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Frédéric Maragnani
Photo : Julian Blight
Frédéric Maragnani 
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Frédéric Maragnani
Director Frédéric Maragnani has spent several years working on a literary project with a focus on staging and supporting new forms of writing and a blend of literary styles. He develops bonds and partnerships with playwrights with whom he initiates writing projects and creates innovative ways of translating and reinventing their work for the stage. After studying to be an actor he created his own theater group and came to public attention in 2001 when he staged several twenty-four-hour performances of Noëlle Renaude’s theatrical epic Ma Solange, comment t’écrire mon désastre, Alex Roux (in Bordeaux / Grandes Traversées, Dijon / Frictions and Paris / Nuits Blanches). Over the years he has adopted Renaude as his pet playwright and staged a number of her plays including Petits rôles, Le Prunus, Le Renard du Nord, Quarante Églogues natures mortes et motifs and Par les routes.

His pictorial and often colorful stage work blends various scenic influences, asserting the power and intensity of photographic images (William Eggleston, Ryan Schude…), painting (Tim Eitel…) and film, and above all of the musicality of words and verbal expression. His work involves specific literary genres such as drama and comedy, and more recently tales and legends to which he gives a new twist in order to create confusion, grey areas and a new space onstage.

In recent years he has staged several productions with the common thread of “tales and legends of mankind,” commissioning and co-directing Le Couloir at the Théâtre Ouvert with the playwright, Philippe Minyana (another of his “pet” playwrights), starring among others Marcial Di Fonzo Bo, Marie-Armelle Deguy and Françoise Lebrun. He also staged Minyana’s opera Entente cordiale (music by Benjamin Hertz), Suite 1, and more recently (2011), Sous les arbres at the Théâtre de la Ville and Théâtre Ouvert. He staged Le Cas Blanche-Neige (comment le savoir vient aux filles), a reinvented version of the traditional tale of Snow White. The play is by Howard Barker, another of his favorite playwrights, and features among others Marie-Armelle Deguy, Christophe Brault and Céline Milliat-Baumgartner. A recent revival of the play at the Théâtre de l’Odéon brought him to the attention of a wider public. Constant in his choices, he has also staged another play on the theme of tales: Nicolas Fretel’s Barbe-Bleue (la scène primitive).

His latest productions have continued in the same vein of giving a new twist to traditional models: historical legend for Lolita Monga’s Vénus, il était une fois signifie maintenant, about the incredible story of the Hottentot Venus; and bourgeois drama for Henry Becque’s La Parisienne starring Marie-Armelle Deguy in the title role of La Parisienne.

He has also pursued his support of Noëlle Renaude’s writing project by commissioning a writing residency and a production in Nord-Gironde of Vues d’ici. He is scheduled to direct his first opera, Offenbach’s La Belle-Hélène, at the Opéra National de Bordeaux in May 2011.

Subsequent projects include a production of Eric Pessan’s Tout doit disparaître at the Festival d’Avignon 2011, and Carlo Goldoni’s Baroufs à Chioggia, in a new translation by Jean-Paul Manganaro, at the Théâtre de l’Ouest Parisien and the Théâtre National de Bordeaux-Aquitaine in the Fall of 2011.
He is currently interested in plays by Olivier Choinère (Félicité), Lancelot Hamelin (Shoot the Freak) and Virginie Barreteau (Plage) which he intends to stage.


For further information, see: http://www.cietravauxpublics.com