On August 22, summer visitors from Dieppe will have the privilege of being able to dive, a few hundred meters from the beach, into the world of a genius whose 400th birthday is being celebrated this year: Blaise Pascal. No beach volleyball or swimming with Blaise, but an immersion in his thoughts with some of his finest connoisseurs.
Around Laurence Plazenet, president of the Société des Amis de Port Royal, three of the best specialists in his work will evoke his brief but ardent life and his inexhaustible work, alternating “instant” conferences on an essential theme of the work, “exercises of reading” and exchanges with the public. We will thus be able to enter into some of his most famous Thoughts, in particular that on Entertainment and on the Misery of man, in an attempt to grasp their richness and depth.
Among the themes of the conferences, some are intriguing (“Thoughts, Apology or wager?”, by Laurent Thirouin, “the most quoted style”, by Constance Cagnat-Deboeuf, about the language of Pascal, “the profession of surveyor”, by Pierre Lyraud, who will explain the relationship between the scientific work and the literary work of Pascal, and how his thought always proceeds by observation), others amuse (“Pascal woke?”, by Tony Gheeraert , from Fragment 94 in which Pascal demonstrates the relativity of customs and constructs, but does not, in fact, deny the existence of nature.)
In the evening, the church of Arques-la-bataille will host the show “Fire”, the theatrical creation of Benjamin Lazar which will immerse the public in the process of Thoughts. Small or large sequences of Pascal, some of which worked during the day, will be whispered by the actor in a 3D helmet, according to binaural technology, which spatializes the sound. Each spectator will hear Pascal working out his Thoughts, and whispering them in his ear.
The initiative for this day came from Jean-Paul Combet, founder of the Bach Academy: “We often tend to be interested in culture in a very compartmentalized way, music, literature, the arts… The men of the 17th and 18th centuries had their eyes and ears open to many things other than their disciplines. This is evident in Pascal and Bach, keen on theology and mystical poetry. These two fervent Christians share the same lofty thought. Despite the injunctions of the Ministry of Culture which invites us above all to entertain ourselves as Pascal would say, or to occupy the homo festivus as Philippe Murray would say, we prefer to the playful and superficial side of culture another dimension: that of deepening our humanity and our past. »
Tuesday, August 22, from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Studio of the Jean Renoir media library. Boulevard Berigny, 76200 Dieppe. FREE ENTRANCE. Fire show on August 22 at 9 p.m., Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, rue Le Barrois, 76880 Arques-la-Bataille. Tickets from €10 to €30, free for children under 18.
