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∞ “A Communism of Ghosts” (pdf) – Adam Losange, 2018
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Adam Losange was the founder of the Ultime Compagnie (1981-1992), a theatrical troupe whose eleven members used to perform masked interventions in private places (apartments, gardens, cars) while performing with their faces completely uncovered in public places (town halls, squares, trains) – on one hand redoubling secrecy and on the other hand visibility until its point of transparency. Cosmic and political, the Ultime Compagnie’s theater consisted of prerecorded words that were played on certain astronomical and geophysical occasions (an equinox, a full moon, the passage of a comet, a satellite falling out of orbit, an earthquake, or a heat wave), thereby attempting to introduce the outside of the universe into terrestrial activities (French composer, Gerard Grisey was known to affirm the influence that the Ultime Compagnie’s “exo-theater” had on his own musical work, Le Noir de l’Étoile) and to accompany the manifestations of the Earth in its technological, economic, and political ramifications. Adam Losange insisted on the “spectral” dimension of the recordings, allowing “the ghosts of human voices to host the cosmos’ relic radiation” (The Dark Scene, mimeographed). It should be noted however that far from sticking to mere voice recordings, the Ultime Compagnie, as a collective, has signed sophisticated poetic, philosophical, and political writings that tended to stratify the text by sudden, “hallucinatory” stops in the shifting of meaning – like “a thousand Pompeii in negative” (Many Volcanoes, mimeographed). The political component of the Ultime Compagnie’s theater was clearly manifest, such as during the 1989 “Aurore Sonore” intervention (“Sound Dawn”) aiming to “grant access to the public who endeavored to listen the recording of everything – everything – that the wretched of the Earth did not have the time to pronounce before being executed” (Specters of Mars, mimeographed). Following aesthetic as well as doctrinal divergences that are still unclear today, the Ultime Compagnie dissolved in 1992 and Adam Losange disappeared for nearly twenty-five years, until his name reappeared on the occasion of the publication of short texts, political and almost hopeless, pointing towards some form of science-fiction. These texts are signed “Adam Losange du Théâtre de l’Ombre,” that is: Adam Losange from the Theater of the Shadow. We know almost nothing about the other members of the Ultime Compagnie (Effie and Monika Domrowski are said to have collaborated in the troupe in the early 1980s and Olivier Capparos between 1989 and 1992).
[editorial note]
Adam Losange also wrote: “Rouges ou Cramoisis” (Terrestres)
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