French Literature Reviews - 2026
V. Novarina, Voie négative
Theatre and Performance
Voie négative
Valère Novarina
Publication date: 16/02/2017
Publisher: POL
ISBN: 978-2-8180-4153-6
EAN: 9782818041536
Number of pages: 288 p.
One September day, quite some time ago, after spending fifteen months nourishing myself on the theater of Stéphane Mallarmé — a theater opened with one's own hands; scenes brought back to life; letters to which we restore life by breathing them in — I read in my initials: Voie négative, and thought that one day I would give this title to a book... Here it is. Four texts, or rather, excavations; four variations on a fixed idea.
Ecrit dans l'air, the chronicle of an encounter with eight actors from Haiti. L'acte de la parole, a descent into our language down to Latin and sometimes much further below. Niement, a series of notes taken during four walks in the mountains. Entrée perpétuelle, a theatrical, orchestrated (and Pythagorean?) version of Le Vivier des noms." V.N.
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Valère Novarina made two trips to Haiti to prepare and stage his production of L’Acte inconnu (P.O.L 2007). He recounts this experience in the first part of Voie négative, entitled Ecrit dans l’air. It discusses working with actors, theater and painting, and the profound harmony that emerged during rehearsals and visual arts work. It is a joyful text. The second part of the book, its second act, Voie négative, naturally gives the book its title. It develops Valère Novarina's increasingly firm conviction that 'the spirit breathes'. And if it breathes, it is because it overturns, because it passes through what the author calls niement (something akin to a positive, dialectical negation). Valère Novarina experiences the link between thought and breathing very concretely. To him, it becomes self-evident when closely observing actors at work: animal breathing foreshadows thought and heralds it. The third part is entitled Désoubli (Unforgetting). It is a text about the mysterious presence within us of all languages — our mother tongue, of course, but also other unusual, secret, seemingly dead languages that still live deep within us... Here, Valère Novarina revolves around the idea that language is a fluid, a wave, an undulation, a gesture in the air, water... Every "speaker" carries within them a fraction of the memory of all languages. The fourth and final part of the book, Entrée perpétuelle, is a metamorphosis, a disguise, another version, or in any case a fresh look at the mysterious organic machinery of Le Vivier des noms (P.O.L 2015). It is a condensation — or rather a chemical precipitate of the book — a new entry in its active, dynamic form, along with its new staged version.
Valère Novarina occupies a distinctive place in contemporary French theatre and literature, known for creating works that constantly bridge dramatic writing, linguistic inquiry, and visual art. His sustained exploration of the breath, the actor's physical presence, and the subterranean layers of our vocabulary aligns with a long-standing tradition of experimental writing that treats language as a living, organic force. This volume gathers four distinct texts, moving across genres from theatrical chronicles and reflective notes to variations on earlier works.
The texts collected here touch upon several recurring themes in the author's practice, including the collaboration between directors and performers, the memory carried within our mother tongue and older idioms, and the physical foundations of speech. Through discussions of Haitian actors, mountain walks, and the echoes of dramatic texts, the book returns repeatedly to the idea of language as a fluid gesture in the air. Readers interested in contemporary French drama, the intersections of theatre and philosophy, or the experimental aesthetics of stage performance may find these reflections particularly engaging.