Têtes is a work based on the Japanes tradition of rakugo. This is a generally comic literary-linguistic stage genre extending back to the 17th century, operating inside a minimalistic framework with only a narrator and a few stage props. The narrator tells a brief story, acting out all the character roles themselves. For our project with staged poetry I asked Dominique Quélen both to write stories based on the traditional Japanese tales from Lafcadio Hearn’s “Kwaidan: Studies and Stories of Strange Things” and to invent new stories on the general topic of the head.
In most cultures, executions consisted – or still consist – in severing the head from the body (in France the guillotine, in Japan beheadings as part of seppuku, or, in our time, decapitations by members of the terror Militia Islamic State). What makes these actions shocking, aside from the fact that the lives of these people are taken, is that, in a sense, their identities are also destroyed. The face and brain are respectively the outside and inside of the personality, the thing that makes us unique.
These stories will deal with creatures that lose their heads (both in the literal and the metaphorical sense) or gain additional ones; creatures that consist only of a head, others whose face has been wiped out, and others that multiply. Each of these stories, in its own way, asks questions about our own identities, the differences between us, and at times evokes bioethical conflict connected to technologies such as robots or cloning.
(Misato Mochizuki, 2017)