TOUT ÉTAIT ÉCRIT ? by La Dame de 11h

par Laurent Prost-Deschryver

TOUT ÉTAIT ÉCRIT ?

Un concert poétique entre chanson et destin

by the company La Dame de 11h

with Alain Klinger, piano / singing

and Hélène Gratet, voice

Presented on October 3, 2026 at La Sphère (Paris)

[ Bias Disclaimer : Hélène Gratet and Alain Klingler are professional acquaintances and friends of the author. ]

γίνεσθε παράγοντες
become passengers
Gospel of Thomas, Logion 42

I did not know what to expect when I entered La Sphère, a new center for art and thought located in Paris’ Le Marais, founded by the poet and writer Flora Bonfanti. On this Saturday, La Sphère was proposing an opening festival with lectures and talks on the concept of destiny, followed by a concert-spectacle by the company La Dame de 11h, Tout était écrit ? I did not attend the lectures, so I will speak only about the latter.

At first, I was intrigued by the title: why the imperfect tense? And why a question mark? Recently I was reading a beautiful French translation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát, I remember this line: Tout est écrit : pour toi nulle autre version, which could be translated as: Everything is written: for you no other version. Here Khayyam (or at least the translator, unfortunately I do not speak the Persian language) uses the present tense; he may be referring to the famous Arabic word مكتوب, maktūb, which etymologically refers to fate as ‘that which was written’. The second part of the line may indicate a reading which is closer to my understanding of the Rubáiyát: everything that you live becomes writing, you don’t have a second chance, or a second life, or any afterlife — your life will (at the end, in the future) have been (in the past looked from this future) this one, and no other one. I heard the sentence Tout était écrit ? through these sunglasses: the imperfective introduces a feeling of duration, of something that is still ongoing, as opposed to the preterit — as in a novel, when you read for example She was singing, and suddenly the doors opened up. The question mark intensifies this feeling, while at the same time opening the space for a doubt: is it true that everything was written? or is there also a space for freedom, choice, contingency, non-predictability?

The songs and texts chosen by the two artists explore the space and time of these questions with a stunning diversity of perspectives, of musical genres and of poetic styles, a diversity that prevents the audience from jumping to conclusions, and to let their mind be moved by this kaleidoscope as a theater of multiple voices. I have to say it was not a surprise to me, having also seen the previous production of the company La Dame de 11h: Shakespeare in Songs, a montage of various Shakespearean scenes and songs, staged as a Baroque theater with no firm center, no strong difference between surface and depths, but a shimmer of voices and gestures which functions as a hall of mirrors. Tout était écrit ? reaffirms the Baroque aesthetic stance of multiplicity, putting the audience in a sort of meditative state of mind: what if our life was a dream, a pure surface of apparition, without any founding ground? what if what I believe to be the most real — matter, feelings, thoughts, joys, and sufferings — what if all this was already written, like in a theater play, what if I was only playing a character?

I cannot remember all the songs and texts which were voiced during this evening — partly because of the state of daydreaming I was speaking about, partly because I didn’t know most of them — and still don’t know, as there was no program sheet or booklet. I have the intuition that this was intentional: a list of songs and texts would have altered the work of memory — the work of the ‘natural’ writing that is memory. In the following, I will therefore evoke some of the sounds, texts and images that have made on me the strongest impressions and that remain in my memory after a few days.

The setting was bare and simple. A jardin (stage right): a grand piano, a few books, and the pianist, singer and songwriter Alain Klingler. A cour (stage left), a little centered: a delicate velvet stool, a guéridon, a pedestal table with a few books and postcards, a mic on a stand, and the singer and actress Hélène Gratet. At the back of the stage, a red theater curtain. A few lights on the grid (unfortunately, almost all frontlights — may have side and backlights given more contrast and depth to the images on stage?).

The tonality of the show was set by the first text read by Hélène Gratet: the prayer addressed to Sara e Kali (Saint Sarah, in French Sara la Noire) by the community of Romani people in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer — an invitation au voyage, the departure of a pilgrimage through songs and poetry, guided by the faith in the destiny that is offered to each of us. Life may be a dream, but it is also a journey through a labyrinth nobody can claim to fully decipher or ‘understand’. The song that came after was particularly moving on that very day, in the midst of an intense high school student uprising in France: a song by the French singer Juliette, Les garçons de mon quartier, which was inspired by the novel La virgen de los sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins) by the Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo. A love song dedicated to los chicos de mi barrio — the boys from my neighborhood, those young people who say that ‘tomorrow’ is an invented word, who live from various traffics, and whose most likely future is to end up with a bullet in the head. It was as if the artists were saying to the audience: to affirm that life is a dream has nothing to do with escaping reality into an illusion. Quite the opposite, I would say: to affirm that life is a dream demands to fully accept life as it is, to embrace life even in its terrible and cruel aspects, and to firmly refuse any attempt to build a backworld or afterworld. Amor fati: Nietzsche’s famous motto was read during the show, almost as a challenge to the audience — given what life and destiny are, will you have the strength to say yes, to love the ineluctable course of events in which you are embarked?

Amor fati, however, was not only a philosophical stance in this show: it was also a way of acting and singing. I will try to explain an obscure intuition I had — briefly formulated: a distance between the eye, the ear, and the voice. I don’t know exactly what this means; but I had this sentence in mind during and after the show. Frequently in theater, actors are passionate about their role: they would like to really be the character, to really embody the role — with the desire, at the end, to be fully possessed by it, as in a trance or a mania. I remember an actor once told me that the applause, at the end of a show, was meant to pull the actors back into reality, to chase away the ghosts that were invoked. This desire may relate to the religious and cultic origins of theater — but isn’t theater precisely theater because it is not a cult, nor a shamanistic ritual? Theater comes from the Ancient Greek theatron, which could be understood as the place from where one sees. There are many ways to listen to this word — one is to say that theater only occurs in the eye of the viewers: the ghosts are nowhere on stage, only in the viewer’s mind and imagination. If the actor fully embodies the role, the danger is that the audience may stay completely outside of this trance, and will passively contemplate the egocentric mania of an artist. I don’t say that this kind of acting is necessarily worthless; but it is rarely effective, and very often tedious and boring. In Tout était écrit ?, it is stunning how the two artists are constantly keeping measure and balance in regard to the multiple roles they step into (including themselves as persons); they are embodying a persona, but at the same time we see and feel that this persona is a mask, and that someone is holding the mask. This is what I try to express in the sentence: a distance between the eye, the ear, and the voice. It is as if these three organs were separated from each other, and functioning in different dimensions — almost in different roles: can the eye listen, the ear speak, the voice see? I wonder if the impression I had could be related to what Bertolt Brecht was trying to formulate as Verfremdung, or Viktor Shklovsky as ostranenie — estrangement, de-familiarization, making strange. Or to this mysterious sentence I never understood Ibn Arabi is said to have uttered when, still a young man, he visited Ibn Rushd: “between the yes and the no, the necks are separated from their bodies”? Thus, Tout était écrit ? leaves the audience in a state of suspension, of epoché (a major concept used by German philosopher Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology: if one wants to be truthful to the phenomena as they appear to the consciousness, one has to suspend the common judgement of reality and carefully analyze the appearances as such, detached from any thesis about what ‘reality’ is). I would like to firmly underline this peculiar quality of this work, in a time when rigid assertions and univocal claims are often overwhelming our common world, paving the way to a totalitarian atmosphere. To stay between the yes and the no is not always a weakness nor a sickness of indecision: it can also be a strength, the strength to refrain from mass identifications, and to embrace life in its highest dialectical complexity.

This, I would conclude, is the hard and sometimes painful work of love — the love for life as it is, amor fati, as well as the love that sometimes blossoms between human beings. It is not a result of chance that most of the songs performed by Hélène Gratet and Alain Klingler are love songs; love, even in its most ordinary forms, confronts one with the otherness of an other — an other who is simultaneously the same as always (everything was written: the common experience of lovers who feel like they have known each other since always) and the strangeness of a totally unknown other who cannot be inscribed into any known category. In the show, this division was beautifully expressed in a song by French singer Michèle Bernard, in which, in an apophatic-like process, the character is rejecting almost every articulable aspect of life (Je m’fous de… — I don’t give a f*ck about…) to pronounce the only one sentence that is at the same time the most universal and the most intimate, and which — at least according to some advocates, from Empedocles to Freud — is governing the world. Unfortunately I cannot write down this sentence, as it is a speech act that, fortunately, no machine would ever be able to perform. Instead, I can only warmly invite you to discover Tout était écrit ?, with the subtle piano arrangements by Alain Klingler, and more generally the work of the company La Dame de 11h.

Laurent Prost-Deschryver (FR) is living and working in the heart of analogous mountains. He teaches philosophy in highschool and is the founder of the compagnie attanour.