Partner: La Mousson d’été
Play: Sfumato
Playwright: Maya Lopez
Translation session with: Laurent Gallardo (from Catalan to French)
Meetings: 8th-12th April 2025 at Théâtre Ouvert, Paris
Reading: April 12th at 4pm at Théâtre Ouvert
Director: Nathalie Fillion
Cast: Eric Berger, Flore Lefebvre des Noëttes et Damien Sobieraff
After going through the entirety of the text, the artistic team will focus on certain fragments in order to develop their theatrical qualities. Given that the playwright has used several modes of writing (monologues, dialogues, stage directions) in the play, she is particularly interested in hearing through the voices of the actors how the parts coexist and how organically they transition from one to the other. One of the goals is for her to develop a more precise idea of the coordination between those modes of telling and their general balance within the play.
Sfumato 5 characters: 1 woman, 4 men
Sfumato by Maya Lopez interweaves poetic motifs and images around the figure of Noah and a founding event: the Bible recounts that during a night of drunkenness, Noah was seen naked by his son Cham, giving rise to several possible interpretations, including that of a rape committed by the son on his father.
In a powerfully poetic language, the text intertwines points of view and hypotheses made by the characters about this event. By tackling questions of the body, sex and memory, as well as the great universal taboos of rape and incest, Sfumato revisits through dreams the founding myths of our civilisation.
The writing of the play began in May 2024 during a dream-themed workshop given by Nathalie Fillion as part of Fabulamundi New Voices. From this starting point, Maya Lopez crafted symbolic motifs, repetitive writing and developed the dramatical poem form that continues to give the text its strangeness and beauty.
Maya Lopez
Maya Lopez was born in Grenoble in 1999. She studied literature and attended for two years the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon where she wrote a thesis on Copi for the Dramaturgy Masters and directed Copi’s play EVA PERÓN at the Kantor Theatre. She also trained in theatre for a year at the Lyon Conservatory. She decided to specialized in theatre and joined the Eracm Acting School in 2022 in order to polish her acting and directing skills. She is an apprentice at National Drama Centre Les Tréteaux de France for the season 2024-2025.
She is currently writing her first play Sfumato, supported by the programme European Fabulamundi Playwriting Europe – New Voices co-funded by Creative Europe. She is also directing Ça Réchauffe, a variation on Heiner Müller’s Hamlet-Machine.
Also a guitarist and singer, she wrote and composed with Lucas Bustos Tapage, her first collection of songs.
The discussion with translator Laurent Gallardo was very stimulating. After a brief introduction, we talked about his impressions after reading my text sfumato. Laurent’s having prior knowledge about the myth my work primarily refers to (Noah’s drunkenness episode in the Bible) was, I believe, extremely beneficial to the conversation. He was able to define what he perceived of my writing research in a very accurate manner (in terms of style, form and substance) – namely, the idea of addressing a topic by “circling around”, through the form of a reverie, rather than from a frontal or moral approach. He pointed how writing several hypotheses and interpretations of the same event serves the attempt to adress the taboos underlying our societies.
In a second phase, we discussed how certain hints to external references should or should not be made more obvious to an uninitiated reader – that bridge could be created by changing the title, adding a subtitle or mentioning more explicitly the biblical reference ahead of the text. (Those considerations are very precious and I am thinking of researching in that direction soon).
We also spoke about the possibility of a translation: since the text draws on a biblical reference, hence widely shared – if not internationally (!), imagining a translation seems to make sense, as there would be no need to find equivalent references in the target country’s cultural context.
Finally, drawing on the Playground research week at Theatre Ouvert and Erell Blouët’s feedback, we discussed the acting possibilities offered by the text sfumato. We agreed that it seems appropriate to propose a certain frontality, an acting style absolutely not forced or voluntary; in a nutshell, one should keep a form of naivety in relation to the language, close to the mystery the text tries to touch on, a naivety which is also Noah’s as he drinks and discovers drunkenness for the first time.
– Maya Lopez
This meeting with Maya Lopez provided an opportunity to speak about her play sfumato, currently in progress, and to discuss its dramaturgical stakes with a view to a possible translation. The discussion pointed the richness of a polysemic work, one open to interpretation, which draws from the myth of Noah’s drunkenness and nakedness to question the violence at the origin of any society. Maya Lopez’s inventive rewriting is characterized by a kaleidoscopic and abundant style. At the same time singular and aiming for the universal, its dramaturgy fits perfectly into the French theatrical landscape while transcending cultural boundaries. By choosing a scene from the Old Testament as its subject for variation, the play draws on a reference common to all Western civilisations. It thus invites a pluralistic reading, capable of resonating differently depending on the context in which it is received.
sfumato’s particular strength lies in the permanent tension it presents between form and substance. The writing constantly performs what is enunciated and enunciates what is performed, in a reflexive movement which allows language itself to become a dramaturgical act. With sfumato, Maya Lopez offers a demanding and daring work interweaving myth, writing and performance. The text appears to be animated by a universal force that already calls for future translations.
– Laurent Gallardo
