Camille Chamoux: “Finding people much more annoyed than me does me a lot of good” – La Vie Nouvelle

Camille Chamoux returns to us with a reflection on time, a theme as eternal as it is contemporary, particularly put to the test during confinement, imagined with the complicity of Camille Cottin and Vincent Dedienne.

Calming the race against time, is that the urgency of the 70 minutes of your show?

CCSoothing is really in the best case scenario. It is therefore rather to be aware of the race against time and to master it. I want to reverse the logic: to ensure that it is not a race, but a conception that we must have of finitude, because it is because there is an end that we enjoy. I’m going to talk about optimism and the contemporary disease of disappointment. It’s a very optimistic show, like my nature. A kind of challenge to the laws of attraction of time in today’s life: having to do a maximum of things in a minimum of time. I alternate between personal anecdotes and risky and comic theories on our relationship to existence, while calling on confirmed authors like Proust, Vian… I mix literary and cultural references, and theoretical hypotheses on these notions of passing time, about our human condition as mortals, with as much humor as possible!

Virginie Despentes, whose platforms you say are “your catharsis”is also invited to your show…

CCVirginie Despentes says what we’ve always thought, but better… and with swear words! That’s what gets me started on her in the show: I explain that as soon as I’m very upset about a topical issue, I’ll immediately find out if she’s written anything on the subject. Half the time, it is! From there, it’s as if she were expressing herself and letting off steam for me and the cathartic effect is immediate: I feel better and I can go back to my activities. (laughs). As soon as I find people much more annoyed than me, it does me a lot of good!

Are you obsessed with the passage of time?

CCNo, I live outside of time. I have no faculty of anticipation, and that is the problem. I am like a child unaware of the passage of time and who lives in an eternal present. That’s what makes the difference with my spouse, who I talk about a lot in the show and who is perpetually anxious about the future, rehashing the past and a kind of distressing projection of time. With the crisis, existence imposed on us a kind of vacant time post, which led us to reconsider who we were in a suspended time. The crisis has re-examined the notion of man’s relationship to time and the relationship to time in general.

Wanting to take the time is ultimately contradictory with the very spirit of the one-man-show, where everything must go very quickly on stage…

CCA quote from André Gide says: “Art is born of constraints and dies of freedom”. I think that if we have a very strong constraint like doing a show in 70 minutes, by responding to a timing challenge, a fortiori by talking about the time to live and taking the time, within our show itself, to explain things and to laugh a lot, this gives birth to an original and particular form. Things then do not have time to dilute.

Camille Chamoux - « Le temps de vivre » : jeudi 20 janvier, à 20 h, à Malraux Scène Nationale, à Chambéry. 04 79 85 55 43. De 15 à 33 €. Dès 13 ans.