017 | Biographie Bibliographie Liste expositions |
In 1945, after the war, he joined the Parisien Liberia as a legal columnist. This was when he began signing his work Armand Gatti. In 1954, after spending six months with the animal tamer, Paul Leroyer, he was awarded the Albert Londres prize for his article Envoyé spécial dans la cage aux Fauves (Special correspondent in the animal cage). He became an international reporter, working with several newspapers ( France Soir, Paris Match, L'Express, Libération). He was reporting in Guatemala when the government was overthrown. As soon as he returned, he wrote his first play, Le Quetzal, which was inspired by his stay with the Indian guérilleros. His work as a journalist gave him the opportunity to travel the world over (Siberia, Nicaragua, China, Algeria, the USSR…). "I haven't forgotten anything about these trips. They gave me the opportunity to get to know the world better, particularly in the context of the destiny of men " (1), says Armand Gatti. In 1998, he recalled China in these terms: "That's where I discovered great human writing, above all, their theatre which is carried by signs. With this, you live in an eternal plural, without the realistic aspect. At each instant, you discover a thousand horizons and a thousand possibilities. It is pure poetry. And, above all else, I met Mao who will always remain one of my masters ". During this period, Armand Gatti continued his investigations into the camps, asylums, slums, and the 'maquis'…
In 1957, Le Poisson noir was published by Seuil - an Emperor, consumed by his thirst for power, sets out on his all-consuming quest for the secret of immortality. He dreams of a battle with a fish with a man's head…. The work was awarded the Fénéon Prize. Starting with his earliest plays, Armand Gatti's theatre has always brought together numerous places and periods, mingling historical context and imaginary transposition. In 1959, Agnès Varda, who was then a photographer with T.N.P., gave one of Armand Gatti's texts to Jean Vilar and the director decided to stage Le Crapaud-Buffle at the TNP-Théâtre Récamier. That same year, Armand Gatti gave up journalism to commit himself fully and definitively to the theatre. Right up to 1968, he participated in the adventure of the Théâtre Institutionnel Populaire. Speaking of Jean Vilar, Armand Gatti said: "He is the one I call my first father. The two others are Piscator and Mao Tse Tung.".
In 1960, Armand Gatti made his first film, L'Enclos – a film on the subject of concentration camps, which won prizes at Cannes and in Moscow. He published L'Enfant-Rat: a series of destinies affected by the remaining memories of experiences in a Nazi salt mine. Three of Armand Gatti's plays were staged in 1962: Le Voyage du Grand'Tchou, directed by Roland Monod at Marseille's Théâtre Quotidien, a canto of fables or "the municipal life of a small French town translated by a cat's vision of the Mayor"; La Deuxième Existence du camp de Tatenberg, produced by Gisèle Tavet at the Théâtre des Célestins in Lyon, a play that Gatti says "evokes how, once the gates of the camps are closed, the deportees took away a part of the camp with them." and La Vie imaginaire de l'éboueur Auguste G. This latter, with a scenography by Jacques Rosner at Villeurbanne's Théâtre, recounts the events and encounters in the life of Auguste G. – the double of Armand Gatti's father – as he agonises after his mortal wound inflicted by the police. Armand Gatti's second film, El Otro Cristobal, represented Cuba at the Cannes festival.
Armand Gatti wrote a number of scenarios, Le château, Le Parcours du combattant, L'Affiche rouge, Antoine Bloyé, Les Katangais… all of which were refused at various stages of their creation. He directed his own play, Chroniques d'une planète provisoire, at the Théâtre du Capitole in Toulouse. Two years later, in 1964, he staged Le poisson noir. That same year saw the first reading of Note tranchée chaque jour, which draws its inspiration from the Cuban revolution. In 1966, he produced his play, Chant public devant deux chaises électriques at the Théâtre National Populaire, Palais de Chaillot in Paris – the play highlights the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, as well as other high points of the class struggle in the United States. In Saint-Etienne, he created Un homme seul – a communist leader taking refuge in a cave meditates on the meaning of his combat. At the Théâtre Daniel-Sorano in Toulouse, Armand Gatti staged his play, V comme Vietnam, which the University Inter-union Collective for action for peace in Vietnam had commissioned from the author. In 1968, Guy Rétoré staged the play Les Treize Soleils de la rue Saint-Blaise at the Théâtre de l'Est Parisien in Paris. This was based on exchanges between members of the theatre placed in "the situation of author". At the Théâtre Universitaire in Strasbourg, Jean Hurstel produced La Cigogne, a drama set in Japan after the atomic explosion, where seven survivors are drawn together by the memory and hope of a little girl who has just died. In 1968, for diplomatic reasons based on the request of the Spanish government, one of his plays, La Passion du général Franco, was banned as it was being rehearsed at the TNP.
Armand Gatti left France in 1969, settling in Germany. He stayed in Berlin for two years, where he did research work on the writings of Rosa Luxembourg, taught university classes on street theatre and worked as a handler in the Osram factory. He made his third film, Übergang ûber den Ebro (Crossing over the Ebro). He wrote mini-plays, assembled under the title Petit Manuel de guérilla urbaine, works that were to be played by everyone and everywhere (les Hauts Plateaux ou Cinq Leçons à la recherche du Vietnam pour une lycéenne de mai ; Machine excavatrice pour entrer dans le plan de défrichement de la colonne d'invasion Che Guevara ; Ne pas perdre de temps sur un titre - Que mettez- vous à la place ? - Une rose blanche ; Pourquoi les animaux domestiques ?. From this point, Armand Gatti and his companions rejected the traditional schemas of theatrical representation; just as happy playing in a warehouse as in the street, encouraging spectators to become more like partners than consumers. After the French government ban on his play, Armand Gatti wrote L'interdiction de la passion du général Franco (1969), where, in one notable scene, we see "André Malraux inside a Cultural Centre, reduced by Gaullist austerity to the size of a suitcase". His play, Chat sauvage was produced in 1970 in various university centres and youth organisations. The following year, Rosa Collective was created in Kasel under the direction of Kai.
From 1972 to 1976, he worked in setting up collectives to mobilise a region, a town or a high school. In Belgium, in 1972, La Colonne Durruti, a collective creation, drew a parallel between an anarchist column in the Spanish Civil War and the discovery by young people of war, of poetry and the theatre. He continued this experience the following year, with L'Arche d'Adelin. Armand Gatti returned to France in 1974, presenting La Tribu des Carcana en guerre contre quoi? at the Avignon Festival. At the beginning of that year, he created Quatre Schizophrénies à la recherche d'un pays dont l'existence est contestée in Berlin. In 1975-1977, he turned to video and made Le Lion, sa cage et ses ailes where the protagonists are immigrant workers in the Peugeot factory. In Berlin, he wrote and directed La moitié du ciel et nous. At the Festival d'Automne (1975), he staged Le Joint in the context of a collective writing experiment called Le Chat guérillero. Armand Gatti tried a new experiment in collective creation in Saint-Nazaire in 1976, with Le Canard sauvage. The following year, he directed Le cheval qui se suicide par le feu for the 31st Avignon Festival.
In 1978, he made La Première Lettre, six videos that were filmed with the people of the Isle-d'Abeau region (Isère). He was in Northern Ireland in 1981, where he made Nous étions tous des noms d'arbre – filmed during the death of ten IRA hunger strikers, the film takes place in the catholic ghetto of Derry. When he returned from Ireland, he wrote Le Labyrinthe, created in Genoa and then in Avignon. From 1983 to 1985, he opened the Archéoptéryx, a workshop of popular creation in Toulouse and signed a contract with the Ministry of Culture to work with people "excluded from society". He stopped using professional actors in his work. Nous ne sommes pas des personnages historiques was the first play made with young people on courses as part of their reintegration programme, in Toulouse in 1984. This theatre without spectators is the attempt to write and stage the representation of an event by society's 'excluded people'. At the same time, it endows them with a new dignity. These are representations that are far removed from "from the illness of present time. Addressing the public? But what is the public? A mass that comes to buy tickets and consume…" says Armand Gatti.
In 1985 Toulouse saw another course that gave rise to the creation of Dernier maquis. 1986 saw the world creation of Opéra avec titre long at Montreal's National Monument theatre. In 1987, Le passage des oiseaux dans le ciel was produced at the University of Quebec Montreal (UQM). Directed by Armand Gatti and Jean-Jacques Hocquard, La parole errante was installed in the former Mélies studios in Montreuil. 1988 saw the creation of Les sept possibilités du train 713 en partance pour Auschwitz in Rochester (United States). In 1989, Armand Gatti celebrated the bicentenary of the French Revolution in Fleury-Mérogis prison – working with prisoners in making Les combats du jour et de la nuit à la maison d'arrêt de Fleury-Mérogis. In 1990, he went to Marseille on another programme of working with another group of 'excluded' youngsters. This resulted in Cinécadre de l'Esplanade Loreto. 1991 was the twentieth anniversary of the death of Jean Vilar. Armand Gatti produced Ces empereurs aux ombrelles trouées at the Musée Lapidaire in Avignon, with a group of "housing-scheme youngsters". In 1993, he worked with a similar group of 80 youngsters in Marseille, writing and producing Adam quoi ?, which was based on the text Le Chant d'amour des alphabets d'Auschwitz. This was presented over two days in ten different locations in the city. In 1994, with another course for 80 people in Strasbourg, he produced Kepler, le langage nécessaire in the French Railways Depot. The work makes a link between the Thirty Years War and the war in Guatemala. The experiment became, on the day of presentation, Nous avons l'art afin de ne pas mourir de la vérité. F. Nietzsche.
Armand Gatti's latest experiments reveal a particular interest in Science (quantum physics). Armand Gatti says: "I discovered that the only people who wanted to carry on the struggle in terms of language (….) In fact, what do quantum physicists tell us? That the world can be decoded and interpreted, but that each time it's a different world." Armand Gatti transposes this quantum perception with his poetry: "The only language that corresponds to my idea of poetry is the language of quantum physicists. For them, 2+2 can make 8,16,42 just as well as 4, because they aren't sectarian. It's the same with poetry: a term can mean several different things. In fact, each word is the sum of all the possibilities of a word. This finally becomes an undefined adventure again." In 1996, L'inconnu n° 5 du carré des fusillés de la prison d'Arras brought together 45 participants in Sarcelles, with a presentation of this collaboration taking place in January 1997. The staring point for this experience is the mathematician and philosopher of science Jean Cavaillès, a member of the resistance who was shot by the Nazis in 1944.
Dominique Garrigues.
1- Bibl ref.: Claude Feber, Armand Gatti, La poésie de l'étoile (Paroles, textes et parcours), Descartes & Cie, Paris, 1998; Gérard Gozlan, Jean-Louis Pays, Gatti Aujourd'hui, Le Seuil, Paris, 1970.