ABSTRACT
This chapter, with its numerous production photos, examines how the Soleil has actively fought for the freedom of other artists, the rights of immigrants, and the need for clarity about government decisions that have fostered catastrophes. Cixous’s play The Perjured City, or the Awakening of the Furies (La Ville parjure ou le réveil des Erinyes, 1994) targets through lamentation and satire state-run medical services that knowingly allowed HIV-contaminated blood to be transfused. In their return to collective creation with And Suddenly, Sleepless Nights (Et soudain des nuits d’éveil, 1997), the actors perform as two different theatre troupes, one of these a Tibetan troupe welcomed into a French theatre -- thus referencing the Malian immigrants given shelter by the company. Mnouchkine’s version of Tartuffe (1995) interprets the hypocritical priest as an Islamic fundamentalist and suggests how the West helps keep such people in power. The culmination of this cycle is a reinvention of bunraku style in Cixous’s Drums on the Dam, in the Form of an Ancient Puppet Play Performed by Actors (Tambours sur la digue, sous forme de pièce ancienne pour marionettes jouée par des acteurs, 1999), in which actors play puppets and their puppeteers portraying a terrifying ecological fable.
