Spectacle "Une ombre vorace"

A double ascent

Jean Vidal, a mountaineer nearing the end of his career, decided one day to climb Annapurna in Nepal, where his father had died some 30 years earlier. His story was adapted for the cinema. From there, Mariano Pensotti interweaves the levels of fiction through the monologues of Jean Vidal and Michel Roux, the actor chosen to play his role, who himself talks about his father.

Making a film and climbing a mountain become two sides of human existence. The director loves intimate narratives that respond to and intersect with each other, uncovering whole swathes of forgotten history: like the mountain that, as the ice melts, lets the bodies of the disappeared rise to the surface.

On stage, Une Ombre vorace alternates between two monologues, two narratives. On either side of the stage: the climber in search of ascendancy and the actor in search of embodiment, recounting their epic journey, one towards the summits, the other facing the cameras. Between the two, a wall of ice or mirrors disrupts the journey, distorting the reflections but not preventing some interaction between the original and his double.