When Silence Confronts Us, The Question To

Realism Falls Short Of Reality. It Shrinks It, Attenuates It, Falsifies It; It Does Not Take Into Account Our Basic Truths And Our Fundamental Obsessions: Love, Death, Astonishment. It Presents Man In A Reduced And Estranged Perspective. Truth Is In Our Dreams, In The Imagination.

Childhood Is The World Of Miracle Or Of Magic: It Is As If Creation Rose Luminously Out Of The Night, All New And Fresh And Astonishing. Childhood Is Over The Moment Things Are No Longer Astonishing. When The World Gives You A Feeling Of "déjà Vu," When You Are Used To Existence, You Become An Adult.

To Tear Ourselves Away From The Everyday, From Habit, From Mental Laziness Which Hides From Us The Strangeness Of Reality, We Must Receive Something Like A Real Bludgeon Blow.

The Universe Seems To Me Infinitely Strange And Foreign. At Such A Moment I Gaze Upon It With A Mixture Of Anguish And Euphoria; Separate From The Universe, As Though Placed At A Certain Distance Outside It; I Look And I See Pictures, Creatures That Move In A Kind Of Timeless Time And Spaceless Space, Emitting Sounds That Are A Kind Of Language I No Longer Understand Or Ever Register.

I Am, It Seems, An Avant-garde Dramatist. It Would Even Seem Obvious Since I Am Present Here At Discussions On The Avant-garde Theatre. It Is All Entirely Official. But What Does The Term Avant-garde Mean?