Olivier Py: On the world stage

"With my parents, we never went very far, but my first memory is of 1978, when we went to Barcelona. That first trip gave me a taste for travelling. After that, when I was eighteen, I set off, backpack in hand, and became a professional traveller. For years, almost twenty years, I didn't have a home. I lived here and there, couchsurfing as they say today, sleeping wherever people would have me. At the time, going to Ireland was an adventure. I had very little money. So, to get to the Aran Islands, it was a mixture of hitchhiking and ferrying and it took me almost a week. I also went to the United States, where I travelled a lot between New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. I'd asked my parents to send me there on a study trip. My leitmotiv was to go, go, go...

Being a stranger in a city is a pleasure.

I enjoyed travelling alone. I met a lot of people, especially between the ages of 20 and 25. I was like a sailor with a sweetheart in every port, it was an incredible opportunity. I'd set off carefree, meet someone, experience something and set off again. I slept in Italian monasteries, in fishermen's shacks, even under bridges... Then I discovered Europe, Africa for a while, Latin America and I fell in love with the Middle East. There were a few cities where I wanted to live and Damascus was one of them. Then there was Jordan and the Palestinian Territories, where I was lucky enough to meet the poet Mahmoud Darwich. Later, I moved to Eastern Europe, on the other side of the Iron Curtain. What a discovery! Younger people can't understand what it was like to go and play in Hungary, Bulgaria or Russia. It was a real change of world. Then the Wall came down, and the atmosphere in Moscow was still strange, but we were welcomed with open arms.

What really struck me was Sarajevo during the war, in the early 1990s. It was a completely new experience for me, tourism in a country at war. I was desperate to get to Sarajevo, so I went there with an association to get in touch with the situation. I don't think I was being voyeuristic, it was an irrepressible desire for solidarity. I was also very moved when I went back to Algeria, where my parents came from. Rediscovering their traces, my grandmother's house, was deeply moving. It became an inner, initiatory journey. The journey also meant staging a play or an opera, and there are places like Geneva where I had a sort of double life. I worked a lot at the Grand Théâtre, creating some very strong and sometimes passionate friendships. Then there was Munich, Cologne and Berlin, where working with the director of the Volksbühne, Frank Castorf, was a highlight. I have a passion for German culture that wasn't entirely in my genes at the outset.

I often talk about long-haul trips, but my very first were to France. It's a blessed country with its great concentration of diversity. And I'll say it again, I'm a true child of decentralisation, I've been on the road and I've played with my friends just about everywhere. The fact remains that I still have something profound to achieve, and that's to discover the South Pole, go to Ushuaia and, from there, sail to that ultimate point...".