paris-theater

Watch Me Fall

2011-06-15T23:37:00.000-07:00

Hard to forget Evel Knievel. His hugely mediatized, death-defying stunts and Stars and Stripes costumes made him an icon of the American Seventies. According to Wikipedia, he attempted some 75 ramp-to-ramp motorcycle jumps between 1965 and 1980 and suffered 433 broken bones. His most memorable feat, as it nearly killed him, was his jump (or crash, rather) over the Caesar's Palace fountain in Las Vegas on New Year's Eve, 1967 (he spent a month in a coma). Stunt artist, entertainer, self-promoter and freak show of sorts, Knievel is the object of a different sort of publicity in "Watch Me Fall", by Bristol duo Action Hero, the final act of the program of British theater invited by the Théâtre de la Ville for the mini-festival known as Chantiers Europe.

A tongue-in-cheek dive into Knievel's motives, ambition and personal marketing machine, the 50-minute show uses pop culture's performance codes to question a social desire to indulge voyeuristically in extreme feats. In fact, as its title-cum-command indicates, "Watch Me Fall" places the public center stage, as much a focus of Action Hero's concerns as Knievel's indestructible rogue. Equipped with disposable cameras distributed at the door and standing around a downsized, home-made model of one of Knievel's jumps, the audience is constantly encouraged to clap, cheer, photograph and show its support for the legendary daredevil's feats of derring-do.

The show electrified in the UK with its interactive premise and its ironic take on larger-than-life personas, but fell far short of that response at the performance I saw, where, true to its own cultural codes, the public of Parisian twenty-somethings engaged mildly with the actors, at best. Interestingly however, their reaction proved Action Hero's premise right: if it is human nature to derive strange pleasure from seeing other people take risks and experience pain, the audience barreled into that cliche by, at one point, pelting Gemma Paintin with the plastic golf balls her character was collecting off the floor. When mores are pushed and barriers shaken, propriety too flies out the window.

As short and as elliptical as it was, the piece was far more engaging than the public would allow however, from James Stenhouse's boyish good looks to Paintin's silently suffering stuntman's showgirl, with a smart text that sends-up braggadocio and ABC Sports Specials as easily as it jumps a child's mock-up of the Caesar's Palace fountain (fashioned from an inflatable wading pool and two jumbo bottles of Diet Coke). "Watch Me Fall" is an invitation to see humanity at its most human: reaching for the moon but gravity bound.

June 14-16, 7 pm, Théâtre de la Ville, 2 place du Châtelet, 4e, Métro Châtelet, info: www.theatredelaville-paris.com

Photo Credit: Toby Farrow

ChantiersEurope: British Drama in the Spotlight

2011-06-08T17:03:00.001-07:00

What do Antonin Artaud, Ophelia and Harold Lloyd have in common? The answer is at ChantiersEurope, a mini-festival of European theater at the Théâtre de la Ville, showcasing British, Italian and Portugese companies. The event is the first in over 10 years in Paris to train a spotlight on contemporary theater from the UK, and a recent visit turned up some interesting surprises...

The first comes from Katie Mitchell, who won the 12th Europe "New Theatrical Realities" prize in St. Petersburg, Russia in April (see April 20 post below). Known for her meticulous research, savvy use of video technology and keen study of Stanislavsky's acting method, Mitchell presents an installation commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that develops all three. In "Five Truths", alternatively known as "The Ophelia Project", Mitchell directs a single actress, Michelle Thierry, through five versions of the suicide of Hamlet's girlfriend, attempting in each scenario to explore a different approach to the theater act. Video runs simultaneously on 10 screens of Mitchell and Thierry's work to bring into focus Shakespeare's briefly glimpsed waif, in the styles of Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht and Constantin Stanislavsky. For neophytes and specialists both, the experiment proposes illuminating comparisons and contrasts of the ideas of these five giants of contemporary theater. An acerbic music hall number à la Brecht faces a mute Ophelia overcome with grief in the manner of Grotowski's exploration of performative elements of ritual, Brook's poetry stands out sharply against a mad Ophelia such as Artaud woud have envisioned her, while Stanislavkian method acting certainly appears the most familiar and "normal". Thierry's versatility and Mitchell's painstaking direction and filming lift this intellectual exercise from academicism to a fascinating moment of theater.

A more traditional piece, though only in the sense that it takes place live on a stage, comes from the Compagnie 1927 and a show half-way between silent film and contemporary animation. Its title, "The Animals and Children Took to the Streets", doesn't reflect much about the content of this story in which the children of a tenement block known as Bayou Mansions are kidnapped and force-fed drugged gum drops to keep them quiet and obedient. In fact, a simple plot description captures nothing of the color, sass and faux archness of this delightful piece created by the combined talents of animation artist Paul Barrett, actress Suzanne Andreade, soprano/pianist Lilian Henley and actress/costumer Esme Appleton. Andreade who conceived, wrote and directs the piece, plays a number of wicked ladies of the housing block on Red Herring Street with malicious airs, opposite Appleton as a wide-eyed Lilian Gish type crusading for justice and the return of her child. Barrett's animation paints a richly hued backdrop for the Bayou Mansion's residents, most of whom come to life through paper doll silhouettes, as fanciful complement to the live actors, and his multi-media compositions (of the paint and paper variety) add a graphic punch to this perfectly naughty tale of crime and corruption in the big city. Barrett's portrayal of the Bayou's caretaker, a sympathetic Harold Lloyd outcast with an Edward Scissorhands wig, adds a self-effacing counterpoint to the women's confident aplomb and deliciously exaggerated tongue-rolling. Compagnie 1927 had its first success in 2007 at the Edinburgh Festival (5 awards) and seems to find a confident ease in its artistically rich style with this latest work.

Both shows offer a tantalizing glimpse of contemporary British theater and are in no way overshadowed by the main event of ChantiersEurope: "I Am the Wind", created at the Young Vic Theatre of London under the direction of Patrice Chéreau. Tom Brooke and Jack Laskey form a compelling couple as two men, One and the Other, caught in a personal struggle between life and death. With the open sea as a dangerous metaphor for despair and fear, Chéreau finds a balance between situational context and Fosse's psychological tension by setting the characters intermittently afloat on a sideways monolith of a raft, which aptly underscores an undercurrent pulling between metaphysical weight and lightness. Fosse's rhythmic text is their life-buoy, an intermittently rising and falling dialogue on the reasons to live and an inexplicable pull to choose not to, until it knocks one of them off his feet. A spare and pure production carried by an exceptional duo: reason enough to give ChantiersEurope a look, with more shows next week.

Information: www.theatredelaville.com

Photo: Director Katie Mitchell directs Michelle Thierry in "Five Truths". Credit: Gareth Fry

"Pan + "Songe": Dreaming with Irina Brook

2011-05-27T02:48:00.000-07:00

Neverland is J. M. Barrie's world of insouciant freedom from adult cares that only exists through a child's power to believe. In one fundamental way at least, Peter Pan's decision to never grow up is an obvious metaphor for theater, because like Neverland, it works only if the audience suspends its attachment to reality. Irina Brook has "carte blanche" in May and June at the Théâtre de Paris to create her fantastical worlds, in "Pan" and in "En attendant le songe".

In "Pan", Irina Brook builds instinctively on both themes, creating an explicit vehicle for the childhood wonderment that lies at the core of her vision, one which comes organically from her lifelong relationship with the theater. With a title that evokes the mythological origins of Barrie's character rather more than Disney's green-bonneted sprite, the production nevertheless is very much for children, even if Brook's characters many not be immediately recognizable to them (such is the power of Disney iconography). In "Pan", Captain Hook and his crew are better musicians than they are evil sailors, for example, with more pranks than villainous plots, while Peter and the Lost Boys are a comical band of circus acrobats and clowns. The changes set the tone for this production; fantasy, physical grace and plenty of laughter guide her ship, through crocodiles, pow-wows, battles, and Tinkerbell's jealous machinations. The set clearly sets up the contrast: on the one hand the Jolly Roger looms above the actors, on the other a carrousel is their playground. Fairies really fly and so do Wendy and John, all because they believe. In Brook's "Pan" that belief is infectious...

And it carries over into the second work she is presenting: "En attendant le songe". This is a revival of Brook's 2007 production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", where a merry band of companions, here the fictional Compagnie internationale d'Athens, provides again the narrative structure for a revisiting of Shakespeare's text. The all-male troop excels at cross-dressing and gags of all sorts in yet another Fairyland created here with a simple trunk of colorful scarves, proof again that Irina Brook is a magician of her own sort, able to transport us, whatever her chosen means, to the land of dreams.

"Pan", Tues-Sat, 8:30 pm, Sun, 3:30 pm, 17-42 euros, "En attendant le songe", Tues-Fri, 9 pm, Sat, 5 pm & 9 pm, Sun, 3 pm, 28-36 euros, Théâtre de Paris, 15 rue Blanche, 9e, Métro Trinité d’Estienne d’Orves / Blanche, tel: 01.48.74.25.37.

Photo Credit: Patrick Lazic

Semianyki: They're Back!

2011-05-22T02:04:00.000-07:00

The cathartic power of laughter has never been lost on the Russian people, despite, or perhaps because of their momentous history. Through war and repression, clowns from Bim Bom and Karandesh to Yuri Nikulin and Oleg Popov have kept Russians laughing at their pains, while Russia's most famous contemporary clown, Slava Polunin (creator of the international hit "Slava's Snow Show") has built from the genre a dreamlike escape from darker realities. Stalin may have coopted the subversive potential of laughter by creating the Soviet Academy for Political Clowns in 1926, but it is the troupe and school of Polunin's Teatr Licedei which carries the flame of Russian clownery in the world today. Created in 1968 in Leningrad, the troupe forged its style - and aroused State suspicion - on a preference for Western music over Politburo-approved themes of glorious labors, but was allowed to travel and so spread its fame abroad. After an intercontinental "Peace Train" that foreshadowed the fall of the Berlin Wall and a spectacular funeral ceremony to lay the company to rest on its 20th anniversary, the Licedei was reborn in post-USSR society primarily as a clown school, housed today by the Drama Academy of the University of St. Petersburg.

But in this country of revolutions, a smaller kind of overthrow is taking place in the world of its clowns, led by the troupe known as Semianyki (The Family), former Licedei students. Their name comes from the show they created while still in school, a wacky family portrait that easily makes the Adams Family look like the Brady Bunch and which recently celebrated its 700th performance. Great acts are hard to follow but the six clowns of Semianyki (Alexander Gusarov, Olga Eliseeva, Marina Makhaeva, Yulia Sergeeva, Kasyan Ryvkin and Elena Sadkova) are giving it their best shot and enjoying the kind of success that creates more enemies than friends, prompting them to break out on their own, with a theater, the Chaplin Hall, just for them in St. Petersburg, and decorated to their kooky, kitschy taste.

The company's history interests me as I saw the show in one of its early performances and walked the streets of their stomping grounds in St. Petersburg this spring. But with Semianyki, the main thing is the fun - and so much of it - that takes place on stage. The Semianyki are six oddballs : deadbeat dad, mother hen-mambo queen and four incorrigibly mischievous children, right down to the baby. The parents get it on whenever the youngsters' backs are turned, but left to their own devices, the kids have a seemingly limitless repertoire of tortures and annoyances for their genitor. Before Dad knows it, on any given day, he might be clothes-pinned to his chair and speared with a ski pole to prevent him from engaging in his two favorite activities : walking out and drinking. Mom is a matron of popular legend and ethnic jokes, keeping her cherubs in line with withering looks, a sergeant's boot and a fountain of sloppy kisses. The offspring of their unabashedly passionate union are part mad scientist, part chainsaw murderer, and the trouble they can get into is as limitless as it is ingenious.

The Semianyki write a devilishly hysterical send-up of any parenting book ever written but the gags are really only a pretence: love and togetherness ultimately carry the day. That the message comes through loud and clear despite barely a word being spoken is proof of the ingeniousness and generosity of these unparalleled clowns who draw the audience immediately into their nutty world, not only with abundant opportunities for interaction but with powerfully evocative images and richly drawn characters. We are only too happy to stay under their spell, an ingenious left-handed homage to the joys, fears and crocodile tears of childhood. If you can't catch them now, look for their return, by popular demand, in November. Brilliant!

To July 2, Tues-Sat. 8:30 pm, Sun, 3 pm, Théâtre du Rond-Point, 2 bis, avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt,
8e, Métro Franklin D. Roosevelt ou Champs-Élysées Clemenceau,10 euros-34 euros, tel: 01 44 95 98 21.

Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights

2011-05-19T06:10:00.001-07:00

"Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights" has the hand of its creator, Gerturde Stein, all over it. The title alone sums up her two obsessions: power and repetitive language. On the one hand there is the doctor who bargains dangerously with Mephisto, not, in Stein's retelling of the legend, for the love of Marguerite, but to master electric light. On the other is the kind of sing-songy word play that made the self-proclaimed mother of Modernism's reputation as a different sort of "illuminée".

Director Ludovic Lagarde confronts both features of her work in his version of Stein's opera libretto (1938) of the Faust legend. The terrain is well-traveled; even if Stein's work never found the audience she hoped for in her lifetime, her Faustus remake has tempted theater visionaries the Wooster Group, Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson. Where these others explored rather more her ontological theories regarding consciousness or their own theater aesthetic, Lagarde's production concentrates on her seemingly irrepressible repetition of ordinary words and phrases, what she called "insistencies", and shows that if Stein were alive today, she'd finally find fame as a pop music lyricist.

The show is indeed more concert than play, with a set that looks like it came from La Cigale down the road instead of the Bouffes du Nord: a raised backstage with keyboards and drums, center-front solo mike, neons, strobes... The lights come up on Faustus in a Mick Jagger pose and Mephisto excels at Keith Richards-style jumps and leaps across the stage. Stein challenged herself in her libretto to write a recognizable narrative but the audience is soon wondering who exactly are the strange pairs that join them through the smoke swirls and blue and yellow flashes. First, Boy and Dog, here a British schoolboy with a Nintendo-generated companion, followed by the always popular Marguerite Ida/Helena Annabel, who is herself the very embodiment of one of Stein's insistencies.

As always with Stein however, content takes a back seat to form, something Lagarde recognizes in his embracing of rock opera's cliches, which are like an open book in which Stein's phrases write their hypnotic and teasing musicality. Rodolph Burger's score throws rap and rock beats and pop's tonal angst at Stein's text, which embraces them all and loses 70 years of dust in the process. Playing further on the rock genre motifs, Lagarde's direction gives free reign to the sexual metaphors of Marguerite (etc.)'s predicament: stung (or bitten, the distinction is important) by a serpent between the legs.

Stein's theme of modern man's fear of progress is not obviously present among everything else happening on stage, except for the lonely figure of Dr. Faust and the glowing electric candles that form the stage's backdrop. Lagarde's attention falls more on the love story between Marguerite (etc.) and her Mr. Overseas Man. They are backed up by an eclectic cast of many contrasts and doublings, from the diminutive Annabelle Garcia as the sweet-faced Boy with troublingly confusing gender attributes, Stéfany Ganachaud's controlled and enigmatic Dog, whose canine features are made possible by a kind of futuristic Roller Ball costume, and Joan Cocho's monkey-like Mephisto in black t-shirt and jeans. Samuel Réhault's anomic Faust is the least interesting in his leather trenchcoat weighed down by Faust's arrogance.

As Marguerite Ida/Helena Annabel sang her name for the hundredth time at the performance I attended, audience members started to mildly panic, clutching at programs and watches: proof that, taken as literature, Stein's circular experiments can still challenge Cartesian order. Lagarde's production has the merit of hinting very strongly however that Stein's concerns are not so different than those of many a Grammy winner or MTV star: it's the music that matters.

To May 22, Tues-Sat, 9 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, 37 bis, boulevard de la Chapelle, 10e, Métro La Chapelle, 14 euros-28 euros, tel: 01.46.07.34.50.

Photo Credit: Guillaume Gellert

Krystian Lupa's "Fin de partida"

2011-05-16T02:05:00.000-07:00

The work of Samuel Beckett is a famous teaser. That the author of the theatrical conundrum of the 20th century, "Waiting for Godot", insisted that there are in his work "no symbols where none intended" (to paraphrase his novel "Watt"), has never much eased the public's anxiety of meaning when faced with his plays and fiction. If the Irish playwright's estate has worked tirelessly to reign in any and all over-zealous interpretations of his work, it still remains as difficult to refrain from dissecting Beckett as it is to resist gawking at an accident. "Endgame" which followed "Godot" by eight years, revisits many of the themes and situations of that defining play, such as dependency, suffering, inevitability, stasis - and no redemption from any of these - with a foursome of characters, here all physically impaired. "More inhuman than Godot" according to its creator, "Endgame" asks again how it is possible to live if there is no meaning to be found in what is commonly called life.

Regarded as one of the most important artists of contemporary European theater, Polish director Krystian Lupa comes to "Endgame" at the height of his work and influence, and his "interpretation" begs us consequently to sit up and take notice. Beckett's text imagines the blind and infirm Hamm, his servant Clov, and Hamm's maimed parents, Nell and Nagg, in unspecified grey and desolate surroundings on the edge of a sea. Some liberties Lupa takes include casting Clov as a woman (who asserts her femininity at the play's end) and replacing the trashcans Nell and Nagg are relegated to in the original, with glass-sided rolling boxes that are equal parts gerbil cage and casket. Hamm's house becomes an abandoned cement bunker, empty of furnishings save his wheelchair and a jarringly ornamental chandelier. The sea that Hamm and Clov listen to from the tiny windows has also pressed itself inside, in the form of a sand dune that partly obscures the doorway Clov enters and exits from, prompting him to swing in and out like a monkey (Clov has also been interpreted to mean "clown"). In addition, natural light reaches to the hard corners and dusty floors of their concrete shelter and does indeed bathe Hamm's face at the play's end. Could "hope" be far behind?

Certainly not, because, despite these deliberate choices, Lupa's production, with the Teatro de La Abadía of Madrid, excels at doing what Beckett claimed his work must: resist meaning. Enclosed within the faded green walls and menaced by the encroaching, inhospitable environment, the characters of this "Fin de Partida" exude a kind of absurdity that belies more typical representations of Beckett's existentialism as wholly pessimistic while never denying that their existence is no more than a farce. Susi Sanchez's Clov is a malicious teenager who throws biscuits at Nagg and laughs loudly at their daily frustrations, José Luis Gomez is a dryly cynical Hamm, a playground king in his dilapidated chair, black beret and glasses, while Nell and Nagg (Lola Cardón and Ramón Pons), all in white, farily radiate purity, one would dare say human attachment, into the mix. That is to say that, relieved of some of its darkest suggestions by Lupa's direction and set, Beckett's text gains in complexity. If death is obviously intimated by Nell and Nagg's coffin-like boxes, which slide into the wall as in a mausoleum, these also have an air of the glass caskets used in Catholic churches to enclose holy relics, while the whole set could be a gas chamber. Lupa opens the door to a variety of extrapolations. Similarly, Clov's final feminine elegance starkly contradicts the character's previously slouchy, juvenile delinquent air. "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness", says Nell. That mystery sums up Lupa's vision.

Contrasts may abound within Lupa's production but all the sunlight in the world can never change the blunt power of Beckett's language, even in translation. Since the opportunity presents itself currently, some interesting comparisons stand to be drawn with Alain Françon's "Fin de partie" featuring an all-star cast led by Jean-Quentin Châtelain and Serge Merlin, at the Théâtre de la Madeleine, until July 17.

"Fin de partida", in Spanish with French subtitles. May 13-18, Tues-Sat, 8:30 pm, Sun, 3:30 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 7 avenue Pablo Picasso, Nanterre (92), RER A Nanterre-Préfecture, 12-25 euros, tel: 01.46.14.70.00. "Fin de partie", to July 17, Théâtre de la Madeleine, tel: 01.42.65.07.09, www.theatremadeleine.com.

Photo Credit: Teatro Abadía/Ros Ribas

Sounds of Silence

2011-05-06T04:30:00.000-07:00

A number of reprises are in Paris in May and I'll be revisiting them here.

One of these, "The Sound of Silence", at the Théâtre de Chaillot for just three performances (previously at the MAC-Créteil in 2008), I first saw at the 2007 Europe Theater Prize in Thessaloniki, Greece. It was a creation by Alvis Hermanis, from Riga, Latvia, and a co-winner of the "New Realitites" Prize that year. In interviews at that festival, he revealed himself to be the odd child of Communist propaganda and Sixties idealism. Artistic Director of the New Riga Theater, he first spent 10 years focusing on classical productions, but these led him to make a self-described "radical shift", from adapting texts to creating a "theater of emotion" that explores private space and "real life".

The work that brought him international attention, "Long Life" (2003) is a case in point. The play delves into the everyday minutiae of five individuals sharing a post-Soviet-era communal apartment. Audiences, limited to a relative handful, entered the theater via the set, and were supplied opera glasses to dwell at leisure on the extraordinary jumble of objects, furniture, detritus and general miscellanea that the set contained, over the course of a three-hour, wordless performance.

The prequel to "Long Life" is "The Sound of Silence", which jumps back 40 years to a brief moment of Sixties-era bohemia, symbolized for Hermanis by Simon and Garfunkel's 1964 song of the almost same name, or at least insofar as it trickled into Soviet-controlled Latvia. Written in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy's assassination and pin-pointing a collective anomie, the folk hit came at the beginning of the Sixties political, cultural and sexual upheavals. These represented an even bigger danger in the Soviet bloc countries than they did on American college campuses, and Hermanis considers what life might have been like for his parents' generation, before the intensified Cold War hostilities of the early Eighties and the exacerbated economic and cultural stagnation that resulted across the USSR. Experimenting again with silent theater, in a 3hr15min attempt through music and gestures but no dialogue, to take the pulse of that fleeting moment, Hermanis seeks to tap into the era's utopianism to deliver a more "human dimension" to the theater act and our experience of it.

Hermanis is gaining increasing attention throughout Europe. A recent collaboration with theaters in Naples and Bologna under the auspices of the European Union's Prospero Project led to an Italian adaptation of Polish writer Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz's short story "The Wilko Girls" (1933), created in Modena in January 2010 and touring to European project member cities.

May 4-6, "The Sound of Silence", 8 pm, Théâtre national de Chaillot, 1 place du Trocadéro, 11-32 euros, tel: 01.53.65.30.00.

Persona.Marilyn

2011-05-04T13:59:00.000-07:00

Many a man has fantasized about Marilyn Monroe, but when Kyrstian Lupa does, he is magnetized less by her blonde bombshell physique than by the icon she became, and why. "Persona. Marilyn" is the second work in the Polish director's trilogy exploring larger-than-life 20th century personalities. Between Andy Warhol ("Factory2", at Théâtre de la Colline earlier this season) and Simone de Beauvoir ("Le Corps de Simone"), Lupa's Marilyn is the heir of the former's embracing of market culture and the antithesis of the latter's intellectual asceticism.

A pin-up more than a flesh-and-blood woman, yet inherently carnal in all her representations, the former Norma Jean Baker never seemed in her lifetime to have much control over the forces that created her, marketed her, married her and buried her. Two highly public marriages and divorces, a messy emotional tailspin, and the never elucidated circumstances of her premature death were more than enough, after her sex-symbol superstardom, to secure her legend. Lupa picks up the threads of Monroe's story in the final days of her life, long after her raw talent had been confused by drugs, alcohol and, in Lupa's piece, the nefarious influences and competing interests of her acting coach, Paula Strasberg (wife of Lee Strasberg), and her analyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson.

If the real Marilyn lived life at full speed for a brief moment, Lupa slows the action down to a near standstill, placing his character in an abandoned film studio: a much needed retreat from the public eye but where she is also visited, one might even say preyed upon, by her various handlers and lovers. At the same time, he uses the contemporary tools of iconography, video and photography, to make clear that any revelations are precisely calculated: if she didn't control the machine that created her, she certainly assumed the image it projected of her . Actress Sandra Korzeniak is riveting as Marilyn, making love instinctively to the cameras with the star's particular combination of emotional fragility and overt sexuality. Hardly a moment Korzeniak spends on stage is not recorded or observed, and her Marilyn both needs and teases the public's gaze. Lupa's preoccupations and references turn on the nature of performance - his actors' and Marilyn's, on screen and in real life - more so than on any biographical artifacts or setting details (the characters drink from plastic water bottles and carry computer bags, circa 1962). He explores the theme from a variety of angles, including a play-within-a-play, as Marilyn rehearses again and again a scene from The Brothers Karamazov in which she tellingly plays the beautiful temptress Grushenka.

Lupa was winner of the Europe Theater Prize in 2009, in recognition of his intense direction of actors and painstaking construction of characters, both clearly on view in this show. He offers with "Persona. Marilyn" a slowly hypnotic reflection on la fabrique de l'image and the cult of the pop star, two features of contemporary society that may have begun with Marilyn but that have far surpassed anything she ever knew and which we are not likely to rid ourselves of any time soon.

In Polish with French subtitles. To May 7, 8:30 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, RER A Nanterre-Préfecture + navette, tel: 01.44.14.70.00.

Photo credit: D.R.

Some Traces of Katie Mitchell: Europe Theater Prize (III)

2011-04-20T14:23:00.000-07:00

Director Katie Mitchell was awarded the 12th Europe "New Theatrical Realities" prize in St. Petersburg, Russia, last week (see previous posts regarding the event, below).

At 46 years old, Mitchell has lengthy directing credentials, first at Paine's Plow and the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she was an assistant director, and more recently as associate director at the Royal Court and currently at the National Theater. Mitchell trained extensively in Russia and Eastern Europe, in particular with Russian pedagogues Lev Dodin, of St. Petersburg's Maly Theater, and Anatoli Vassiliev of Moscow's Gitis school. In Britain, where she has been called one of the country's "most polarizing" directors, she is known for her almost obsessive background research, her strict application of Stanislavsky's system and a growing, complex body of multi-media work, as well as operas. An intimate collaborator of Britain's most famous contemporary playwright, Martin Crimp, she has directed two of his works, "Attempts on Her Life" and "The City", as well as his versions of others, such as "The Maids" and "The Seagull". That production earned her enormous criticism for her reworking of Chekov, but the experience has not prevented her from yet more ambitious adaptations, of Virginia Woolf's The Waves and Dostoevsky's The Idiot ("Some Trace of Her"). A children's show, from Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat, is scheduled to come to Paris next December.

Extremely controlled and precise in her answers during a public interview at the conference, she provided, in the absence of an actual production, some insight into her concerns and methods. Extracts.

"I came here 22 years ago and looked at the work in this city with Lev Dodin and then in Moscow with Anatoli Vassiliev and in Georgia and Lithuania, in actually December '89 just after the Wall had fallen, and it was the most informative part of my... everything actually. It shaped everything that I did and do. I studied Lev Dodin's work and watched him train directors for three weeks in this city, so I was shaped by that visit and those international practitioners much more than I was shaped by anything in my own country."

"I suppose in the UK there is a preoccupation with language and speaking words, but there isn't such a preoccupation with constructing behavior and psychology, of which language is a small component. So in this country [Russia], at least, the legacy of the investigations of Stanislavsky, which were very rigorous investigations into how to represent life-like behavior on stage, that legacy created an amazingly sophisticated and complex methodology of acting and directing, with the emphasis on behavior and not on language. I think that was the thing I learned: the way that someone like Dodin or Vassiliev would scan every inch of the actor's body for the data, so that wherever the audience would look on the body they would get very thorough, precise data. And I've never really forgotten certain productions by Dodin or Vassiliev. They set the bar in my head for everything I make. And Pina Bausch, obviously."

"It's very strange to constantly have your influences a long way from you so you have to really work hard to hold them in your head. I think that's been the hard thing. Obviously, to fully understand Stanislavsky's late work, which is my interest and speciality, and to communicate it to actors in the rehearsal room, and then through the actors to the audience, has been 20 years of work. That's all I've been doing, really."

"I'm often sort of taking ideas about how to play an actor's intention or ideas about esthetics, color, the use of light, through several shows over several years. I think that to direct work is such a complex art because you have so many components: the writing, the acting, the lighting, the sound, the colors, the design. There are so many things that it's probably not possible to practice getting all of the strands of work without practicing over several shows. [...] If each production is life or death I get so frightened that I get paralyzed. But if a production is a production as well as a covert investigation of something, then I'm less paralyzed because I'm intellectually somehow free. [...] I don't think in individual productions. I think in arcs of work all the time."

"[As a director interpreting a play], I suppose you've got the surface dialogue of the text and you've got to analyze that, moment to moment: what every character is playing. That's one level. And then you take a mine shaft down deeper and you discover the ideas that consciously or unconsciously preoccupied the writer when they were writing the play, and these determine all the surface action. With all of Chekov's plays, one of the key ideas would be death or illness or family. Those were the ideas that were in his head, maybe not formulated as simplistically as that, but they were there. So those are things that I spend a lot of time trying to find: what are the key ideas that are driving the writer or driving the play at the same time as analyzing the surface, textual exchanges that are going on. That's why we're making theater, isn't it? We're making theater to communicate ideas. I don't think there is any other point to the act. The ideas have to seep through everything: the sound, the lighting, the acting. Everything. The reason that Chekov is so powerful is because the idea structure is so terrifying. Or Euripides: absolutely terrifying ideas. Every inch of the action that the audience sees has to be somehow in relationship to those ideas. And that's really hard. Its very easy to do the story of a play; that's really, really simple. But to do the story [of the] ideas is much harder; it requires a different form of articulation. But ideas aren't very popular, just like politics aren't very popular and morality isn't very popular and metaphysics aren't very popular and philosophy isn't very popular. There's a lot of interest in diversions and entertainment and escape and romanticizing behavior and making beautiful people. [...] My aim is only to honor the material. I'm incredibly rigorous and incredibly serious about what I do."

Photo credit: Luciano Rossetti © Phocus Agency

In Photos: 14th Europe Theater Prize (II)

2011-04-20T06:40:00.001-07:00

A glimpse of the winners in the "New Realities" category of the 14th Europe Theater Prize held from April 12-17 in St. Petersburg, Russia (see article in previous post). Photo credits: Luciano Rossetti © Phocus Agency

Finnish director Kristian Smeds at a conference on his work

"Happiness" by Russian director Andrey Moguchiy at the Alexandrinsky Theater

Vesturport Theater's "Faust" and "Metamorphosis"

Teatro Meridional performing "Contos em Viagem - Cabo Verde" at the Komissarzhevskaya Theater

"The Theater" by Viliam Docolomansky's Farm in the Cave company

Diverse Realities: 14th Europe Theater Prize (I)

2011-04-20T02:08:00.000-07:00

Built on flood-prone marshland and steely political will, St Petersburg was meant to be Russia's "window on Europe", at the Western-most edge of Peter the Great's empire. The organizers of the 14th Europe Theater Prize, awarded last week in the city equally famous for the October Revolution and the beginning of Communism, not improbably had in mind Peter's visionary project when they chose this former imperial capital to host the event. Their intentions would have been well placed: like no other edition, the 2011 Prize opened its own window on an eclectic spectrum of artists, most hailing from the confines of modern Europe and whose work the Prize legitimized in ways they never could have hoped for at home.

Created in 1986 under the auspices of the then European Community to recognize theater artists who are "promoting understanding and the exchange of knowledge between peoples", the Prize focused originally on superstar directors like Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Brook, Georgio Strehler and Robert Wilson, before opening its boundaries to rising talents, in a section bis entitled "New Theatrical Realities". As Europe has grown and EU directives kept apace, the latter category is today bestowed on no less than five artists, so that, with the Grand Prize winner, at least six member states can be recognized every year. In addition to the hugely influential German director Peter Stein, whose decades of creation and innovation at Berlin’s Schaubühne made him a natural laureat of the Grand Prize, the New Realities section this year recognized directors Viliam Dočolomanský (Slovakia/Czech Republic), Katie Mitchell (UK), Andrey Moguchiy (Russia) and Kristian Smeds (Finland), as well as companies Teatro Meridional (Portugal) and Vesturport Theater (Iceland): an impressive cross-spectrum of "European realities", to be sure.

As a glimpse at how theater is dreamed, constructed and played out across the continent, this year's Prize event proved illuminating. Between the wordless anthropological studies led by the Teatro Meridional and the coolly high-tech narratives of Katie Mitchell, or between Andrey Moguchiy's animated cartoon characters and Kristian Smed's anarchic fury, or again between Vesturport's high-flying acrobatics and Dočolomanský's anti-globalization choreography, the possibilities are widely disparate and not likely to shrink any time soon. But if the quantity and imagination of these propositions seem limitless, their quality was invariably irregular, or in the case of Katie Mitchell, whose work was not shown at the festival, impossible to judge. A general if not always unwelcome sense of confusion reigned over the Prize's six days of conferences and performances.

What unites these artists, if coherence was on the agenda, is the physicality of their different approaches to story-telling and performance. Watching their work, it seemed already a truism to say that a shared belief that human beings are inherently theatrical as well as a consequent desire to translate human experience through the body rather than words, are probably the defining characteristics of new European theater. In any case, the Jury's choices made for an unusual showcase of generally unknown artists and their unfettered attempts at finding appropriate forms for their texts and ideas.

Of the work on offer among the New Realities, the most likely to book passage to France in a not too distant future comes from Mitchell and Vesturport. While the former was only briefly present in St. Petersburg, a meeting with her past and present collaborators, including the British playwright Martin Crimp, along with a public interview, provided a skeleton of Mitchell’s interests and methods, inspired from research and training in Russian and Eastern European traditions and Stanislavsky's system for actors. Firmly established on the British arts scene, as associate director of the National Theatre and a close collaborator of Crimp, Mitchell might have offered the most serious and evolved work of the New Realities laureates if she and the Prize organizers had found a way of showing any of her plays here.

So it had to be the Vesturport theater from Reykjavik who captured the most attention in St. Petersburg, with its casual hipster charm, good looks, team spirt and circus tumbling. The company presented two very different works, both adaptations of novels: Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and Goethe's "Faust". The former was as controlled as the latter was wild, but both pieces manifested clear interpretative choices. "Metamorphosis" showed off actor/director Gisli Örn Gardarsson's gymnast training, in the role of Gregor Samsa's anti-heroic cockroach, but focused on family mores over existential crisis. Their “Faust” shrugged off Goethe’s philosophical and metaphysical considerations entirely, in favor of a love story between an aging actor and his young nurse, made contemporary by a rock opera esthetic and an original Nick Cave score. Physical theater and theater of ideas are frequent strangers but it might be hoped that Vesturport may develop stronger content to match its already massively appealing signature forms.

As the main reason for the Prize, Peter Stein was also strangely absent from the event, offering limited time with the public and, for the awards ceremony, a solo, one hour reading of "Faust" that showed off his frustration with the venue rather more than the doctor's dilemma or Marguerite's crimes. Stein's other work presented during the conference, an early 19th century comedy by Heinrich von Kleist, "The Broken Jug", performed under his direction by the Berliner Ensemble, was a perfect, even too clean example of Stein's work, better known for its uncompromising political vision. Along with Russian director Lev Dodin (winner of the 8th European Theater Prize), whose reprise of "The Three Sisters" at the Maly Theater was a reminder of the excellence of his company and the mastery of his art, at the forefront of contemporary Russian theater, Stein's presence at this year's edition starkly contrasted with the urgency of the New Realities' winners, even if they have much to learn from his vision of theater as essentially text-based.

The face of European theater is perhaps only harder to define after the 11th Europe Theater Prize but like the view through Peter the Great's "window", this edition showed a vast continent of artists waiting to be discovered.

Photo: Prize Ceremony at the A.S. Pushkin Russian State Academic Drama Theater, April 17, 2011. Credit: Luciano Rossetti © Phocus Agency

Ma chambre froide

2011-03-19T16:50:00.000-07:00

Estelle is a model employee. For her coworkers, she covers their shifts, takes their blame, cleans up, stays late, opens early, asks for advances on her salary to loan them money and even lets the boss take advantage of her. In "Ma chambre froide", Joël Pommerat adds a new anti-héroine to his world of workers pitted against implacable market forces and each other, except that this time, Estelle is perhaps not the simple sum of the hours she works and the company balance sheet.

"Ma chambre froide" is also not the obvious sequel to Pommerat's trilogy on the same themes. After "Au monde" (2004) "D'une seule main" (2005) and "Les Marchands" (2006) [see this blog and parisvoice.com for reviews], which explored the pressure exerted on family and society by an unethical work "ethic" and economic crisis, "Ma chambre froide" considers what happens when colleagues and work supplant family and private life altogether, with a previously unsuspected comic vein. Common to all however is Pommerat's brutal vision of human nature in its 21st century struggles with globalization, downsizing, unemployment and their related ills, in a particularly French interpretation of the social contract.

The play imagines a certain Blocq, self-made entrepreneur and CEO of four successful businesses, whose crass and dismissive attitude towards all earns him the hatred and scorn of his staff, with the notable exception of Estelle. When he learns he has weeks to live, he leaves ownership of all his holdings to his eight "store" employees on the condition that they remember him once a year in a public display of their thanks. When Estelle has the idea to write a play about his life, her colleagues start to doubt her sincerity and even her sanity, especially when she starts imposing late-night rehearsals and animal costumes at the same time profits take a downturn and the whole staff is called upon to make enormous personal and moral sacrifices in the so-called collective good. That Estelle inadvertently refers to the store's cold chamber (chambre froid) as her own room suggests the extent to which the characters have been overtaken by the same pressures that consumed Blocq.

Like last season's "Cercles/Fictions", "Ma chambre froid" tells an episodic story that builds in suspense with each succeeding installment. But unlike that work, it does so with both feet more or less in a recognizable reality and a biting sense of humor. Less fantastical and figurative than his earlier plays, this latest piece has all the intrigue, suspense and surprises of a criminal investigation, while the exasperated insults with which the characters take each other down and Estelle's comic attempts to direct her colleagues create some very funny moments. What interests Pommerat though are the mysterious zones that theater provides to question human experience and explore alternative possibilities to what can be known and lived in real time and space. Who is Estelle in fact? What was Blocq's intention?

The actors of his Compagnie Louis Brouillard prove yet again to be invaluable guides through Pommerat's rich and strange worlds, creating with their characteristic cool precision equally familiar and monstrous characters within the close confines of the arena-like, 360-degree space, in contrasting tones of bleak neon or total darkness. They are masters of the transformative powers that Pommerat's work presupposes. His writing and direction, so exact from the timing of the scene changes to the irony of the sound track, here deserve the best of their talents,

If Estelle is right that it is always possible to change a bad situation, in "Ma chambre froide" liberation comes with a price that only the best, or the worst, are willing to pay.

To March 27, Tues-Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 3 pm, Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe/Ateliers Berthier, corner of rue Suarès and bd Berthier, 17e, Métro Porte de Clichy, 6-28 euros, tel: 01.44.85.40.40.

Photo Credit: Alain Fonteray

Please Kill Me

2011-03-13T14:31:00.000-07:00

If you remember that Robert Hell was the father of the Mohawk as a hair statement and safety-pins as a fashion accessory, then “Please Kill Me” is right up your alley. The latest show from Mathieu Bauer and Sentimental Bourreau takes its material and its name from the collection of interviews compiled by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain with everyone who was anyone in the punk music scene that started in New York in the early Seventies: Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Joey and Dee-Dee Ramone, Johnny Thunders, Blondie, Malcolm McLaren… Subtitled “The Uncensored Oral History of Punk”, the book holds no punches but shoots off more than a few, recounting overdoses, animal defenestrations, groupies, the pogo and the sweating steamy clubs where it all went down.

From that dense and not always fascinating body of anecdotes, Bauer has assembled an intelligent show that translates the style, the sound and the stunts of CBGB’s circa 1975, without ever attempting to recreate them. Actors Kate Strong and Matthias Girbig channel more than mimic the furious energy and nihilistic personas that shot to notorious fame in New York and then London, shouting, whispering and growling with the shadow of a Sid Viscious scowl or the sinuous muscularity of an Iggy pose. Of different generations and genders, they embody the scene from blast off to burn out, its major and minor players, its crossing of sexual codes. Bauer, on percussion, aided by Sylvain Cartigny on guitars and Lazare Boghossian on synthesizer do “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “Blank Generation,” not like the Stooges and the Voidoids did but rather how adolescent memory and forty-something experience have moved them, as talented musicians in their own right and certainly far more musically sophisticated than the Sex Pistols ever were. Bauer makes use of a mostly blank set and a huge back screen to subtitle the VO text, delivered with deadpan humor by Strong, and to create context and atmosphere, using original album artwork and live and prerecorded video montages.

Long before the music business became an industry, the stories retold and alluded to, as outrageous as they were, seem strangely from a more innocent time. The show doesn’t quite keep the pace of a Ramones’ song, and an unnecessary and overlong coda weights the finish, but “Please Kill Me” gets the message of the t-shirt Hell wore proclaiming that same statement: attitude is everything, just don’t take it too seriously.

To March 22, in English and French, Mon-Sat, 7:30 pm, Sun, 3:30 pm, Théâtre de la Bastille, 76 rue de la Roquette, Mº Bastille, 13-22 euros, tel: 01.43.57.42.14.

Photo Credit: Romain Etienne

Une Saison chez Césaire

2011-03-10T03:40:00.000-08:00

Living legends are rare but Aimé Césaire was one. In his lifetime (1913-2008), his name was synonymous with Black consciousness for French colonial subjects, or Négritude. One of France’s first and only colored députés, he delivered a blistering attack on French colonialism and racism in 1950, and was also the face of modern Martinican politics, as both the mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to 2001 and the author of Martinique’s request to become a French Overseas Department. First and foremost however, Césaire was a poet who developed a personal esthetic of surrealism - astonishing even to André Breton - to evoke the unique mal-de-vivre of French West Indians caught between a calculatingly generous “motherland” and aspirations for self-actualization. He was also the author of an equally acute theatrical body of work that is unforgiving of history and the political and economic machine that dictated it in his part of the world. “Nègre fondamental” and “éveilleur de conscience”, Césaire provided the foundation and the vision for African and West Indian literatures and identities.

The play “Une Saison chez Césaire”, conceived by his daughter Michèle and Haitian director Ruddy Sylaire is an invitation to rediscover Césaire's poetico-militant preoccupations in this year of celebrations of France’s overseas territories (“2011 Année des Outre-mer”). Splicing scenes from his four plays, the piece explores his principal concern, that of “le Nègre en lutte pour des lendemains meilleurs”. From the fugitive slave who aspires to be the Inventor of oppressed desires (“Et les chiens se taisaient”) to Christophe, the liberator/dictator of Haitian history (“La tragédie du roi Christophe”); from Lumumba, visionary of African unity (“Une Saison au Congo”) to Caliban, symbol of the brutalization of African-American identity ("Une Tempête"), Césaire challenges official lip-service to human rights and France’s own cherished motto of liberty, equality and fraternity for all.

If Césaire’s metaphorical language and Sylaire’s direction feel limited by the narrow confines of the Déchargeurs, the four actors give generously to their performances as a host of idealists trapped by history and crushed by unstoppable forces. The production is a simple and direct tribute to Césaire’s writing, as minimal in its dramatic language as it is symbolic in its few concessions to set (two poteau-mitan and a hanging sculpture evoking the lianes of the Martinican rain forest, both charged with rich symbolic implications for his work). Césaire’s voice rings loud and clear in this too brief “season” of his yet too pertinent discontent.

To April 9, Tues-Sat, 9:45 pm, 2 pm Sat, Théatre les Déchargeurs, 3 rue des Déchargeurs, 1e, Mº Châtelet, tel: 0892. 70.12.28.

Timon d'Athènes

2011-02-25T07:19:00.000-08:00

The critic Harold Bloom is said to have credited poetry slams with the death of literature, but an adaptation of “Timon of Athens” with three stars of the underground rap scene demonstrates that slam and Shakespeare have plenty in common. Fundamentally popular arts, both relish in bringing the spoken word to the people by pushing language to heights of musicality and imagery. They’re also blisteringly human and a lot of fun to watch. Those qualities are only part of the success of the “Timon d’Athenes” directed by Razerka Ben Sadia-Lavant, who has astutely seen in Shakespeare’s last play, a work made for the slam stage.

That is to say that the play has a checkered history. Unfinished, rarely produced and with an ambiguous story allowing little comfort or a clear moral, Timon lurks in the curtains as Hamlet and Lear steal the spotlight again and again. That marginal position lies easily with the show’s performers who represent the underclass of a politically and socially engaged form of rap that is far from the genteel melodies and lyrics of MC Solaar or the marketing machine of Diam’s. French rappers of West Indian origins, Casey and D’de Kabal are joined in the project by former Nuyorican Poetry Slam (NYC) laureate Mike Ladd, along with actors Denis Lavant and Marie Payen. They form an intimidating team to tell the story of Timon, a wildly generous but equally naive idealist who goes to his grave hating mankind when wealth then friends recede into the horizon. Asking the questions of friendship’s “price” and the power of moolah to create obsequious flatterers, the play’s themes are similarly in keeping with the rap scene’s penchant for bankrolls and bling.

These connections lead to a truly inventive adaptation of Shakespeare, but one that retains a sense of measure while offering a piercing reading of the text: a quality which lifts the struts and swaggers, the gold gloves and the omnipresent mikes from mere vehicle to interpretative insight. Lavant plays Lavant, a live wire if ever there was one, and his mere presence adds a dangerous unpredictability to Timon, who literally collapses under the weight of his rage. D’de Kabal lends his impressive stature and vocal register to Alcibiades, the rebellious general, and Marie Payen fills in the supporting roles from the artist and merchant classes, as well as Flavius, Timon’s faithful servant; her casting brings the sole hint of sex to Timon’s Athens, obsessed with money at the expense of human relations. As Apemantus, the cynical philosopher who scorns Timon’s hangers-on, Casey gives the most astonishing performance. This female rapper from Seine-Saint-Denis via Fort-de-France has built on an androgynous appearance to enter the macho world of hip-hop, but her softer physicality sets Apemantus off from Alcibiades and makes for a a fascinating, insult-hurling show-down with Lavant’s tiny Timon in the play’s final act.

Those verbal jousts of which Shakespeare was a master, 400 years before Grandmaster Flash, are, in Timon, particularly well served by rap’s pulsing braggadocio. Besides commissioning a translation that has its ear to the language of the streets (by Sophie Couronne), Ben Sadia-Lavant had the excellent idea to invite American spoken word master Mike Ladd to deliver Timon’s significant monologues in a sizzling half-sung, half-rapped VO: some of the most exciting moments of the show. The production does away entirely with set and movement, leaving only the text in a poetry slam atmosphere, the performers delivering their lines from five microphone stations. The sole concession to the dramatic genre is their repeated costume changes, to signal character shifts and to mark Timon’s demise from wealthy benefactor to destitute misanthrope. Even with prodigious Doctor L. on percussion, guitar and synthesizer, the show clocks in at a mere 75 minutes. Purists be damned: it’s a slam all right, but one that does Shakespeare proud.

To March 12, Tues-Sat, 8 pm, Sat, 7 pm, Maison des Métallos, 94 rue Jean-Piere Timabud, 11e, Mº Couronnes, 10-14 euros, tel: 01.48.05.88.27.

Le Musée de la Mer

2011-02-04T08:16:00.000-08:00

Author Marie Darrieussecq broke onto France's literary scene in 1996 with a Kafkaesque story about a woman who finds herself turning into a sow. Surprising transformations and ambiguous relations are not unusual to the dozen novels that followed. For her first play, « Le Musée de la mer », she dives into the murky waters of crisis and conflict to fish out dystopian anxiety along with some strange marine life.

Director Arthur Nauzyciel is drawn to intercultural collaboration as well as to Darrieussecq's themes and writing. He has directed two Koltès plays for the Emory Theater in Atlanta and a "Julius Caesar" with the American Repertory Theater of Boston. In 2009, he got Darrieussecq on board to adapt "Ordet" (1925), by the Danish writer and Lutheran minister Kaj Munk.

This background seems important in trying to understand what we see on stage at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers. Never dotting too many of her « i »’s in her unsettling fictional worlds, Darrieussecq writes for the program notes that she has relied on Nauzyciel to fill in much of the detail of “Musée”. Where the text stops and Nauzyciel's vision takes over cannot be known, but it is a wonder who of this otherwise talented duo will take responsibility for the undefinable creature from the deep
which occupies center stage for most of the performance.

"Belle" is described as possibly a lamantin (sea cow), in the program notes. She is, from what is to be gathered from the text, all that remains of the museum's marine life, decimated by the consequences (largely famine) of an ambiguously defined war which encroaches on this windswept corner of an equally unspecified country. "Her" uncensored suffering, which is communicated by unnerving moaning and even singing, is undoubtedly meant to illustrate the unstated feelings of the largely stoic characters: two couples and the two children of one of these. Dancer Damien Jalet goes to admirably painful lengths to give life to Belle, but, as insensitive to her metaphorical importance as the comment may be, the formless thing never looks like more than a lumpy orange bag with a man inside.

Another curiosity is the plastic-draped set, dominated by an enormous bubble. Characters enter it at times, ostensibly extending the narrative space, while their presence there is alternately dream-like and grotesque. There is also the matter of a kind of basin, or even a trap leading into the open sea, where the last (rubber) fish are caught. We're not sure where we are, but it certainly isn't real, with consequences for the intended message regarding wartime, concessions and survival.

The children who arrive at the museum's door, and their siamesesque contortions, provide the most interest here. If their presence is meant to underscore the characters' uncomfortable need for each other under stress, that is perhaps the most powerful message of the play.

"Musée" was created with Iceland's National Theater and a multicultural artistic team. The Icelandic connection lends a hint of wild spaces and dramatic contrasts to Darrieussecq's oblique text, but "Le Musée de la mer" remains as slippery as a fish or as taciturn as a fisherman, its intended effet never quite clear.

Seen at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers, Feb. 3, 2011.

Photo Credit: Frédéric Nauzyciel

Your Brother. Remember?

2011-01-28T09:59:00.001-08:00

Zachary Oberzan is finding fame with some of the most weirdly adventurous performances in miniature one might ever see. He was the star of Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s “Rambo Solo”, a retelling of the novel First Blood and its film remake, "Rambo", performed on film by Oberzan in his studio apartment and simultaneously live. The experience led to a full-length feature film redux, “Flooding with Love for the Kid”, where he plays all 26 roles, again in his 225 sq. ft flat. In addition to being an accomplished musical autodidact and sought-out actor, performing last year with New York experimental theater the Wooster Group, Oberzan is also, to judge from his latest piece, an action movie addict since his earliest years. In fact, “Your Brother. Remember?” answers the questions audiences to his previous projects might have pondered while watching him crash painfully around his apartment, such as: “Why does he do this??” If the story of “Brother” is any indication, it's because, as the child of a broken marriage in Maine in the ‘70s, he and his brother Gator bonded by watching Jean Claude Van Damme in “Kickboxer” (1989) as well as other inanities only teenage boys could get into.

The show finds Oberzan once again reproducing, gesture for gesture, video sequences that play behind him, trading John Rambo for Kurt Sloan, Van Damme’s character sporting a full-body pancake-makeup tan throughout. In these, clips of favorite scenes from the movie are interspersed with home video of the brothers precisely enacting the same segments, first as teenagers twenty years ago in their living room, and as adults today: more accomplished in Zachary’s case but rather worse for wear in his brother’s. Whatever artistic or conceptual motives may underlie Oberzan’s intersecting interests in video and performance (American society’s penchant for home video “bloopers” and Candid Camera gags, to hypothesize a couple), “Brother” doesn’t rise much above a homage to lost boyhood and above all Gator, now 100 lbs heavier and a methadone addict with a prison record. Extended footage of him and sister Jenny talking about the fun they had filming the project or retelling scatological prison tales may be meant to evoke those "Making Of" extras now common on movie DVDs , but a sudden glimpse of Gator coming down from meth makes for a suddenly startling reality show.

Oberzan’s considerable talents may owe much to those early film-making experiences, and he proves here again to be the highly versatile actor of his preceding projects. His fascination with acting is ultimately what lends needed weight to the show’s stunts. A scene where Oberzan meticulously acts out Van Damme monologuing about his start and struggles in the profession is the most interesting moment of the piece, engaging, in the pop culture terms of Oberzan’s language, with theories of acting, from what Diderot had to say about the “paradox of the actor”, who must only appear to feel the emotions he portrays, to Lee Stasberg's Method Acting.

Oberzan’s DIY approach to film and limitless physical exploits and costume gags have opened doors across the Continent. Next stops: Sweden, Norway, Italy, Austria, Germany, Portugal, and Belgium. What foreign audiences will make of this thoroughly made-in-America project is anyone's guess.

Seen at MC93 Créteil, Jan. 25, 2011

La Niaque

2011-01-27T05:35:00.000-08:00

“Niaque” is slang for a fighting instinct. It’s what helped Chad Chenouga survive an extended stay in collective foster care to go on to a career as a filmmaker. In the autobiographical monologue he directs and performs, la niaque is also the irrepressible energy that gives hope to the story of his protagonist Nassim and the other “enfants de la DASS” (child-wards of the Département des Affaires sanitaires et sociales) with whom he lives in a foyer in Fontenay-aux-Roses. Among these “cas sociaux” (social cases) as such children might be more pejoratively referred to, Nassim stands apart, however: a good student, curious, easy-going, he looks with the same equanimity at mates La Savate, Liesse, Malek and Prosper, Africans and Rebeus (backslang for beurs, or French-born North Africans) like himself, as he does at the “éducs” (éducateurs / social workers) who try to strike a balance between their reputations as “distributeurs de baffes” (a little too ready to use their fists in a conflict) and their role as foster parents. A year in their company exposes Nassim to much of what he already knows, as the orphan of a broken marriage, preferring the street to a too-volatile home, but also offers his first experiences with love and a chance to start over.

In his simple, forthright piece, Chenouga captures the best and the worst of a system endowed with considerable means for raising at-risk children (a highlight in the show is when Nassim and pals are taken to receive their monthly stipend of 300 euros, which they promptly blow on counterfeit D&G jeans and Ray-Bans at the Puces de Clignancourt), yet handcuffed by lingering racism and the French state’s weak promise of an ascenseur social to equal rights and opportunities for all. Like the suspicious fire in the director’s office that destroys all their files, these adolescents burn with an incandescent desire to be acknowledged and to have their say, a feeling translated on stage by two hip-hop/Krump dancers who punctuate Nassim’s narration with their repetitive, staccato gestures that hover between collapse and control like a spinning top in the moment it starts to wobble. Nassim’s struggle is not so much with his mother’s addiction, his father’s disappearance or the suicides and murders that punctuate his year at the foyer, but rather with the feeling of relief he discovers to be free of an unbearable personal history and to be at ease with himself in the new life that the foyer and a change of lycée provide.

Chenouga tells his story in the slang of the streets, the language of his characters, who nevertheless grapple, like Nassim, with the codes and forms of standard French. The dual registers speak in plain terms the distance that separates mainstream French society from its disenfranchised youth, whether they live in foyers or HLMs. Nassim’s “niaque” or desire to shake off that status creates a vibrant piece of theater that is never self-pitying but rather genially combative. Chenouga and dancers Wrecker and Romuald Brizolier/Migue Ortega (in alternating performances) use impressive restraint to tell a story that more usually leads to a police record, with salutary laughter and an exemplary will to live.

To February 12, Tues-Sat, 9 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 7 avenue Pablo Picasso, RER A Nanterre-Préfecture + navette, 12-25 euros, tel: 01.46.14.70.00.

Photo Credit: Pascal Victor

Interview with Dan Jemmett

2011-01-23T13:55:00.000-08:00

It has been 12 years since a little known director from London’s experimental fringe created Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu roi” with three actors, some kitchen utensils and a bunch of tomatoes, at the Théâtre de la Cité internationale. Dan Jemmett’s approach to theater – playful, visual, rooted in formative experiences as a child of actor-parents, later as a street puppeteer while at Goldsmith’s Art College in London - has served him well in that time; he now holds a long list of productions in France (nearly two a year) and a reputation for being a director who can wring magic from even the poorest text. His work includes creative retakes of Elizabethan classics, along the lines of “Shake” (a revisited “Twelfth Night”), “Dog Face” (Thomas Middleton’s “The Changeling”) and “Presque Hamlet”; a few contemporary risks like “William Burroughs surpris en possession du Chant du vieux marin de Samuel Taylor Coleridge” by Johny Brown, “Le Musée du désir’ by John Berger, and a version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl”, with English band The Tiger Lilies; as well as five operas and two acclaimed productions now in the repertory of the Comédie Française: “Les Précieuses ridicules” and “La Grande Magie”. Success rarely taking a straight road, however, Jemmett has navigated some challenging turns: flops, to be blunt, such as at the Théâtre de Marigny last season with the critically excoriated “Le Donneur de bain”. His newest play, “La Comédie des erreurs”, finds Jemmett returning to familiar ground, with cross-overs in theme, set design and cast from his first big success in France (“Shake”, Prix de la revelation théâtrale (New Talent Award), awarded by French theater critics, 2002). The production provided the opportunity for some frank conversation on the day before the show opened at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord.

Molly Grogan : What motivated your choice of “The Comedy of Errors,” and how did you decide to use just two actors to play the two sets of twins [the brothers Antipholus and their servents Dromio]?

Dan Jemmett: I always liked the play. It's performed a lot in England, very badly, I think, mostly because it’s kept at a certain face value: it’s a farce, its accessible to children and its sort of a beginner’s Shakespeare piece. But I was struck, even as a child being in it, by a sort of grace that was present. And of course the asides that the two Antipholuses have to the audience; in general, in an Elizabethan text, the asides interest me because they immediately break down the conventions. And then the desire to reduce it to, not a Commedia piece, but a tréteau [traveling stage] with as few actors as possible: that’s appealing because it means you have to think differently; can the attempt at representation, whether its scenic or the actors’ characterization, really be sketched? It’s a form that maybe has stayed with me since working with puppets. It allows perhaps for a space to open, a space between the performance and what is being said, somehow; it allows us to breathe. It’s sort of a way of commenting together on the kind of theater we’d like to show, without it ever being ironic. I’d like to think it calls up an intelligence that is there in the audience to play with the form of theater.

Shakespeare wrote “The Comedy of Errors”, I imagine, thinking that different actors would play the twins, which is impossible because you spend your whole time, in productions I’ve seen, trying to make the two twins look as much the same as possible, when you know they’re different actors. At the end, you have the dévoilement, where two actors have to look at each other pretending that they’re twins, when they’re not. It’s horrible. We spent our time erroneously, to start with in rehearsals, wondering how we could make the difference between the two, and then I thought, “That’s ridiculous. They should be the same because that’s the whole point.” [To show which Dromio or Antipholus is which] we use vaudeville techniques, glasses, hats, it doesn’t really matter. It’s a sort of a poor attempt to differentiate between the two. Then, the action sort of stops, and the text in the last scene of the dénouement, when everything is sorted out, happens in a more abstract way, meaning the actors lose the attempt at characterization and become the actors giving the text. I’m not quite sure what it means but it seems in the moment to allow us who are watching it to take what we want out of the questions of identity that have been set up, about finding not just a twin brother but finding oneself somehow. I don’t know if it feels slightly hermetic, but I can’t quite take it beyond a certain point. I can set the thing up and ask the questions by doing it with two actors like that, but then the resolution is something that is left.

MG: What’s keeping you interested in theater?

DJ: Well, I feel its sort of changing now. I went through a phase of accepting work that I hadn’t chosen, to do commandes, opera, the Marigny, the two pieces at the Comédie Française; they weren’t me. For as long as I can remember I’ve been doing quite a lot of that, and now with this work, I wanted to try and say “Stop” to that and make a smaller piece, a chamber piece, with a text that I wanted to do. On the back of that now, I’ve still got a few more commandes coming up, but I’m starting my own company in Paris with a producer, and in the autumn I’m going to do again one of Jarry’s ‘Ubu” pieces: “Ubu enchaînée” (*). I’m going to start with the same idea [as with “Ubu roi]” and see what happens if I spin off of that. I think there is maybe a stage in the careers of young-ish directors where you do some work, and people think that’s interesting, and then you think, “I need a career”, and you’re not sure in fact how it works. You’re taken by imposing individuals and producers, and it’s difficult to find any sense of autonomy in the middle of all that, but you’re seduced by it as well. I feel anyway, personally, that it’s time to take stock a little bit of what I have done and what I want to do and also to realize there are some things I just can’t do, certain ways of making theater that I’m not suited to make: the choice of material and the size of the theater, the architecture, the audience, all things that are very important. I was very gung ho, but sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t.

MG: It worked more often than not; the Comédie Française pieces were very well received.

DJ: That worked very well but the Marigny was a horrible experience and the Opéra Comique [“Beatrice et Bénédicte”, 2010] went very well but it could have gone very badly. I suppose one gets a sort of reputation for “Oh, he’ll do it because he can do crazy things…” A lot of this stuff is quite bad. The Berlioz score I was given was impossible. I managed to make something work, but if they asked, “What would you like to do?”, well, I’d be very happy directing “The Marriage of Figaro”, for example; that’s something I feel I could do. You say, yes I’ll do that. Why? Because it’s an interesting experience and it’s the opera but […] it’s such a personal thing to do and yet you find yourself in a position where your whole reason why you wanted to make theater and the whole personal relationship you have with it completely means nothing because it’s a vast machine. I think there are a lot of directors who get burned. I have been, variously, and I want a change.

MG: It’s unusual for a director to go back, truly, to where he began, as you are…

DJ: “Ubu enchaîné” is the sort of logical conclusion to “Ubu roi”. I suppose I wanted to go back and do that as the first thing in the company because it is a pretext for making the kind of theater that I’m interested in. It’s going to be working with objects again and three actors. Jarry is a universe that appeals to me for several reasons. There is a very impertinent voice there. I like the way in which somebody [Jarry] came to the theater having already made these puppets. On the first night of “Ubu”, he made a speech and said, “I would have liked to string the actors up like puppets but we couldn’t”… I thought that was an interesting belief that he, a little bit like Edward Gordon Craig, didn’t quite believe in the actor, and I don’t think I do. It sounds terrible to say that. [laughs[ I’m aware of the necessity of the actor and I like actors who don’t quite take themselves too seriously and who are aware of the limitations of it, so then you can do something else. The idea that I had originally of taking the three actors interests me, it becomes like a Guignol; there is some strange freak show. I like to go back to the Punch and Judy. And I think that politically there’s something interesting [in “Ubu”], and if one can find a way of making an “Ubu” feel something today, not just a museum piece… You look around and you see people like Sarkozy and Berluscuni and Bush and you think there is something to say there, surely…

MG: What makes you want to continue to work in France?

DJ: I think England is sort of finished now. I went back about six years ago and just the conditions of work there and the way in which the work is made are now kind of alien to me. In any case, when I was working in England with this experimental company, Primitive Science [formed at Goldsmith’s], we hated theater. We wanted to do it in our own way. It was a way of making up our own rules. It was very underground. I miss that, the kind of political voice that that had at the time, after the Thatcher years. Even though we didn’t really know it, we were doing it because [the situation] was so awful. There was no provision for making experimental work; it was all very mainstream. So the simple gesture of making that work was political in a sense. In France, it becomes quite quickly, not mainstream, but the culture, accepts and values those ideas, so you’ve got no opposition. I suppose I sort of miss that, or I kept that, but there’s no reason; I have nothing to be in opposition against, really. But that sort of iconoclastic, punk voice is something that is left over from being born in England when I was, I think.

I’ve been here for 12 years and I’m still feeling I’m an outsider in many ways. An outsider in the sense that… I have no problem feeling being part of French culture, but there is just a recognition that however long one lives in France, one never really understands the French. They are the way they are. It’s true that in France the seriousness, intellectually, is possible in a way that in England it just isn’t, or in the States. So I am where the work is, where I can make the work.

MG: Where is home then: more an idea than a place?

DJ: Even Paris I find sometimes very conservative, not much fun. And yet you think well, there is another space, that is a kind of freedom here, which is an intellectual space, which isn’t pretentious either; its just a French quality, and that allows for the work in a way that couldn’t happen anywhere else.

* Starring Eric Cantona, scheduled at the Théâtre de l’Atelier

See review of "La Comédie des Erreurs" at www.parisvoice.com

Photo Credit: Mario del Curto

Damas Crosses the Line

2011-01-19T01:19:00.000-08:00

Leon-Gontran Damas was the least known of the three founders of Negritude, the poetry movement created by French colonial subjects in Paris in the 1930s, but his poems gave the impetus to a politically engaged literary uprising among French-speaking Africans and West Indians. While his friends, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, went on to pursue high-visibility political careers and authored expansive and critically acclaimed oeuvres, the contributions of the quieter and more personally reflective Damas never found the same fame or public in his lifetime. His poetry exudes, however, the raw energy and urgency that lie at the core of Negritude’s declaration of Black identity.

Those poems and that search for self are the subject of an excellent short piece of theater: « Leon-Gontran Dams a franchi la ligne », directed by Frédérique Liebaut and interpreted by Mylène Wagram. Poupées noires, faux cols, banjos and Canadian Club… Damas’ evocation of the everyday with a surreal quality of imagery and brutally elegant language are dramatized over 90 powerful minutes through Wagram’s inspired performance, incarnating with equal sensitivity the poet’s disapproving mother or Damas’ own tortured figure in his Parisian exile.

The son of middle-class mulatto French Guineans, Damas struggled to render the foundational existential question for West Indians over the course of their 400 year history, spanning the extermination of indigenous peoples, the slave trade, race-obsessed creole society and the colonies’ relation to la Mère-patrie: what does it mean to be black in France ? The question has lost little of its pertinence nearly a century later, and Liebaut and Wagram find in Damas’ verse much to reflect on today, weaving a narrative through « Black Label », « Hoquet », « Limbe » and other works with a precise physical language and a handful of props and costumes. The intensity and intelligence of Wagram’s readings of Damas’ language and vision, even exploiting the rap tonalities and rhythms of these poems written long before Blacks had any kind of voice, make a gripping performance of these too long unheard poems.

To Feb. 27, Tues-Sat, 7 pm, Théâtre Lucernaire/Centre national d’art et d’essai, 53 rue Notre Dame des Champs, 6e, Mº Notre-Dame-des-Champs, 15-25 euros, tel: 01.42.22.26.50.

Identité

2011-01-18T06:40:00.000-08:00

A white rug, a beige raincoat, a few bottles of wine and one couple. Gérard Watkins, who won the Grand prix de literature dramatique (new writing prize) in 2010 with “Identité” (published by Voix navigables), places some very large preoccupations in a very small world (and a very familiar theater trope). How may an individual define himself/be defined? Getting there has many access roads, passing through culture, family, profession, nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, gender… most of which originate in realms far beyond our control.

Impatient with an immediate notion of identity (child + parents) for characters André and Marion Klein, the play opens a Petri dish of germinating ideas on identity as history (Vél d’hiv’), as politics (immigration policy) and as economics in the consumer societies of the European Union. But just as the question of who one is cannot be summed up on a census form, the larger issues Watkins tries to tackle are not easily contained in the miniature frame he uses, in the example of the Klein’s participation in an identity contest of sorts which finds them either exhuming corpses to win hypothetical prize money or engaging in a hunger fast in reaction to a general malaise. The action takes on a vaguely Orwellian atmosphere, in the play’s evident subscription to the existence of nebulous forces which inexorably manipulate us all.

Writing in reaction to the "Mariani Amendment" which proposed requiring DNA tests for immigrants to France requesting visas for their family members. Watkins seeks to transpose the Amendment's violence to society at large, as André and Marion must scour their parents' homes and even tombs for DNA residu. The question of their genetic tree is not what interests Watkins, however; André and Marion's discussions on genocide and involvement (both direct and indirect) in such mass crimes, make clear that is rather the dangerously insidious allegiances made by individuals in their daily lives that risk defining them. The work's merit lies in this extension of the debate, along with the cadences and images of Watkin's language which can, in the brutality of the context, approach the surreal. Billed as a tragedy, vaguely facetious, deliberately abstract, and with a tone vacillating between hysterical laughter and brute pessimism (from actors Anne-Lise Heimburger and Fabien Orcier, respectively), "Identité" is much less about a perception of self and much more about a society at pains to embrace the Other in its midst.

To Feb. 11, Tues-Sat, 7:30 pm, Sun, 3:30 pm, Théâtre de la Bastille, 76 rue de la Roquette, 11e, Mº Bastille, tel: 01.43.57.42.14.

Photo Credit: Hervé Bellamy

Meeting Nature Theater of Oklahoma

2011-01-15T15:23:00.001-08:00

While in Paris for the French premiere of “Life & Times” (see parisvoice.com review; also review of “No Dice” on this blog, March 29, 2010), Nature Theater of Oklahoma co-directors Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska spoke with me for a very interesting hour of conversation on topics ranging from their influences (Duchamp, Warhol, Rivette, Malevich) to their specific interests in the theater art form. The company was informally founded after Copper and Liska met at Dartmouth University, but took its name, which comes from Franz Kafka’s novel Amerika, in 2004. Since then, and with six shows and an Obie to its credit, the company has been hailed as “the most buzzed-about new troupe on the New York avant-garde scene” (New York Times) and “one of the top alternative companies in New York” (Village Voice). Nature Theater of Oklahoma is becoming a regular visitor to Europe, with frequent invitations to Belgium and Austria (where Copper and Liska won the Young Directors Award at the Salzburg Festspiele in 2008) and multiple appearances in the Paris area over the last two years, from Aubervilliers and Bobigny, to Gennevilliers and now the Théâtre de la Ville. The following transcription presents only the highlights of what they told me…

Molly Grogan: Can you describe what you do or yourselves as a company?

Pavol Liska: Every show is a different challenge. I would say in the past 4-5 years, we have been exploring the mundane, but it’s not the only thing that we’re interested in. We’re always interested in subverting the expectations, even from ourselves: whatever we feel is expected of us or what we expect from ourselves. We do what we don’t know how to do. Of course, there are similarities in vision or in picture-making between “No Dice” and “Life & Times,” even though we said ”Oh, that’s a new challenge.” But it’s still part of our world, it has our sense of humor, so, as much as we may not like that, there is a style, there is a limitation to what we can do and what we do. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get away from that as we keep going and that the last show we make will be completely different from the first show we made, but you can’t really escape yourself radically all the time. I probably don’t want to make a traditional Molière. It’s probably not going to look like that, in 2 years. Maybe in 5. Maybe in 10 years, we’ll be working at the Comédie Française!

Kelly Copper: We always try to throw ourselves off with every show. The first show we made together [“Poetics: A Ballet Brut”] had no language in it at all, and the next show was “No Dice”, which was 4 hours of non-stop talking.

PL: “People who booked “No Dice” […] came because they saw a one-hour long show with no talking, and they’re like “Ah! Those are the people who don’t talk and we’re just going to have fun,” and then we talked for 4 hours.

KC [laughing]: It’s not actually the best business sense to do something completely different.

PL: And then we used a lot of video [“Rambo Solo”], and we’d never used video before. Then we dealt with “Romeo and Juliet” because people thought, “Oh, these guys just deal with trash subjects.”’ So, lets take on hard culture. It’s always like that. We’ve written descriptions about what we do for grant applications, but we don’t necessarily subscribe to them.

MG: In “Life & Times,” then, what are you working on? You added music, you say, as a challenge, and then there is a very codified series of gestures, and, of course, there is the American language. Are you particularly interested in the American idiom, the way people talk, or are these conversations more of a tool to build a show around?

PL: In many ways, it’s a tool. It’s a way to keep time, and it’s a way to keep attention from the audience and then how we can sneak in other interests we have, like abstraction or the function of abstraction in life and how abstraction can open up reality, and that’s contained inside that language. It’s also for me, the archeology of the brain and how, I can, by a simple question, like, “Tell me your life story,” conspire or trigger human creativity inside the brain to produce language and how you create a history. What we’re doing is not biography, we’re not interested in biography or even storytelling, I’m purely interested in what the brain does when it’s asked a question and how the mouth makes language, makes words. So I asked something that someone knows. It’s almost in some ways a psychoanalytical project. I’m more interested in the Lacanian idea of truth being revealed in the breakdowns of language, not necessarily in the fluent sections. When language breaks down, that’s where I’m most interested. The rest of it is for the audience: “Oh! We’re being told a story. Ok, I’m safe. It’s ok.” I’m much more interested in the crashes and the accidents.

MG: That’s where all that sort of filler comes in, the “likes” and the “ohs” and the “ums”. Which is what for me at least, because I don’t hear that kind of American English so much, really hits me, the number of times that those expressions are used.

KC: Yeah, and you should have seen some of the email back and forth about the translations [for the subtitles]: “What is the difference between ‘um’ and ‘uh’? Must there be a difference? We can spell it differently in the French language, but we don’t have an ‘uh’ and an ‘um’.”

[laughter]

Me: And how did they translate them? I wasn’t watching the subtitles.

KC: It was “euh” or “heu”. But I’ve never been asked [that]; that’s not something you spend a lot of time thinking about, even as an American English speaker: what is the difference between “um” and “uh”? But, there is some kind of… you know…I guess …

[laughter from everyone]

KC: Those kinds of obscure questions!

PL: Even subconsciously, that caused the biggest - not problem - but that was the discourse around it.

KC: That that can be an issue.

MC: Was it a bigger issue for your French translator that your German translator?

PL: Yeah, German translators never brought it up.

MG: You mentioned abstraction. Can you talk more about that? I’m just guessing, and you’ll tell me I’m wrong maybe, that there is a relationship between that idea and what the gestures are doing and the use of the rings and the squares [as intermittent props in “Life & Times”].

PL: It’s related to the way we live. For me, as we keep going, I realize more and more that really all our behavior is abstract. We don’t see it as abstract only because of habit, because we’ve done it for so long. We sit down on these objects that are like this [indicating a chair] but they could have another shape and we could get used to that, over centuries. And so, when you grow up - and it kind of fits with the project because you have childhood, from birth to age 8 - in Kindergarten, you deal with geometrical shapes that are abstract. You start with the very clear triangles, circles, squares, and you’re dealing with these very basic shapes that are abstract, and the child has no problem with that. And all of a sudden, as we keep moving, we don’t deal with those shapes anymore. You still deal with them in geometry in high school, but then you move away. For me, life has become abstract; everything is abstract to me. And abstraction is very real at the same time. It’s just finding a way to creating alternatives. Episode 2 does not have those; it has a much more baroque movement vocabulary, not such a basic one [as Episode 1]. And Episode 3 will keep evolving, in the same way that James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man starts with a very basic, child-like language and ends in a much more complicated language in his journal, and then leads into Ulysses and then leads into Finnegan’s Wake. I think that’ll probably be the journey that the whole project will take: moving from very strict, basic geometry into something that’s much more intricate.

MG: The abstract language is a reinforcement of the world of the narrator, the child’s world, what she sees, how she perceives her world?

PL: Yeah… It’s also a development of our aesthetics. The red square [the actors wear like a badge on their costumes] comes from Malevich, Suprematism [art movement founded in Russia by Kazimir Malevich, 1915-1916], and the red square represents revolution in the arts. So we’re trying to start there. Episode 2 has a black square. Each episode will probably have its own color square. For us, we always want to reinvent ourselves.

KC: Also the blank white backdrop means…

PL: The blank page.

KC: … blank page, clean slate. Same thing with the geometric shapes for us… We’re really into Malevich and the Suprematist art which was the kind of last utopian push, all these artists getting together at the beginning of Communism to make an art that’s more a part of everyday life. They designed textiles, they designed plates and napkins, and they were interested in making art a useful thing. And so we have that connection to it, but also it can mean basic geometric shapes of childhood, basic colors of childhood or the tabula rasa of childhood. As you go, you find reasons for including this stuff, but maybe you start with a more personal reason. You’re talking about a lot of abstract gesture and graphics, but I think it’s also been an outgrowth of how, anytime you deal with this kind of language [the show is based on a recorded monologue of a company member remembering her life] recorded closely enough, you realize how abstract it is. When you look at it on a page, it looks more like Gertrude Stein.

MG: I was going to ask you!

KC: Yeah, and you realize we only appear to make sense. We translate really for each other. You listen to me, but you don’t hear every single word, and how much it doesn’t link together and how much I don’t finish my sentences, because you translate me into something that makes sense. And I think that as experimental artists, we are always asked by the audiences in talk-backs, “What’s the story?” Or, “Why don’t you guys just have a narrative?” [laughter] And so part of our obsession with storytelling and narrative was just trying to get at why that was so important and why people needed it. And when you start getting back to this basic language and basic storytelling, you realize there’s nothing basic about it. When you record this kind of speech, it actually doesn’t make sense. It’s actually way more abstract than we think it is.

MG: Yes, it’s very cubist or very Steinian. You get the story but there is no linear flow. [laughter] It’s about memory too; you were talking about your interest in how the brain reacts to a question. Stein was very interested in memory and the idea that what we know is how we remember we came to know it. You see that in the show. The story begins with a baby picture. But that’s only one way of starting the story. I would have started my story somewhere else. And for me there were big holes in the story. [The narrator] talked about certain things, about friends and their houses, whereas her family and house were not clear to me, and then she seemed to talk more about her aunts and uncles than her siblings, for example. It’s very cubist in that sense: we get a picture of the whole from a selection of its parts, some of which are insisted upon more than others.

KC: When you get down to transcribing all that material and looking at it very closely, what’s funny to me is how much it actually mirrors the Freudian stages of development. In the early childhood, it really is all me-centered, peoples’ relationships to me. Strangely, whenever she describes her family, its all about the legs, the mom’s legs; it’s all at a child’s level. And then it gradually branches out, so that at the end of Act I, she sees her mom resting and to realize somehow that the parents are separate and they have separate needs and that it might be good to give them some alone time in their bathroom, Mom might need some private time to die her hair. Even though she is telling it as an adult person, it does go back to that early childhood way of seeing the world. That’s all there.

MG: I read somewhere that you wanted to find the least common denominator of theater. Have you answered that question?

PL: Yeah, a mask of comedy and tragedy makes theater. [laughter] Or an accent makes theater. Or makeup or… What are the framing devices? We always feel the need to situate the audience in a context that they feel familiar with before we can change it. And if we don’t, like with “Rambo Solo”, which does not look like a theater when you come into it, then we put the actor in front when the audience is coming in to greet them and to set the context. What are they coming into? They’re coming into somebody’s social context.

MG: Was it performed in someone’s house?

PL: No, but the video takes place in his house, so the audience gets to know his house very intimately. We shot all of it in his apartment. But there is always a reduction. We always ask what is absolutely necessary for theater to exist or be called theater. And those things could be very absurd things. It's like when [in “Life & Times”], the actor comes on in a rabbit costume. It’s not because we are trying to illustrate Easter, but it’s because, around this time in a performance, something like this would happen. [laughter] Same with “No Dice”: around this time, a new character would be introduced in the traditional dramaturgy. Even though we’re using non-dramatic text and it does not subscribe to that shape, we feel like we want to give that so that the audience has these touch points where they can stay with us, where it doesn’t veer off into something... Maybe it's because we are American show-business people, we do feel the obligation, because we have invited these people to our “house”, to somehow tend to that, and the work is never just about the work. Whatever happens on stage is almost always secondary to what the overall event is about.

KC: I was thinking that it’s a little bit like disguising a pill in a piece of meat for a dog... I remember when we first started dealing with the music [for “Life & Times”, which is sung and accompanied by live music throughout], looking at what do people do when they sing on stage: they bounce, they sway, sometimes they go like this [she raises her arms]. Just taking the shapes of all of those things, almost to say to the audience, “This is exactly like what you’ve seen before.”

MG: But it isn’t! [laughter]

KC: What little trick can you play in order to get them to go along with it just long enough to have it become something else.

MG: Those little tricks are necessary?

PL: We do think about the audience. We quit theater before and we didn’t make any theater for five years, and the reason we came back is because we were interested in the audience, not because we were interested in the art form. We could do a film, a video, and we still do, and photography, but the main thing that interested us in coming back was the social context and the social situation.

KC: And how do you get the audience not to hold it out at arm’s length? How do you get them to put their defenses down? That “this is not some strange piece of avant-garde art that I’m supposed to watch, this is not a painting that I’m looking at, but it involves me. Somehow I’m necessary for this event and it’s not ok for me to just watch it as an aesthetic object. I’m not here to look at anyone being a virtuoso. I’m not here to observe, I’m not here to pass judgment; I’m here to engage with it.”

PL: Which is nothing new: Molière and Shakespeare had prologues. There was always a welcoming. We may do that when we do longer presentations of “Life & Times.” That’s what I like about “No Dice,” when Kelly and I come out and thank people for coming; just that act of acknowledging, a little kind of stand-up comedy routine. I just hate the feeling of: “Its 8 o’clock; let’s all quiet down.” I want people to talk; no need to be so serious about this yet. The expectations: we like to break them up in the beginning. We don’t do it enough in “Life & Times” yet, but it’s an evolving project that’s going to have ten episodes so we’re learning as we go and learning slowly, and it’s going to take years to really find the right context and the right shape for the total revolution in the arts.

[laughter]

MG: That’s what you’re promising us?

PL: Yeah!

MG: One last question. Your company name comes from Kafka’s Amerika, the theater company that purports to offer a utopia in the final chapter of the novel, and then you mentioned the utopian vision of the Suprematist artists. Is finding a utopia in what you do a preoccupation for you?

PL: Yeah!

KC: I want to find a way… the way that art is useful and somehow a part of everyday life. I guess that’s the utopia. That it’s not somehow something that’s so separate. And I think all of these current projects were made out of a desire to always be in the arms of art or always be making art as a part of everyday life.

PL: It used to be more about ready-mades, about “let's find this” and then leave it. For me, right now, it’s much more about making as much as possible, creating something to add more art to the world, more and more and more: an overabundance to balance out the stasis. So, I’m losing interest in the mundane. As the project goes on, “Life & Times”, the language will stay the same but gradually I’ll probably forget about the language, just let it sit there as a way for it to keep that interest for the audience, as an excuse. Once I get the audience in the house, I can do whatever I want with them. But it’s just about getting them there, making them feel like they know what they’re going to see. So, in “Life & Times”, people are going to want to see the next installment. You know: “Oh, I wonder what happened to Cheryl or Mr. Winters!” We’ve set that up, that’s fine; that machinery is in process, and the audience can do whatever they want with that story. I’m not going to worry about it. I’m going to keep working on other things. That’s the utopia: how do you make something useful and how do you make it appreciated in a way that’s useful to people, not just other artists, but that somehow people who would never think of possibly appreciating abstraction to actually like or be woken up by it. My hope is that, after 7 hours [of “Life & Times”, scheduled to run 24 hours in its full 10 episodes], they’ll be like, “F*** it! Ok, what else is going on?”

Cabaret New Burlesque

2011-01-09T16:27:00.000-08:00

As bare-breasted, high-kicking musical entertainment, burlesque owes its origins to Paris cabarets, but “New Burlesque” performers like Dirty Martini, Kitten on the Keys and Mimi Le Meaux are the stars of a renewed interest in the art form that comes straight from the clubs of New York and San Francisco. These ladies are XXL, in cup-size and attitude, and play on American culture iconography from cowboys to ‘50s starlets, with cascades of platinum ringlets, and cleavage stuffed with greenbacks, Kentucky Fried Chicken and fistfuls of glitter.

Striptease and tassel-twirling seem as natural to the performers of the Cabaret New Burlesque as pulling clothes ON seem to the rest of us. Comprised of the above mentioned three, joined by Julie Atlas Muz, Evie Lovelle and, the one male, Roky Roulette, the company has strutted its voluptuous forms across stages in France since 2004, but it is the success of Mathieu Almaric’s film “Tournée” (Prix de la mise en scène at Cannes last year), a fictionalized road movie capturing them on tour across France’s west coast, that explains their breakthrough to a larger public in Paris since late December. The crowd at the Théâtre de la Cité International, where the Cabaret is currently playing to sold out crowds before moving briefly to the CentQuatre, knows what it is in for, eager to see the larger than life stars of Almaric’s film in the flesh (the more the better).

The assembled company certainly obliges. Led by emcee Kitten on the Keys, who sports a mind-boggling array of boas, stilettos, head-dresses, and gowns, each ensemble more outlandish than the next, while lending some titillating humoristic and musical interludes, the rest of the troupe takes it off, again and again, with his or her own style, whether grotesque/fantastical (Julie Atlas Muz), Rita Hayworth elegant (Evie Lovelle), rockabilly (Roky Roulette) or overtly political (Dirty Martini’s “Patriot Act” number). But it is far less any indirect eroticism of the acts (the thrills are knowingly tongue-in-cheek) than their performance quality that is the measure of New Burlesque, and this show measures up very well in the genre : dazzling in sequins, lamé and satin but not too polished, a whisper of mystery but a good dose of self-deprecating humor, physiques corresponding to perceived notions of physical beauty and others rather more, well, full-formed, plenty of atmosphere and audience interaction, a bit raunchy in its jokes but poised in its striptease sequences. Gender wars and feminist theory take a back seat for an hour of unadulterated entertainment.

To Jan. 15, Théâtre de la Cité international Mon, Tues, Thurs-Sat, 8:30 pm, 17 bd Jourdan, 14e, RER B Cité universitaire, tel: 01.43.13.50.50, Jan. 21-13, CentQuatre, Fri-Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 5 pm, 104 rue d’Aubervilliers / 5 rue Curial, 19e, Mº Stalingrad, http://www.104.fr

Photo Credit: Eve Saint-Ramon

Éonnagata

2011-01-02T14:55:00.000-08:00

As unusual lives go, the Chevalier d’Éon had one: the famously hermaphrodite fencing master and spy in the service of Louis XV used his sexual ambiguity to his advantage to sail through court intrigue, diplomatic imbroglios and military contests before socially entrenched gender views and the political machine got the better of his bravache. More than his career, his androgyny is what interests Quebecois director Robert Lepage in “Éonnagata”, a show devised with the former French ballet star Sylvie Guillem and the British dancer Russell Maliphant. A clever telescoping of the Chevalier’s name and that of the Kabuki art of transvestment, or Onnagata, the show explores hybridity, performance, and invented selves in a rewarding cross-disciplinary collaboration featuring Lepage’s fine-tuned storytelling skills, Guillem’s technical perfection and Maliphant’s suspenseful choreography.

The show offers multiple surprises, the most prominent being Lepage’s own performance, which proves him to be not just a skilled actor and endlessly inventive director, but a remarkably fluent dancer as well. The 53-year old Lepage is able to hold his own with Guillem and Maliphant in scenes of kenjutusu, or Japanese sword fighting, fencing, table dancing and a kind of musical chairs-duo with Guillem. The set’s sustained sleight-of-hand (allowing actors and characters to switch identities, appear and disappear in the blink of an eye) wears the stamp of Lepage’s creative vision and scenographic language. Guillem is, as always, the focus of attention, her combined physical grace and muscular frame embodying a fascinating Chevalier fighting to continue to wear his/her military uniform before being forced permanently into women’s clothes. Her duos with Maliphant, who plays the Chevalier at the height of his career in the Russian and English courts, explore the duality of this chameleonesque figure, who spent nearly 50 years of his life as a man and roughly 30 as a woman. Yet of the three, Lepage is arguably the most interesting to watch, both mastermind and performer.

The parallel created between the Chevalier d’Éon’s ambiguous gender and Onnagata allows for some poetic reflections on dual states, and lifts the show out of mere historical fact (the latter nevertheless necessitating some clunky narrative overlay). The Kabuki references look at first out of place in a show that seems to promise medieval knights and ladies from its opening tableau but in time come to support the story’s development. By his given name, Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d'Éon de Beaumont was predestined to wear both breeches and petticoats but was revealed at his death to be a fully sexed man. In focusing on his ability to exploit, with no little machiavellian skill and ease, his apparent androgyny, Lepage and company offer a tale that is a keen study of performance where gender is only one means, albeit a powerful and volatile one, to achieving a goal.

To January 9, Wed-Sun, 5 pm, 8 pm, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, 15 avenue Montaigne, Mº Alma-Marceau, www.theatrechampselysees.fr

Photo Credit: Érik Labbé

El Hombre que...?

2010-12-22T14:38:00.000-08:00

Theater and film have made a not effortless marriage since video technology began being used on stage, offering new possibilities for set design and narration. The aptly named company Teatrocinema from Chili puts that relationship at the center of its preoccupations, but after a well-received visit to Paris in 2009, with “Sin Sangre”, the exercise proves perilous in its latest endeavor, “El Hombre que daba de beber a las mariposas”. The show is challenged on various levels, although its technical sophistication is not one of them: the animated film which forms the backdrop for the characters’ movements smartly switches planes from medieval castles to cityscapes, and from towering forests to film sets, with dizzying perspectives, rich hues and sweeping movement. The three-tiered story overlapping lovers past and present revolves around the magico-realist story of a man who learns the ancient art of nourishing Monarch butterflies as they begin their annual migration, and who is bequeathed life-sustaining secrets in return. The ambitions of the tale do not live up however to their enactment on stage: the repeated story lines become redundant, the intended lyricism falls flat (despite a necessary distancing effect wherein the medieval tale proves to be a film in the process of being made), and the message finally seems, unlike the butterflies’ journey, not to take us very far. But if the company means to touch on something strange indeed in the juxtaposition of animated sequences and live acting they succeed: there was an odd anti-climax in seeing the actors take their bow, in medieval get-up and masks (the necessity of these also unclear) against the empty blue screen. Without the filmed decors, they looked fantastically... out of place.

To Dec. 30, Théâtre des Abbesses, www.theatredelaville-paris.com/aux-abbesses

Le Mariage

2010-12-07T16:04:00.001-08:00

Marriage is a topic of conversation this month (see parisvoice.com posting of “Dämnone”) but Lilo Baur looks at its more farcical expressions à la Gogol in “Le Mariage”. A civil servant concerned with appearances in his ripening years, a conniving marriage broker after making an advantageous match, and the daughter of a wealthy merchant with a promising dowry are all it takes to make light of the venerable institution that nevertheless weighs unbearably on the couple that “should”, would?, but never gets together. Standing in the way of their betrothal are at least three obstacles in the form of a trio of aspiring grooms (a retired sailor, a paunchy bailiff and an effeminate soldier, played to perfect pitch by Alain Lenglet, Nicolas Lormeau and Jean-Baptiste Malartre), each more fatuous than the next. No hurdle is greater however than Kapilotadov’s own fear of committing to the irreparable (Gogol lived long before drive-through divorces), not to mention Agafia Agatanovna’s “embarrassment” at the mere idea of adding “Missus” to her name. Gogol’s text takes the ceremony out of the romantic exercise with malicious glee, reducing marriage to a burlesque bargain made to the satisfaction of everyone but the bride and groom.

Lilo Baur and her cast excel at breathing a fine-tuned wit into Gogol’s satire, jumping into physical gags as surely as they opine tellingly on the risks and perils of conjugal bliss. Baur has a highly developed sense of humor and timing, from her theater training with Peter Brook and Simon McBurney’s Complicité company, and she uses it to great effect here, allowing silences and expressions to speak louder than words. The courtship scene between Kapilotadov and Agafia Agatanovna writes volumes about the characters’ hesitations in their mute exchanges. What woman wants, God provides, the adage goes, but nothing beats instinct, in the form of (at last one) man’s fight or flight response. No wedding bells ring in Gogol’s text but Baur’s “Mariage” is a no less joyful assembly.

To Jan. 2., Tues, 7 pm, Wed-Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, 21 rue du Vieux-Colombier, 6e, M° St. Sulpice, 8€-29€, tel: 01.44.39.87.00, www.comedie-francaise.fr

Photo Credit: Cosimo Mirco Magliocca

“Ça”

2010-12-02T15:40:00.001-08:00

Henry James likened belief in a grand destiny to a beast that devours the misguided souls who are unfortunate enough to experience it. Director Jan Ritsema adapts James’ “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) as “Ça”, trading the novelist’s concerns with self-actualization for a purely formal exercise, but one that provides an interesting complement to the story’s thematic premise. James imagined a man who wastes his life waiting for the « big something » that will reveal to him the meaning of his presence in this world, never seeing the woman who agrees to wait with him. Through a complete decontexualization of the text, Ritsema attempts to place James’ psychological action in an unspecified present: the conversations that paralyze John and May from acting in the world are shared (or meant to be) by actors Nathalie Richard and Gérard Watkins, who, in street clothes on a blank stage, smoke or move about as they feel inclined and apparently refuse the theatrical fiction.

Does it work? Ritsema provides a fascinating hour of heightened listening to James’ century old text, to find in it a sense of personal importance and power that is perhaps more relevant – and prevalent – in our individualistic societies and their virtual worlds. The actors achieve a subtle complicity between each other and the audience, where every word, look and intonation counts towards understanding who, among the characters, the actors as themselves or their staged personas, is speaking. The visual and aural set design, by video artist Dominque Gonzalez-Foerster, is somewhat curious: the cinematic reference ("Viridiana" by Luis Buñel) remains enigmatic here but the background noise it creates forces the audience to lend a more attentive ear to the actors’ parrying. A modern and challenging approach to James’ text, while preserving his piercing attention to the psyche in its tortured search for meaning.

To Dec. 10, Mon, Tues, Fri, Sat, 8 pm, Thurs, 7 pm, Théâtre de la Cité internationale, 17 bd Jourdan, 14e, RER B Cité universitaire, 10-21 €, tel: 01.43.13.50.50.

Photo Credit: Benoîte Fanton/WikiSpectacle

Shun-kin

2010-11-21T17:04:00.000-08:00

It isn’t often that a writer achieves national honors by writing about sexual deviancy, but such was the destiny of Jun’ichirô Tanizaki. In the middle of his prolific career in 1933, the iconoclastic Japanese writer produced two works: “A Portrait of Shunkin”, a film script imagining a life-long sado-masochistic relationship between a blind woman and her servant, and “In Praise of Shadows”, an essay on contrasting aesthetics in the West and Japan. His preoccupation with eroticism, in all its manifestations, as well as his stylistic novelties left a lasting mark on Japanese literature and society.

British director Simon McBurney begins his new show, “Shun-kin” with a narrator who similarly recalls the strong sensations he felt reading the text as a boy. Not surprisingly: the enigmatic Shun-kin, disfigured in her childhood and put into the care of Sasuke, a young apprentice to her family’s pharmacy, provides a fascinating psychological study and a thoroughly unconventional love story. What to make of it is explored by McBurney’s choice to pair the tale with Tanizaki’s essay: a challenge to examine the figurative shadow zones of the human psyche and, even in its socially vilified perversions, to find beauty there.

The second project to bring together McBurney, his company known as Complicité and Tokyo’s Setagaya Public Theater, “Shun-kin” is a more complex showcase of the two troupes’ talents than the earlier “Elephant Vanishes” (2003). While Complicité’s flare for technological thrills and Tokyo’s neon brilliance disputed the spotlight in the older piece, based on three short stories by Muraki Hurakami, Tanizaki’s “Shun-kin” provides a meditative meeting of East and West, in its exploration of their dimly let intersections.

The show is an noteworthy demonstration of hybridity, both creative and intercultural. Complicité’s signature physical vocabulary and imaginative recuperating of everyday materials prove excellent companions to Japanese minimalism and traditional theater forms. The development of the title character Shun-kin from girl to womanhood is evoked with bunraku (the Japanese art of marionettes), but is achieved with such precision that it is easy to not notice when the doll changes places with an actress. The company also makes the most of the "sotoba", or offertory sticks placed on graves in Japan, with which the show begins: these are employed by the actors to evoke trees, steps, doors, rooms and musical instruments. Paper is similarly stretched to create kaleidoscopic projected images and nightingales taking flight, like origami birds. In a fitting touch, the story is narrated by Yoshi Oida, a longtime actor in Peter Brook’s theater laboratory in Paris, and his presence creates a living bridge between European and Japanese cultures.

Like the shadows Tanizaki praises for their closer approximation to the unknown, the fullness of the relationship between Shunkin and Sasuke remains a mystery, somewhere between passion, power, jealousy, self-hatred and even love. McBurney offers help again to unraveling it, imagining a contemporary framing device about an actress hired to read their story for Japanese radio and who decides, upon finishing her performance, to rekindle a relationship she had been ready to let go. By a multitude of nuances in the sepia-toned set, Judeo-Christian symbolism which equates light with beauty and goodness is challenged throughout by a Japanese connectedness with a spirituality and aesthetic manifested in silence and darkness.

McBurney and company(ies) have fashioned a rare piece of art, in the example of Shun-kin’s puppet: fragmented, multi-faceted and amazingly life-like, to shine a different quality of “light” on life itself.

To Nov. 23, Théâtre de la Ville, www.theatredelaville.com / www.festival-automne.com

Photo Credit: Tsukasa Aoka

Lulu: A Monstrous Tragedy

2010-11-19T01:44:00.000-08:00

Frank Wedekind’s Lulu is a ravishing beauty who drives men mad. They just can’t help themselves from obsessing over their mistress, dancer, muse, high-class call girl and destitute prostitute. If she is certainly a temptress, Lulu was first a horribly mistreated young girl, at the hands of her father to begin with, creating ambiguous sympathies for audiences.

Symbol of feminist freedom, sexual liberation or the second sex’s victimization? The larger than life character – performance artist of her own life, in a world that wants her for its own pleasure and which she is often more than willing to oblige - has been recuperated in the 20th century by all three perspectives on women. Director Stéphan Braunschweig chooses to see her rather more as men’s prey than their dominatrix, in “Lulu: une tragédie-monstre”. Like most treatments of Wedekind’s anti-heroine, the production revisits two of his works, "Erdgeist" (Earth Spirit, 1895), and "Die Büsche der Pandora" (Pandora’s Box, 1904), which were recreated after the writer’s death as the opera “Lulu” in 1937.

In the lead role, the diminutive, gravelly voiced Chloé Réjon is a woman-child who may fail to always grasp the strength of her power over the male sex, yet is just as capable of using it for the darkest of intentions. The progressively sordid scenes of her life whirl by like a merry-go-round on a rotating set of interlocking rooms, hinting that the past is never far behind and that the future can never hold anything new. If Lulu walks literally in circles, the contemporary costumes (and much is to be made of Réjon’s numerous wardrobe changes, from a painter’s Pierrot to a Lido butterfly and a rock and roll vamp) beg interpretations for women’s unshakeable objectification some 150 years later.

Carnal love was nevertheless Wedekind’s overwhelming concern. The young German who had previously dabbled with careers in advertising and the circus made his European tour, not to visit monuments, but to rid himself of the values of his bourgeois milieu. Paris’ brothels proved helpful to his goals; “Lulu” was born. Wedekind may have celebrated eroticism as a counterbalance to and escape from the stultifying social and moral codes of his day, the erotic power that Lulu conjures leads inevitably to her demise. Male fantasy and women’s reality intersect, leaving no clear-cut conclusions and lending the work its own power to fascinate.

From frying pans to Ferraris, everything sells better with a pretty woman in the photo. We don’t need Wedekind to tell us that but it is interesting to remember, through a 19th century lens, that the far from innocuous relations between beauty, sex and economics have always been with us and are unlikely to soon fade.

Continuing the initiative begun last season by the Théâtre national de la Colline to provide English subtitles and program notes for one or more performances of selected shows, the performances of “Lulu” on Dec. 4 and 14 will be similarly subtitled for English-speaking audiences. Note that the early times for all shows reflect the performance length (4 hours).

To Dec. 23, Tues, Wed, Fri, Sat, 7:30 pm, Sun, 3:30 pm, Théâtre national de la Colline, 15 rue Malte-Brun, 20e, M° Gambetta, 13-27 euros, tel : 01.44.62.52.52.

Photo Credit: Elisabeth Carecchio

Le Tangible

2010-11-09T16:08:00.001-08:00

One of the original founders of the Belgian theater collective tg STAN, Franck Vercruyssen is the group’s political conscience, behind shows like “One 2 Life”, treating capital punishment, “The Monkey Trial” from a transcription of the Scopes Trial, and “JDX – A Public Enemy”, an adaptation of Ibsen’s play about one man’s struggle to stand up to political and social hypocrisy. He is also drawn to dialogue between the spoken word and dance and has signed several pieces exploring their interfaces: “Nusch”, “Quartett” and now “L’intangible”. This equally ambitious and poetic piece builds on the choreography of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker to treat the Middle East conflict, with a text derived from writings by poets Etel Adnan (Lebanon), Mourid Barghouti, Mahmoud Darwich and Samih al-Qasim (Palestine), and the British novelist and essayist John Berger.

The principle story comes from Berger’s From A to X, in which A’ida writes to her lover, imprisoned for his political positions, of her struggle outside with military aggression, political injustice, loss and fear. To dramatize her story, Vercruyssen has chosen an empty stage onto which a series of photographic images unfolds, of buildings and streets in anonymous locales of apparently Middle Eastern origin (taken in Beyrouth and Palestine). Beneath their changing façade, three dancers echo and amplify A’ida’s struggle to hold on to hope, with a corporal language that gains in force with the evocation of her daily existence while embodying its unspeakable silences as well. The layers of spoken, visual and gestual narrative, not to mention written (in simultaneous Arabic and French translations), explore the range of A’ida’s emotional response as well as the mutism of her lover, who writes onto her letters but never sends any of his own. The show’s title comes from a line in Berger’s text where, commenting on the loss of physical property in the wake of a bombing, the narrator is led to consider the “amnesia of the tangible world”, where homes and possessions are unable to resist artillery to bear lasting witness to lifelong struggles to exist, a theme underscored tellingly by Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Yazan Al Khalili’s photography.

Vercruyssen has found a richly multiple language to explore a conflict not often the subject of contemporary theater and the resultant loss of cultural wealth and resources, among the debris of human lives. In a booklet accompanying the show, he relates in detail STAN’s efforts to create the show with actors from Naplouse and Damas, the courage and patience of these drama students caught between Belgian immigration policy and university regulations at home, and the ultimate, final-hour failure of the project. The planned cast is replaced in the show now running by Franco-Egyptian actress Eve-Chems de Brouwer and the Iraki actor Modhallad Rasem. Its own lived testament to the conflicts that mine and undermine past and present history in the Middle East, “Le Tangible” blends esthetic and political concerns in a surprising but highly intelligent and thoughtful approach to the question, an approach STAN, as always, does best.

To Nov. 13, Tues-Sat, 9 pm, matinees Nov. 13, 14, 5 pm, Théâtre de la Bastille, 76 rue de la Roquette, 11e, Mº Bastille, 13€-22€, tel: 01.43.57.42.14, Festival d’Automne, tel: 01.53.45.17.17.

Photo Credit: Lore Baeten

Interiors

2010-11-04T16:22:00.000-07:00

After the dark, the silence. Scottish director Matthew Lenton has a gift for giving Maurice Maeterlinck’s works their literal due. “The Sightless” (1999), an adaptation in total darkness of “Les Aveugles” (1890) is followed by “Interiors”, a largely mute recreation of “Intérieur” (1894), liberally transforming the Belgian writer’s play about tragic destiny into a contemporary study of voyeurism and tensions between outward appearances and secret desires.

This "Interiors" is performed in an enclosed space behind a glass wall : a dining room seen from outside its large windows. An important evening is evidently in store, and characters fix their makeup and study the table settings before guests begin arriving, in winter parkas and carrying shotguns. The nature of the dinner and the relationships between these individuals, ranging from adolescence to late middle age –not to mention the reason for their attire and accoutrements - is unclear until a voice-over kicks in to connect the dots. The owner of the voice is later revealed to be a dead girl who now spies in upon scenes of the life to which she can never return and who underscores the beauty of their quintessentially human moment of shared food and laughter before concluding the play with dire predictions of their impending deaths.

Where silent films physically exaggerated the situational drama or humor of their plots, Lenton’s play looks merely like television with the sound turned off, whence the need for narrative assistance. The strength of “Interiors” lies in the quality of the performances given by the seven actors of Lenton’s Vanishing Point company, remarkable for the precision of their gestures and expressions which bring life and authenticity to this dinner viewed from the cold outside but in whose presence the dead girl’s elegiac commentary strikes the ear as superfluous, invasive even and unnecessarily didactic. The set combines naturalism and expressionism in the minutely furnished dining room and cold celestial heights of a projected night sky.

If the point of "Interiors" is to blend these two interpretative fields, to understand better what the assembled friends truly think to themselves about themselves and each other, and so to explore a deeper level of human relations than that which is more usually on display at the average dinner party, the general nature of the characters' reflections, revolving mostly around sex and food, surprises in its lack of inspiration. Although the project seeks otherwise, the “exterior” voice of “Interiors” leaves too little of the imaginative space that would have pushed the exercise to a more challenging engagement with its themes.

In English with French subtitles. Nov. 2-6, 8:30 pm (Sat. 3 pm/8:30 pm), Théâtre des Abbesses, 31 rue des Abbesses, 18e, M° Abbesses, 13€-24€, tel: 01.42.74.22.77.

Photo Credit: Tim Morozzo

Aftermath

2010-10-10T23:42:00.001-07:00

As US troops withdraw from Irak, the play “Aftermath” is a timely reminder of the long-lasting consequences of American intervention there. Based on testimony provided by Iraqi refugees interviewed in Jordan, the piece intertwines the experiences of eight individuals, but their nightmare is collective and speaks for the horrors and privations endured by the population at large. Bombings, mercenaries, death threats, incarcerations, interrogations and the inevitable road to exile and refugee status: from Fallujah to Abu Ghraib the story is one of American arrogance and might and Iraki fear and mourning. A cross-section of citizens - housewives, translators, imams, doctors, artists, pharmacists, cooks - put a face on Iraqi losses that have nothing to do with military strategy or political maneuvering but rather with wrecked homes, families and dreams. After a critically acclaimed play devised from conversations with pardoned death row inmates, “The Exonerated” (2002), Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen have created a simple and moving piece of theater - sober, restrained with humor and honesty – that gives voice to the stories that CNN doesn’t cover and which risk being forgotten once the US presence is gone completely. Seen October 8 at the Maison des Arts de Créteil.

Photo Credit: Joan Marcus

Forced Entertainment's Cheap Thrills

2010-10-07T00:04:00.000-07:00

The latest show by the British collective Forced Entertainment is a particularly clear example of the company’s explorations of the performance act. That is to say that “forced entertainment” is what the nine actors deliver in sequined go-go dresses and lounge-act attire, awkwardly throwing themselves across the set of plastic palm trees and red carpets. “The Thrill of It All”, as the show is named, is an ironic enterprise on all counts, so wide is the gap between the excitement promised in the title and frequently referred to by the cast, and the deliberately trite spectacle given. The company takes down indiscriminately the familiar codes of performed representations of human experience: there is the declaration of love, the fisticuffs, the emotional breakdown, the holiday gathering around the hearth, the agonized death rattle (also the subject of “Spectacular” in 2008)… The artificiality of these displays is reinforced by the distorting miking of the actors’ voices, while their ubiquity in TV and cinema is emphasized by the cast’s homogenizing get-ups: gents in red dress shirts, black pants, cream jackets and stringy black wigs; ladies in white dresses, red boots and long platinum hair. A reflection on popular entertainment, which still seems to believe that a buxom blonde in a short skirt is worth any intelligent discussion? A send-up of performance codes, as a challenge to the public’s indulgence of these? Forced Entertainment founder Tim Etchells leaves the door open to interpretation while eluding richer discussion of the meaning and effects for society of its performed selves.

“The Thrill of It All”, October 6-9, Wed-Sat, 8:30 pm, Centre Pompidou, Place Georges Pompidou, 4e, Mº Les Halles/Rambuteau, 10/14 euros, tel: 01.44.78.12.33 / Festival d’Automne, tel: 01.53.45.17.17.

Photo Credit: Hugo Glendinnin

Cubist theater?

2010-10-04T15:59:00.000-07:00

After cubist painting (Picasso and Braque) and cubist writing (Gertrude Stein), does a thirty-something Japanese playwright and director hold the key to cubist theater? Toshiki Okada does not claim to be under the influence of any artistic revolutionaries, but his deliberate separation of the spoken word and body language opens up new ways of imagining theater’s representational possibilities.

If Stein believed that cubism was more real than reality, Okada agrees that the repetitious, disarticulated movements his actors make are a heightened form of naturalism. This is particularly true in his trilogy of short plays, “Hot Pepper”, “Air Conditioner” and “The Farewell Speech”, which finishes a brief run at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers as part of the Festival d’Automne. While engaging in utterly banal and codified conversations about the workplace (a theme familiar from Okada’s “Freetime” in 2008), the trilogy’s characters inexplicably engage in unexpected, socially “inappropriate” gestures that find them shaking their legs at uncomfortable angles, jumping stiffly, holding fans on their heads and wiping their mouths with their ties, among many other surprises.

That their actions bear no relationship to their words is visibly jarring, and the most recognizable feature of the work of Okada and his company known as “chelfitsch” (“selfish” pronounced with a Japanese accent). Repeated over time, however, their gestures and words are imbued with new meaning, in the same way a cubist portrait proposes nearly indistinguishable cubes of color that demand careful attention to perceive the subject, or much like Stein’s prose experimentations create “insistencies” that require closer reading at every encounter. Emotions and impressions, however fleeting or imperceptible, are given liberty to express themselves in these awkward stretches, steps and struts, and a more complete understanding of the speaker is arrived at as he or she comes to inhabit a larger space and time than that of the discourse required in the environment of an office break-room or reception area.

Okada’s preoccupations also involve the use of a Japanese slang spoken in Tokyo, an argot he attempts to de-ghettoize by bringing it into the theater. While this aspect of his work is regrettably lost in translation, to the extent that his physical work is an extension of these concerns, the vitality of this slang seems to take on tangible, visible strength. In the even more abstract second play Okada presents this month, “We Are the Undamaged Others”, he explores how to break with the “nearly irresistible representative power of language” and the “meaningful processes” it shares with gesture.

Stein argued in favor of art that existed free from the business of living and representations of these, a vision that Okada seems to further, with the style and concerns of contemporary Japan.

“We Are the Undamaged Others”, Oct. 7-10, Théâtre de Gennevilliers, 41 avenue des Grésillons, Mº Gabriel Péri, 11-22 euros, tel: 01.41.32.26.26, or Festival d'Automne: 01.53.45.17.17.

Photo Credit: Dieter Hartwig

La Cerisaie

2010-09-29T16:11:00.000-07:00

How directors choose to represent the cherry orchard of Chekov’s last play can be a reliable measure of the production’s overall treatment of theme. Imagined as a comedy by the playwright, first directed as a tragedy by Stanislavski (a decision with a lasting influence on the play’s production history), “The Cherry Orchard” tends to stand or fall (no pun intended) on the strength of that wood’s perceived presence in the character’s memories and the urgency of its metaphorical reality for the audience. If directors need not show a mass of budding branches for the production to be a success, to the extent that Chekov was himself profoundly moved by the beauty of a tree in flower – and sufficiently so to write the story of an aristocratic family’s wrenching separation from the orchard that witnessed generations of joys and pains – that stand of trees must manage to cast its shadow across the production.

Director Julie Brochen has imagined a “Cherry Orchard” all in glass and metal, evoking a kind of enclosed terrace from which the family might look upon its beloved landscape. In this way however, the orchard, and all its affective implications, is consequently placed very much outside the scope of the show’s preoccupations. These appear to revolve around the character of Lyubov, played by Jeanne Balibar as a kind of neurasthenic: weak, articulating with difficulty, and slow to react, all of which help explain her obliviousness to the pressing sale of the family estate but fail to develop its significance for her. The production places its emphasis on structure and system rather than metaphor, in the weighty, mechanical set built upon rotating disks and the 1930s era costumes. A final touch of sensitivity comes with the parting lines of Firs, the Ranevskaya’s former serf accidentally locked into the empty house, but it arrives too late. Lopakhin can chop the whole orchard down; its absence is only symptomatic of a general lack of feeling and depth.

To October 24, Tues-Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 3 pm, Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, Place de l’Odéon, 6e, Mº Odéon, 10-24 euros, tel: 01.44.85.40.40.

Photo credit: Franck Beloncle

Wajdi Mouawad’s Trilogy

2010-09-15T08:09:00.000-07:00

“Littoral”, “Forêts”, “Incendies”: Wajdi Mouawad’s trilogy is a triple punch of elemental and human forces: water/air/fire, birth/death/war, childhood/maternity/paternity, to name just a few. As a fragmented tableau depicting the search for self among a Montreal youth bred in conflict and displacement, its numerous pieces fall into place with the presence of all three plays at the Théâtre national de Chaillot, after a run at the 2009 Festival d’Avignon. While the plays have been performed individually in France over the last four years, seen together, they tell a compelling story of the paths love can take when buffered by the competing trajectories of the individual, family, society and country. (See reviews of earlier productions here and at www.parisvoice.com).

If the Greeks considered "agape" (self-sacrifice), the highest form of affection, it is the filial bonds which tightly crisscross the Trilogy that also form its emotional center; when they meet personal, social, political and even global aspirations, they beget notable acts of love in all its dimensions.

In the triptych’s middle, “Incendies” returns to the themes of “Littoral”, Mouawad’s first play, marked by the concerns of a struggling post-university young writer/actor, while prefiguring those of the epical “Forêts”, in particular the idea of broken promises. If the theme lends tragic weight to all of the characters' struggles, it figures most prominently in the story of Nawal, whose abandoning of her newborn son in the midst of civil war, sparks violent consequences for future generations. The question of culturally foreign origins and unknown genitors, which provides the trilogy's obvious intrigue, takes a monstrous turn in "Incendies"...

Under Mouawad’s inspired and imaginative direction, all the works impress by his simple and lucid use of space, color and music. A tendency to overstate concerns does not mar the force of his message. The Trilogy is the consecration of a necessary and ambitiously poetic vision of personal destiny writ in universal language.

To Sept. 19, Tues-Sat, 8 pm, (all three shows Sept. 11 and 18, beginning 11 am), Théâtre national de Chaillot, 1 place du Trocadéro, 16e, 8-32 euros single production, 30 euros /55 euros entire trilogy, tel: 01.53.65.30.00.

Photo Credit: Jean-Louis Fernandez

Un certain Songe, une nuit d'été

2010-05-17T06:15:00.000-07:00

Richard Demarcy has been rolling his “world theater” around the globe for 35 years in an effort to break down national and cultural barriers. His appropriately named Théâtre Naïf is utterly unpretentious in its art, one in which this multi-ethnic company also takes very sincere pleasure. Inspired by the craft of storytelling as much as by contemporary issues of identity, in a country currently racked by the question, Demarcy and friends create a “Midsummer Night’s Dream” of racial harmony and cultural understanding that makes a joyous pillow-fight of differences and national pride. The cast, which hails from eight countries across Asia, Africa, North America and Europe, tells “Un certain Songe, une nuit d’été” with humor, fantasy and grace, with a bric-a-brac set and costumes in which Venetian carnival meets les puces de Clignancourt just up the road. Buffoonery and measure hold hands in Demarcy’s direction and revisited text, which comments freely on current cultural politics and funding but keeps Shakespeare’s dream and spirit as its guiding star throughout. Proof that la France multiculturelle is not ignored by contemporary directors, even if Demarcy (unlike his more famous son, Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, director of the Théâtre de la Ville, and more faithful to the soixante-huitard vistion of his neighbor Peter Brook) sticks close to its margins.

To May 23, Fri-Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 3 pm, Le Grand Parquet, 20 bis rue du Département, 18e, Mº La Chapelle, 3 euros – 13 euros, tel: 01.40.05.01.50.

Photo Credit: Axe Sud

Needcompany in "La Maison des Cerfs"

2010-05-12T13:56:00.001-07:00

After “La Chambre d’Isabella” and “Le Bazar du Homard”, it's into the forest – that twilight zone of primordial fears and altered states - with the Needcompany, in a new show “La Maison des cerfs”. In this final piece of the Sad Face/Happy Face trilogy, director Jan Lauwers explores the former side of the coin in a work which takes as its point of departure the death of the brother of a company member: the journalist Kerem Lawton, in Kosovo. Ethical questions of responsibility and involvement in situations of war prompt the story of a mother’s fight to save her family from civil turmoil by retreating to the country. In the style of the Needcompany, however, these preoccupations are mostly deflated by ironic distance, beginning with the sexual play of the show’s opening dressing room scene, which at the same time seeks to approach these very serious issues through the fictional journal of a war photographer.

As in "La Chambre d'Isabella", the set is strewn with an almost inconceivable quantity of objects, here mostly fake deer and their various parts (antlers, countless sets of them). In their pale rubber state, they appear more like formaldehyde specimens than creatures or even hunting trophies, though they also serve in this way as a metaphor for the corpses of the tale, especially in their piling up at show’s end in a kind of anticipated funeral pyre. A certain amount of cliché (a murderous, feuding family) and banality (the mediatized sufferings of war victims), not to mention histrionics, are nevertheless not avoided in the attempted discussion and fictional framing.

For a too brief moment, however, the Needcompany soars as only it can, in the joyous final dance sequence to the music of Hans Petter Dahl and Maarten Seghers. Some of the choreography and movement is riveting, particularly by Eléonore Valère, as the sister searching for her dead brother, while the pair created by Viviane De Muynck, as the mother, and Grace Ellen Barkey as her mentally retarded daughter, is genuinely moving. It seems however that world-weariness is not the Needcompany’s forté and it is to be hoped that they can put the evidently difficult task of remembering a loved one behind them and find a little more joy in their art, which they do so well. Show seen at Théâtre de la Ville.

Photo Credit: Maarten Vanden Abeele

"Moby Dick" by Gare St. Lazare Players Ireland

2010-05-09T15:35:00.000-07:00

Irish actor Conor Lovett has so successfully played the protagonists of Samuel Beckett’s fictional world as to seem the incarnation of these wandering dispossessed. But with the first lines of Gare Saint Lazare Players Ireland’s “Moby Dick”, we are ready to call him Ishmael indeed and set sail for uncharted waters under his sure steering. Lovett and his collaborator in life and art, Judy Hegarty, who directs him in all of the company’s Beckett repertory, which includes the acclaimed trilogy “Molloy”, “Malone Dies” and “The Unnamable”, have created from Herman Melville’s masterpiece, a quiet tour de force for a single actor.

While reducing the 700-odd page text to a swift two-hour crossing of Melville’s whirling, eddying tale, Lovett and Hegarty have kept the original language intact throughout. As delivered by Lovett, whose Ishmael is a comically introspective, even squeamish old salt, Melville’s unique idiom keeps us hanging on every word, from the wryly wary description of Ishmael’s insalubrious lodgings (and roommate Queequeg) in New Bedford, Mass., to his awed tableau of the maelstrom with which the cursed Pequod is sucked to its watery grave. Martin Lewis’ musical accompaniment (voice and flute) provides a mariner’s complaint and poetic counterpoint to Ahab’s raving, fanatical quest. You can almost feel the spray break across the bow…

Performed at the Irish Cultural Center, May 7-8. For more information about Gare St. Lazare Players Ireland, visit the company’s website: www.garestlazareplayersireland.com.

"Invasion!"

2010-04-02T05:02:00.000-07:00

Words can kill, the saying goes, but language is in constant flux, through ordinary usage and more institutionalized “spin”. If it is no longer possible to use the word “terror”, for example, without evoking George W. Bush’s “war on terror”, it is equally true that language once used to objectify groups is sometimes recuperated by these and used to their advantage. Like “nigga”, now ubiquitous in hip-hop music with both negative and positive connotations, “Abulkasem” is just such a word for Jonas Hassen Khemiri. In “Invasion!” (whose title is loaded with imagery going back to the Crusades), this young playwright of Tunisian and Swedish descent considers how language can color identity, particularly in the case of visible “immigrants” in European societies living in the shadow of 9/11.

From the mists of history to the tough realities of the streets, “Invasion!” imagines how the name of an 18th century corsair could lastingly enter the vocabulary of a group of middle-schoolers, grow with them to become a code word for coolness and from there leap into the media’s projectors when a love-struck, would-be gigolo who has adopted the name, repeatedly leaves it on the voice mail of a political refugee/harvest-picker (whose number he was given by a girl trying to avoid his advances in a bar). Seen and felt on stage in the form of a red ball that swells from the size of a child’s toy to a crushing globe, the snowballing associations of the name develop visibly from a boy’s imaginings to planetary dimensions, but always in the absence of any rhyme or reason. “Abulkasem” becomes Public Enemy #1, hunted by Interpol and the press, without ever managing to settle convincingly on an identifiable individual, except for the harvest-picker: when his “story” is finally unraveled by a translator, he becomes the unwitting victim of ethnocentric fears and anti-terror hysteria.

Director Michel Didym translates effectively to the stage Khemiri’s multi-layered, meta-theatrical text, exploiting video and live music to develop the writing’s different registers, from comedy to satire to psychological horror, and building on an able cast in a variety of quick-changing, cross-dressing roles. Khemiri asks questions from his own experiences, as the “Turk” in the eyes of Swedish society whom he imagines in the bar scene. But he pertinently expands on these to comment on wider perceptions of otherness in our particular historical moment. The much-decried government-defined debate on national identity in France has yet to provoke reactions in French theater but Khemiri’s text, seen at Nanterre, fills for the time being at least a lingering silence.

To April 17, Wed-Sat, 9 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 7 avenue Pablo Picasso, Nanterre (92), RER A Nanterre-Préfecture + shuttlebus, 12€-25€, tel: 01.46.14.70.00.

Photo Credit: Eric Didym

"No Dice"

2010-03-29T01:37:00.000-07:00

German has its angst, French its beauty, Italian its romance and Spanish its passion. The American language may not even possess the stiff upper lip of its British cousin, but it now has its own play. Thanks to the nutty folks at the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, the lingua franca of business, entertainment and the Internet is the unwilling star of “No Dice”, a four-hour foray into the bowels of banality. But not quite. A devised show created from 100 hours of recorded telephone conversations and employing its own language of codified gestures, this Unidentified Theater Object, recently seen at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers, explores the strange registers, disabused tones and resigned pragmatism of the uniquely American idiom.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma has nothing whatsoever to do with the state made famous by dust bowls and cowboy folklore . Located in New York City, NTO was created by Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, who were inspired by the deceptively utopian company of the same name in Franz Kafka’s Amerika. Unlike that enterprise, which drives the final nail into already frustrated immigrant dreams, the folks at NTO seem to have a genuinely inclusive philosophy, which shows in its treatment of audiences (free sandwiches and soda) as well as its approach to the raw matter of drama, which is here the flotsam and jetsam in the flow of everyday life. The show is the second of two works by the company using chance as its guiding principle. The first, “Poetics: A Ballet Brut”, was constructed from silent, random choreography, the movements of which were determined by rolling dice. “No Dice” applies the same chance theory, this time using cards to apply physical punctuation to the mini-dramas (the company calls them “mellowdramas”) recounted in the phone conversations.

Taken as a whole, these exchanges on subjects ranging from diets to dinner-theater, office gossip to auditions, share a common leitmotif revealing their origins in the inherently ego-rocking world of actors looking for work in New York City and paying the bills with day jobs in mind-numbing clerical positions. The show presents five sketchily drawn “characters” in exaggerated get-ups: a grouchy chorus girl in rehearsal attire, a struggling writer sporting pirate booty and Hasidic ringlets dangling from his heavy-rimmed glasses, a non-plussed, paper-pushing cowboy, and the silent presence of a caped rabbit in red basketball shorts and an even more mysterious woman in black jeans, sweatshirt and sunglasses, wearing a Marie Antoinette wig and responsible for some eerie musical accompaniment on electric keyboard. Those who talk also engage in a magnified hand language whose significance grows (somewhat), over time and with each use, not unlike the “insistencies” of Gertrude Stein.

Indeed, with its mundane, repetitive dialogue (riddled with, among other fillers: “yeah”, “u-huh”, “um”, “that’s good”, “anyway”, and its facetious flip-side “anyhoo”), vaguely sketched set and character types, “No Dice” reveals an unacknowledged affinity with the techniques and preoccupations of the “Mother Goose of Montparnasse”, as Stein was known. In other words, what “No Dice” shows, at first glance, is a world of unintelligible codes and equally ambiguous responses to these. If its meaning remains an open question, it clearly develops a meta-commentary on the acting game itself, from theory to daily survival, and is genuinely funny. It also features a fine cast, whose sense of humor carries off the deliberately amateurish acting style and lends a deliciously cruel tone to the events described.

In the absence of more familiar life-buoys, however, it is the language itself that the audience grabs on to: disconcerting in its lack of depth, reassuring in its matter-of-factness, and all the more moving for the failures it describes. “No Dice” is shorthand, of course, for “sorry and too bad for you”, and that kind of outright refusal seems to lie at the core of the exercise: “shit happens” (to use a more recognizable bit of American-ese) and what of it? Life and the show must go on.

Photo Credit: Peter Nigrini

Warning to “Streetcar” passengers…

2010-03-05T16:05:00.000-08:00

If you were looking to pick up Tennessee Williams’ “Streetcar” at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, you’ll be surprised by the “Tramway” that takes you, not to any Elysian Fields, but to director Krzysztof Warlikowski’s fragmented, stylized and vaguely nightmarish adaptation of Williams’ masterpiece. While any return to the legendary “Streetcar Named Desire”, which earned Williams a Pulitzer (1948) and launched the career of a prowling, virile animal named Marlon Brando, has to contend with those legends and a lingering iconography (one reviewer of this production got excited over actor Andrzej Chyra’s “tee-shirt à la Marlon Brando”), Warlikowski’s freestyle make-over of such a finely constructed text as this gives cause for wonder, especially when the results are as dissatisfying as these.

Not content to merely truncate the original, Warlikowski goes boldly in the opposite direction, adding close to an hour of “reflections” on Williams’ themes, drawing from texts as disparate as letters written by Gustav Flaubert, an interview with jazz singer Eartha Kitt, Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus” and St. Matthew’s Gospel, not to mention four utterly didactic musical selections, including Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” (1975). Letting a great work speak for itself seems impossible for Warlikowski here.

Moreover, the interpretation he brings is a gross simplification of William’s preoccupations with illusion/reality/disillusion and the replacement of romantic antebellum codes of conduct by a self-made proletarian individualism. Sex is the only point of reference here, beginning with Blanche’s clear depiction as a whore: seated on a stool, legs spread, in a black negligee, facing a glass wall. Played by Isabelle Huppert as a washed-out party girl (and whose gorgeous wardrobe, furnished by Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior, is a too tempting, over-exaggeration of the faded ball gowns Blanche desperately recycles into service), she begs nor earns neither our pity nor our sympathy. Stella (Florence Thomassin) is a trash calendar pin-up to Chyra’s merely cruel Stanley (an incongruous casting error, given Warlikowski’s chosen emphasis). The cast is rounded out by a skinheaded, kick-boxing Mitch and the neighbor lady Eunice (Renate Jett) who doubles as the lounge act, on a slick and shiny, retractable set that is simultaneously bowling alley, bathroom and bedroom, filmed in real-time and projected behind the action.

In short, too much going on and not enough of what matters. For a production that cost as much as this one obviously did, the only thing Warlikowski gets right is the excess that finally burned Williams out.

"Un Tramway", to April 3, Tues-Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 3 pm, Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, Place de l’Odéon, 6e, Mº Odéon, 18€-32€, tel: 01.44.85.40.40.

Photo Credit: Pascal Victor/ArtComArt

Tori no tobu takasa

2010-02-19T06:29:00.001-08:00

The defective brakes recall that has torpedoed Toyota Corporation delivers an ironic punch line to “Tori no tobu takasa”, the tale of a family-owned toilet seat manufacturer’s struggle to join the global economy. Trading a merely model product for sexy marketing, the Saruwatari company aspires to pamper the derrieres of all of Asia, but loses its integrity in the process. This Sino-French production of Michel Vinaver’s landmark play about France’s collision with free enterprise in the 1960s, “Par-dessus bord”, is adapted by the Japanese playwright Oriza Hirata and directed by a passionate reader of both, Arnaud Meunier. The largely satisfying results show however, in the parlance of Vinaver’s play, that “extending the product” may require eliminating some “clutter” for “profit potential” to be “maximized”.

“Par-dessus bord” is a detailed study (in four versions of varying lengths) of how French business was transformed in the 1960s by American corporate practices, written by someone who lived these changes from the inside (Vinaver was the CEO of Gillette France at the time) and who saw in these the makings of Aristophanic dramatic structure and comedy. “Tori no tobu takasa” follows faithfully the six movements of Vinaver’s text, changing only toilet paper for toilet seats and Yankee ad men for Parisian “consultants marketing”. A third modification, concerning a subplot around a “mixed” couple, replaces the young Jewish lover with a Rwandan exile.

Despite the incongruousness of this latter change (unlike French Jews, assimilated Africans are an exception in Japanese society) and the didacticism it generates, as well as the lengthy parallel between mythological and modern Japan (the nuances of which are difficult to capture for the uninitiated to Japanese origin stories, who also have to read subtitles), this contemporary ride on the roller coaster of the market economy remains fast and funny. The multicultural project marshals the resources of an abundant crew and cast, who, like so many legions of Tokyo commuters, crisscross the stage in perpetual motion: moving the set, singing and dancing for the glory of toilet seats, and, most of all, incarnating with wry humor Saruwatari’s furiously busy employees and their smoothly clever French associates.

Oriza Hirata is the leading playwright of his generation in Japan, the founder of the Seinendan company and the theory behind the “quiet theater” movement of the 1990s, which seeks inspiration in contemporary Japanese society and carries a meticulous acting methodology. Somewhat like Vinaver’s straddling of business and theater, Hirata is developing the field of “communication design”, meant to facilitate through architecture and interior clues, the exchange of information between doctors and lawyers on the one hand, and their patients and clients, on the other. As the set sheds its bare wooden walls and patriotic red offices in favor of modular spaces and the shimmering blues of computer screens, Hirata’s interests appear fully connected to the subject at hand. The Japanese are the uncontested world experts when it comes to toilet technology and comfort, but that it would take French marketing savvy in the areas of beauty and bien-être to sell seats in 2009 satisfyingly explains the cultural transfers from the original. As Saruwatari makes room for French investors by pushing faithful employees out the door, the future looks a little too bright and the promises made about ensuring “Japanese” quality above all sound deliberately hollow. A lesson that Toyota is learning the hard way, as are the clients of global markets all around the world, every day.

In French and Japanese, with French subtitles. To Feb. 20, Tues-Sat, 8:30 pm, Théâtre des Abbessess, 31 rue des Abbesses, 18e, M° Abbesses, 12€-23€, tel: 01.42.74.22.77.

Photo credit: Théâtre de la Ville

Littoral

2010-02-05T00:42:00.001-08:00

Burying a father is never a painless affair but in Wajdi Mouawad’s “Littoral”, the task takes on epic proportions, intersecting family secrets and civil war to lend universal dimensions to a personal tragedy. The play, written in 1991, and its new production, recounts a homecoming of sorts, for its protagonist as well as for this Montreal-based, Lebanese playwright and director; Mouawad returns to this early piece, 15 years after writing it as an unemployed theater post-grad, rehearsing simultaneously, in his living room, with props borrowed from the kitchen. “Littoral” is the first work of the tetralogy composed also of “Incendies”, “Forêts” and “Ciels”, and exploits themes common to all of these: missing parents, lost family histories, war and (re)constructed identities, but from a lightly juvenile point of view that translates into physical humor and poetic flights that can teeter between funny and crude or slow down the action, but beg an irresistible sympathy.

The story centers on a rather immature Wilfrid, who juts out his lower lip and stamps his foot when he is contradicted, and his gradual weaning from two powerful father figures. For the genitor he never knew, he must first piece together the story of his parents’ relationship before he can finally bury the man who abandoned him as an infant. In the absence of his biological father, Wilfrid has also created an imaginary hero to save him from his personal bogeymen: the Chevalier Guiromelan, with whom he must at last also part company to finally integrate the adult world. This voyage of self-discovery leads all three men/phantoms to the father’s birthplace and a rude confrontation with greater problems yet: the strife and upheaval caused by civil war there. The grieving Wilfrid finds comfort on the way in the other adult children he meets, also seeking catharsis with dead parents; when his quest to bury his father is shouldered by all, it brings closure to the sufferings of many more than he could ever have imagined.

Despite certain challenges with which the young writer evidently struggled (primarily, how to finally dispose of the father’s corpse on stage), this new production is easily carried by its multicultural cast which exuded an infectious energy on a recent night, led by the opposing comic touches brought by Patrick Le Mauff as the self-effacing father and Jean Alibert as the combative Guiromelan. The simple yet inventive set of wooden walls draped in black plastic can be body bags and coffin liners, but, turned over, becomes sand dunes and the seaside horizon of the play’s title. Mouawad also makes striking use of a painter's palette to underscore in dripping strokes of white, red and blue the play's themes of death, sacrifice and redemption. “Littoral” is a place of new beginnings and a return to old ones as well, and in this way an interesting complement to last season’s autobiographic “Seuls”, which Mouawad wrote, directed and acted. After presiding over the 2009 Festival d’Avignon, Mouawad’s writing brings a welcome current of multicultural self-exploration to French theater.

To Feb. 21, Wed, Thurs, 7:30 pm, Fri, Sat, 8:30 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre 71, 3 place du 11 Novembre, Malkoff (92), M° Malakoff-Plateau de Vanves, 11€ -23€, tel: 01.55.48.91.00.

Photo Credit: Jean-Louis Fernandez

Cercles/Fictions

2010-01-30T04:26:00.000-08:00

Inspired by storytelling traditions from Africa to India, Peter Brook has used for many years an arc-shaped performance space that extends into the audience at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. Joël Pommerat rounds off that arc in the newest production by his Compagnie Louis Brouillard, which enters the final year of a 36-month residency here; in “Cercles/Fictions”, Pommerat takes another step in his exploration of how power relations in contemporary society can blur the boundaries between truths and their distortion, and uses the ceremonial resonances of the circle to invite us into a world where the tectonic plates of norms and fantasy silently run into each other, with consequences as enormous as they are underestimated by these characters.

The play is composed in fact of concentric circles: seven serial stories whose overlapping episodes unfold like onion peels, with each new layer slightly closer to a common center. These tales revolve around: the waiting staff of an aristocratic home and their masters, two couples lost in a forest, a young executive who finds himself the object of the attentions of a sibylline bag lady, a knight, a mind-reader, a door-to-door salesman of his own self-help book, an entrepreneur and the homeless and unemployed he instrumentalizes. Pommerat writes in the program notes that all the stories told here are true, even personal, with one exception. Yet none of the scenarios is ordinary. If truth is stranger than fiction, we are certainly left guessing.

Several threads run throughout: the purported desire of some to improve the lot of the less fortunate, the hidden motivations of these alleged altruists, and the effects of their actions on those they would help. The means that these power-brokers have are many although three are the most common: wealth, confidence and supposed supernatural powers. The question of happiness is central, however, and seems to raise the following questions: to what extent can well-being be defined by money, comfort, success? Does self-fulfillment have any place in relationships founded on market values? And has consumer society fundamentally altered how and where happiness can be found (indeed, is it possible at all)?

“Cercles/Fictions” builds on similar preoccupations in previous shows “Les Marchands” and “Au monde”, which examined the inevitable tensions driving the relationship between the ruling classes and the working classes, and where the question of happiness was measured in terms of productivity. Here, Pommerat digs deeper at the motivations of both groups while introducing a new problematic: if you could change your life and finally achieve equality, happiness, freedom… , would you? If you had everything you could want, would that make you happy? He is joined as always by the formidable Compagnie Louis Brouillard, which performs another tour-de-force here, attaining a precision of tone, gesture, voice and rhythm that proves them masters of their art in France. With little more than a table and chairs to work with, they are assisted by Eric Soyer's magisterial lighting which displaces the action between interiors and exteriors, all equally atmospheric, from parking garages, and drawing rooms to dance halls and primeval forests

As a magical space of exchange, movement and transcendence since time immemorial, the circle(s) Pommerat develops here are indeed sites of liminality, where characters teeter on the edges of transformative changes. In so doing, he stirs up the dionysian (in the Nietzschian sense) powers of this configuration, tapping its creative and intuitive potential in the face of critical and rational forces. And while the imaginary, even the paranormal, has accompanied his earlier work, in “Cercles/Fictions”, it lies at the center of these chimerical stories.

To March 6, Tues-Sat, 8:30 pm, matinees (3:30 pm), Feb. 6 & 20 and March 6, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, 37 bis boulevard de la Chapelle, 10e, M° La Chapelle, 18/26 euros, tel: 01.46.07.34.50.

Photo Credit: Elisabeth Carecchio

« Paroles/pas de rôles…vaudeville »

2010-01-22T00:47:00.000-08:00

Its far from a fairytale and yet this story bears a few resemblances to “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. That most prestigious of French cultural institutions, the Comédie-Française, has invited the avant-garde of Flemish/Dutch theater, in the persons of Damiaan De Schrijver, Peter Van den Eede and Matthias de Koning, to teach their craft to its noble players, or, to work the metaphor, to dress up a centuries old majesty in the latest and coolest threads. The result is “Paroles/pas de roles… vaudeville”, a piece conceived around the notion of repertoire and the preservation of theatrical history (the primary mission of the Théâtre-Français), on the one hand, and the anti-theatrical preoccupations of the project’s guest artists, on the other.

It should be said that the companies from which this trio hail, tg STAN (Antwerp), De Koe (Antwerp) and Discordia (Amsterdam), have come to occupy the vanguard of contemporary European theater in Paris, sharing a similar interest in laying bare all theatrical conceit to explore the motivations and role of the actor in the dramatic moment, while displaying formidable acting skills themselves, finely tuned textual readings and a post-modern look at it all. While STAN is the best known in Paris, enjoying regular invitations from the Festival d’Automne and long-standing support from the Théâtre de la Bastille, members of all three, which operate as collectives, collaborate freely with each other. One such project, by the same De Schrijver/Van den Eede/de Koning threesome, was a condensation of the companies’ commonly held preoccupations and a revelation of the 2003 Festival d’Automne: “Du serment de l’écrivain du roi et de Diderot” (“vandeneedevandeschrijvervandekoninganddiderot”, in Dutch), based on Denis Diderot’s essay, “The Paradox of Acting,” took to heart the French philosopher’s much debated thesis that to move the audience to engage emotionally with the action of the play, the actor must himself remain emotionally neutral.

Suffice it to say that Diderot’s ideas on the subject of acting have not been much implemented at the Comédie-Française. The decision by the theater’s current administrator, Muriel Mayette, to expose its sociétaires and pensionnaires (the two grades of troupe members) to the zero-actor approach of their colleagues in the Low Countries falls under the Théâtre-Français’ more recently assumed objective to venture beyond the classic repertoire produced at its Salle Richelieu venue, by interacting with modern texts and contemporary European directors. Increasingly imitated in France (the company known as “Les Possédés” are obvious admirers), as yet never duplicated, the particular theater equation arrived at by STAN, De Koe and Discordia nevertheless remains, after two months of exchanges and rehearsals, a conundrum for the cast of "Paroles..."

The problem was clearly foreseen, however, by the three directors. As they wrote presciently in the production notes, “With so little time to prepare the actors, the risk is that they will latch onto an appearance of what they want to express, that they show us the form while failing to anchor the project’s subject in their own experience.” (“En si peu de temps de preparation pour les comédiens, le piège serait de s’accrocher à l’extériorité de ce qu’il veulent exprimer, qu’ils montrent la forme sans que le propos vienne de l’intérieur.”). This is precisely the point at which the quintet of actors arrived, but could not surpass, on the opening night.

On a bare space strewn with backstage debris (props, ladders, coats…) and tied up in literal knots by wires and ropes operating curtains and sets, the three actresses and two actors play an ever-repeating, familiar scenario of characters assembling for an anticipated event, and parting when it is over. While the situation they attempt to enact is made deliberately difficult by stage lights that abruptly extinguish, props that are maddeningly missing and direction to talk over each other (so to better destabilize the normative jeu d’acteur in which they were trained), the obviously energized and invested troupe never seemed to find sufficient motivation in the exercise. It may be unfair to hold their efforts up to a standard achieved from decades of reflection, experimentation and improvisation, but a recent STAN performance such as “Le chemin solitaire” (in December), demonstrated to what extent understanding and meaning issue organically in performances by the Dutch and Flemish companies, despite and indeed because of such obstacles to role playing. The temptation to act generally got the better of good intentions in "Paroles...", although Laurent Natrella and Léonie Simaga just as often achieved a necessary humility and distance from character.

As the Emperor found to his dismay, the gorgeous attire he thought he was putting on only exposed his true nature. This latest initiative by the Comédie-Française will be truly splendid if it can shake some of the dust off an art in need of renewal and inject new practices into a venerable institution, to help it do better the repertoire it does best.

To February 28, Tues, 7 pm, Wed-Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, 21 rue du Vieux-Colombier, 6e, M° St. Sulpice, 8 euros-28 euros, tel: 01.44.39.87.00.

Photo credit: Christophe Raynaud de Lage

"Je t'appelle de Paris"

2010-01-13T15:39:00.000-08:00

City of lights, city of dreams: Paris ever fascinates its 45 million annual visitors who probably remember those first sights, sounds, and of course, tastes of the French capital, even many years later. Café and croissants at a bustling zinc, the Eiffel Tower shimmering against the evening sky, the winding streets and precipitous staircases of Montmartre….: Paris is a feast for the senses as well as the imagination, as Hemingway was neither the first nor the last to note. For visitors coming from far away, in both geography and references, the novelty can begin before even touching Paris soil, in the plane or airport for example, where scales of technology, architecture and services characteristic of a world metropolis can mystify, long before getting to the Mona Lisa. Such was the experience of Moussa Sanou, a Burkinabé playwright/actor who came to France in 2002. Eight years and many Ouagadougou-Paris flights later, Sanou relates those indelibly engraved, first impressions in “Je t’appelle de Paris” (emphasis on the last word): more proof, if needed, that the city continues to exercise its charm, though the effects on visitors hailing from a former French colony can be mixed...

Developed from improvisations around Sanou’s encounters and discoveries, this engaging and lively two-hander, performed with Sanou’s fellow countryman Mamadou Koussé, works safe “fish out of water” comic ground while raising the familiar specter of the Banania Negro (whose “Y’a bon” becomes “Il n’y a pas de problème”) to scratch more sensitive zones of French colonial history and its residue. Sanou and the other members of his company Traces Théâtre, invited by director Jean-Louis Martinelli to create and perform “Voyage en Afrique” at Nanterre-Amandiers in 2002, deal with suspicious neighbors and condescending pedestrians with unflappable aplomb and perfect manners, not to mention exquisite consideration (walking barefoot the five flights to their apartment so as not to disturb the elderly couple next door), but do so always with a wry interior smile. In its sources of both wonder (the Métro…) and bemusement (concerns with propriety and appearances…), and its treatment of both, “Je t’appelle de Paris” is certainly indebted to a classic of African literature, Bernard Dadié’s Un Nègre à Paris (1959), where a young Ivorian author and journalist undertakes a reverse anthropological study of the “Parisians” and the city they built. As Sanou says, taking in everything he sees, “Dieu est bon mais le Blanc est grand!”

Have times changed? Much of West Africa celebrates this year the 50th anniversary of decolonization. Globalization and fifty more years of French coopération obliging, French and Africans are no longer the almost total strangers they were when Dadié gazed upon the Arc de Triomphe. As Moussa Sanou shows, however, more differences remain than there are bridges over the Seine, though most of these are what generally translates into “local color”: surprising, hair-tearing even, but harmless, on the whole. Of course, some opposing views will take more time to reconcile: whereas Sanou and his companions, in sketches that take place back in Burkina Faso, feel a sense of community and take time to appreciate the people they meet, their French guests see only crushing poverty and rudimentary hygiene. It is with these reflections that Sanou offers food for thought: Why must aid be a one-way street? Can Africans contribute nothing to their fellow world citizens? If another canicule strikes France, Sanou has a few ideas he’d like to share with us…

“Je t’appelle de Paris”, to February 14, Tues-Sat, 9 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 7 avenue Pablo Picasso, Nanterre (92), RER A Nanterre-Préfecture + shuttle, 12 euros-25 euros, tel: 01.46.14.70.00.

Photo credit: Pascal Béjean

"Deux Voix"

2010-01-13T15:35:00.000-08:00

In June 2009, Royal Dutch Shell agreed to pay over $15 million to the families of the nine Ogoni activists, including Ken Saro-Wiwa, who were executed by the Nigerian government in 1995, with the oil company’s alleged consent. Although neither Shell nor the Ogoni are mentioned in “Deux Voix”, their 40-year conflict looms in the shadows of this one-man tour-de-force by the Dutch company ZT Hollandia, created from statements by Shell’s former Chairman Cor Herkströter, and texts by the Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Created in 1997, the play has its own long history that includes extensive international touring and numerous prizes. After a French premier at the 2004 Festival d’Avignon, the piece arrives in Paris less than a year after the Shell-Ogoni settlement, a landmark that may herald the end of an era of impunity for multinationals who fail to respect human rights and the environment. It certainly opposes a hopeful coda to a work that scours the gloss off the smooth operators of the political and business establishments.

Around a dinner table littered with the dregs of wine carafes, champagne bottles and whisky glasses, an almost interchangeable foursome of government officials, captains of industry and their cohorts peel back the layers of their toxic involvement in each other’s affairs, in a muscular and cruelly comic exposition of how political, business, intellectual and religious institutions and actors feed on and corrupt one another, with the help (this is Pasolini’s Italy, after all) of organized crime and the media. The quartet’s crude posturing and violent outbursts are abruptly deflated, however, by the coolly objective and ostensibly reasoned arguments offered by a fifth dinner guest, for whom business is business/has no business having a moral conscience. Taken from published articles and statements by Herkströter defending Shell’s operations in Nigeria (which included gas flaring and the de facto support of Nigeria’s military rulers), this monologue marks an immediate shift in tone and a chilling end to the play.

In its use of Herkströter’s arguments, its theme of political and industrial bed partners and its partial source in the activities of oil multinationals in Africa, “Deux Voix” (which was created in Dutch, as “Twee Stemmen”) is a forbearer of a similarly preoccupied French play, “ELF, la pompe Afrique”, based on the verbatim testimony of the defendants in the massive ELF-Aquitaine corruption trial (2003) that exposed decades of influence abuse by the French government in its former African colonies. “Deux Voix” issues, however, from ZT Hollandia’s long-standing interest in power relations within society, from its most marginal members to its supposed “movers and shakers”. The show is also the third by the Eindhoven-based company derived from the work and theories of Pasolini, who, diametrically opposed to ideas such as those espoused by Herkstroter, believed that economics pose the greatest threat to human development. By juxtaposing Herkströter’s frank attitude and emotionless language with Pasolini’s dissembling, hyperbolic characters and the bombast of their discourse, “Deux Voix” underscores both the differing opinions of the board chariman and the writer as well as the different approaches (resulting in similar results) by those in power to the mechanisms and structures at their disposal.

Playing all five roles, Jeroen Willems offers a fascinating performance, sliding in and out of the skin of these slippery characters with the same ease a chameleon changes colors, while underscoring a certain uniformity in their activities and views. The play gives much reason to question the nature of the institutions which directly govern and inadvertently rule us and to demand of them, as the Ogoni have done with Shell, that they begin to put human beings back where they belong.

To February 10, Tues-Wed, Fri-Sat, 8:30 pm, Sun, 3:30 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 7 avenue Pablo Picasso, Nanterre (92), RER A Nanterre-Préfecture + shuttle, 12 euros-25 euros, tel: 01.46.14.70.00.

Photo credit: Ben van Duin

"Eleven and Twelve", or When Not To Translate

2009-12-04T15:41:00.000-08:00

“Is it absolutely necessary to translate?”, sighs the Italian tutor in Samuel Beckett’s short story, “Dante and the Lobster”. Such weary frustration with the task of finding in a new idiom the language to express what has been perfectly said in the original, may strike a chord with audiences to “Eleven and Twelve”. For those who saw and were moved by Peter Brook’s masterful “Tierno Bokar” (2004), its English-language version appears a poor substitute.

“Tierno Bokar” was the adaptation by Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne of Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s account of the life and teachings of his spiritual guide, Tierno Bokar (1875-1939), in a period in Malian history when colonial ambitions and religious doctrine clashed with devastating effects for believers. As the English title of Brook’s play underlines in red, the defining historical moment of Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar. Le sage de Bandiagara (Seuil, 1994) was the dispute between rival clans in the Sufi faith regarding the number of times a prayer should be recited. Taught to pray 12 times, Bokar is convinced through his search for spiritual truth to change sides, a decision that leads directly to his banishment and death. His life stood, for his pupil Hampâté Bâ, as it does for all readers of this illuminating autobiographical account, as an example of religious tolerance and the courage to uphold it in the face of ignorance and persecution.

Brook’s “Tierno Bokar” benefited enormously from the insight and energy of its West African cast, led by the great Burkinabe actor Sotigui Kouyaté who, as the descendent of Malian griots (oral historians), lent an aura of authenticity to the role of the sage Bokar, and the presence of three actresses as the formidable wives and mothers on whom African society rests. These crucial elements are lost in “Eleven and Twelve”, whose all-male, international cast fails to locate either the gravitas or the illumination of the original. “Tierno Bokar” was developed in French through workshops at Columbia University in New York City and exchanges with the African communities in Harlem. That cross-cultural dialogue which helped create the original would seem to be “translation” enough of Hampâté Bâ’s book and Bokar’s teachings. Why indeed was another, less satisfying exercise necessary?

“Eleven and Twelve”, to Dec. 19, Tues-Fri, 8:30 pm, Sat, 3:30/8:30 pm, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, 37 bis boulevard de la Chapelle, 10e, Mº La Chapelle, 10€-26€, tel: 01.46.07.34.50.

When Self is Other

2009-11-24T14:53:00.000-08:00

Disappearing identities is the subject of an exciting work of new writing, and its representation on stage, in the “Trilogie Chto”, by Sonia Chiambretto, directed by Hubert Colas. The collision of text and direction is of primary interest here: the one is keenly aware of its form, experimenting with the visual and spatial potential of the printed page (crossed out text, symbols, fonts…) while the other imagines a visual setting that exploits contrasts and media and works on multiple levels and planes. Triptych would be a more accurate term for this series of three independent stories, published separately (as poetry, originally) and which Colas has developed individually into three distinct portraits, which can be seen separately or in any combination. Together, they attempt an intriguing dialogue, thanks to a common theme of displacement/exile and a uniformly frontal presentation.

The origins of the pieces are rooted in Chiambretto’s native Marseille and interviews conducted with three of its more atypical residents: an 18-year old Chechen refugee, a Slovakian nun who entered a French convent at the age of 8, and a German veteran of the French Foreign Legion. While their status as exiles in France most obviously unites them, the stories they tell expose more particular forces at work in their psyche than the broadly political or cultural. Only the young protagonist of “Chto interdit au moins de 15 ans” has the liberty, in her French courses and on-line chats, to reflect on the construction of identity through language and the ambiguities that can develop in the act of switching linguistic codes, but where the “nostalgie langue” will always resonate the deepest. In the other two portraits, “12 Soeurs slovaques” and “Mon kepi blanc”, institutions (religious and military) seek to be the exclusive mediators of identity, with lesser and greater results. If Soeur Rose casts a critical eye on the material and moral privations she has suffered over something like 50 years of cloistered communal life, the Legionnaire finds little fault with the military apparatus that sent him to Indochina and Algeria and taught him the camaraderie of men at arms, although the changes these experiences have worked upon him appear to be multiple.

How is identity created and preserved in situations of displacement, especially in the context of war? Must the exile sacrifice the individual to survive as an “other” in a strange and hostile world? Is memory a process or a condition, an ontology or an institution? And by what ruses real and imagined might the self yet defend itself against physical and psychological aggression? Such difficult questions may not have been the conscious concerns of Chiambretto in the act of writing but the plasticity of her form opens wide the door to interpretation. Colas steps through it to color in the missing pieces, lending depth to character in “Mon Képi blanc” and “Chto…”, but also narrowing interpretative possibility, even to risk cliché, in “12 Soeurs slovaques” (where Catholicism is the ready fall guy for institutionalized hypocrisy).

The trilogy ran for the first time this month at the Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, where "12 Soeurs slovaques" was created. "Mon Képi blanc" and "Chto..." tour in France through April: an opportunity, with the three texts now published together by Actes Sud, to consider how text is translated to the stage and how the different languages of Chiambretto and Colas explore that most modern question of the self, in the environment of conflict and migration which defined the last century and which is poised to challenge even further the societies and individuals of the 21st.

Photo Credits:
"Chto...", Nicholas Marie
"Mon Képi blanc", Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques

Garcia Strikes Back in "Versus"

2009-11-23T06:54:00.000-08:00

A combative provocateur, director Rodrigo Garcia is ready for a fight in his latest show, “Versus”, a battle the cast and audience live in real time over two brutal hours. At last Saturday’s production at the Théâtre du Rond-Point, the actresses, who endure simulations of torture (suffocation and drowning) and beatings, were covered with very real and visible bruises, and the public nearly came to blows, some shouting out their disgust and fairly stampeding for the exits, while others laughed at their bourgeois sensibilities and jeered them on their way. There’s nothing like the theater for inciting impassioned reactions, and if this was in any way Garcia’s intention, he was entirely successful.

Invited by the Festival d’Automne, which first brought his Carnicería Teatro to Paris in 2002, the 45-year old Asturias-based Argentine is not growing old quietly, but rather turning up the volume on his anti-capitalist, anti-consumer message, one that takes no prisoners and soothes no egos. “Versus” is a violent punch back at those who (to paraphrase a monologue repeated twice in the show) would shower us with myriad blows to our individuality and integrity, in the form of invasive publicity, corporate messages and marketing strategies, all of which regard human life as consumer behavior to be manipulated and people as objects to be bought, used and sold.

The show uses several of Garcia’s symbols to underscore the point: food and its mindless consumption in the over-fed societies of the industrialized world; and rabbits, which seem to happily endure traps of all sorts (in this case, a microwave’s timed reheat program). The polar opposite to this gluttonous sado-masochism is represented by books, hundreds of which lie on the stage, and their metaphorical signifier: learning. Both are trampled, torn and urinated upon, while an epithet-spewing monkey very deliberately carries around Proust and Rousseau as a reminder how far this life-style has alienated us from the arts of the mind. Driving the message home are a live, hard-rock beat and the true story of abuse and addiction told by a fairly desperate looking man from Buenos Aires, who is dressed for his funeral in the final scene. Seen through the dozen or so, mostly shocking episodes which comprise the show, consumer society appears as an unstoppable, one-way ticket to man’s demise. In “Versus”, Garcia’s theater is no more digestible than the tons of spaghetti, pizza and steak tartare consumed on stage, although it can be searingly funny. It does seem however, that if the logos and tag-lines and promotions that fill daily existence in the 21st century are any indicator, and if the market indeed holds human self-actualization in a stranglehold, that the premise is vital and the means to communicating it justified, and even salutary.

Photo Credit: Christian Berthelot

Creole Theater, Contemporary Problems

2009-10-06T17:02:00.001-07:00

Metropolitan French know the French West Indies, or Antilles, for their white sand beaches and limpid waters. French West Indians know their home is anything but a paradise. The festival of “Creole” theater now ending at the Parc de La Villette offers a compelling explanation for this disparity, painting a vision of life in Guadeloupe and Martinique that is far removed from tourist brochures and clichés. Two plays, both by Guadeloupean women writers, unflinchingly take on the searing issues facing Antillean society today: unemployment, delinquency, drug abuse and crime among young men and the ravages of these combined social ills on women of all ages.

These are not well-worn topics in Antillean theater. Whether in French or in Creole, French West Indian writers and directors have concentrated their attention over the last 50 years to fighting economic and political oppression by the former colonizer, turned “homeland” (patrie) in 1946. That “Trames”, by Gerty Dambury, and “Comme deux frères” by novelist Maryse Condé, turn to these pressing and very contemporary domestic issues is significant, and testament to their importance for female agency in Antillean society.

“Trames” is the story of a mother-son relationship poisoned by the latter’s inability to hold a job and his subsequent drug use and descent into crime. Although Christian’s mother is an accomplished and well-traveled researcher, with a specialty in women’s narratives (spouse abuse, prostitution, rape, etc.), Christian cannot manage to shake off the heritage of an absent father and take responsibility for himself. Claiming frustration with what he perceives as his mother’s privileging of her work over the problems of her progeny, he robs her of her dearest possessions, then murders her when she asserts her freedom, by telling him in no uncertain terms, “You are not my final destination.” Dambury places on the lips of her heroine a terribly bold statement for an Antillean mother to say to her child, yet it is the only one this women can make if she is to liberate herself from yet another man attempting to wield power over her. In that final act of rebellion, the playwright makes an equally telling statement about Guadeloupean society, where the new turf lords are adolescent males and the latest victims their mothers and grandmothers who tirelessly worry about them, feed them, clean them up and bail them out of trouble. Directed by Dambury, the production which just closed, starring Firmine Richard, was tight, controlled and excellently acted, with a fine supporting cast: Jalil Leclaire as the lost and angry Christophe and Martine Maximin, as a kind of women’s wisdom personified and who also makes an astonishing performance as a prostitute/interviewee.

“Comme deux frères” which runs this week, adopts a similar theme but, under the direction of José Exilis, does not pack nearly the same punch. The text, published in 2007, is a small revelation nevertheless: two friends awaiting trail for murder share the secrets of their pasts in a jailhouse confession that serves as a reminder of the same social problems, here on a grander scale: school, government, religion, the police and above all the family are remiss in their duty to raise a morally grounded younger generation; worse, these institutional actors are the perverse tools of a society gone to wreck and whose victims again include women: the teenage mothers and abused lovers these young men leave in the wake of their destruction. In a powerful, penultimate scene, the friends struggle with a Faustian pact: Jeff, who has always taken the blame for Greg’s failures, will agree to plead sole guilt for the murder if Greg will sleep with him, a deal the macho Greg cannot bear to accept, in part because of his surprise at the discovery of his friend’s parallel life. Maryse Condé has always been a writer of the tough realities of life in France’s tropical paradise. In this play, she develops a provocative metaphor: because Greg has screwed Jeff over these many long years he owes his friend a **ck for getting him out of an equally **cked up situation. In her indictment of contemporary Guadeloupean society, Condé shows that this impossible situation is shared by the community at large.

Unfortunately for Condé’s message, the production by Martinique’s Compagnie Siyaj is marred by a surprisingly blatant casting error: while the text treats clearly with young delinquents, Exilis has chosen to cast his longtime collaborator, 61-year old Gilbert Laumord, as Jeff. While Laumord is a talented actor and dancer, the choice creates an insurmountable problem of representation, added to by the soulful notes Jeff plays on the harmonica and his poetically tortured dance steps. The text, in its perverse pact and the dangerously insatiable will to live of Greg, demands the irresistible energy, uncompromising anger and pulsating music of youth. Exilis has created something more akin to a meditation on crime, where a fragmented dance interrupts the friends’ musings, on a bare stage that dispenses with the cramped promiscuity of the pair’s jail cell : necessary here to convey their descent into the existential pit from which they will never escape.

Dambury’s riveting production and Exilis’ failed opportunity can be taken as immediate evidence that contemporary Antillean theater may be both closer to current realities and farther yet from creating a viable esthetic than may have been supposed.

“Comme deux frères” to Oct. 10, Tues, Wed, Fri, Sat, 8:30 pm, Thurs, 7:30 pm, Grande Halle de la Villette, Parc de la Villette (19e), Mº Porte de Pantin, info: www.villette.com or tel: 01.40.03.75.75.

Photo credits: "Trames", Emir Srklovic; "Comme deux frères", Philippe Bourgade

Exterior Views: “I Went To The House But Did Not Enter”

2009-09-24T16:46:00.000-07:00

The self is the defining notion of post-industrial society : the watershed of modern art, literature and psychology since Picasso, Joyce and Freud, the modus operandi of contemporary society and the yardstick of its tangential pop cultures. T. S. Eliot was one of the first to actively engage a multiple and fractured self in modern poetry, beginning with “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1911/17) and its inward-directed invitation to explore painful zones of feeling and emotion, while taking care, paradoxically, to eliminate these from his poetry. This he did through what he termed the “objective correlative”, or “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” The technique was demonstrated to disturbing effect in “Prufrock”’s etherized patient and insistent coffee spoons, filling in for numbness and frustration, but opened a new poetic field whereby the self could just infuse the objective world of the poem, and in so doing, allow the artist to access a state of necessary impersonality.

These concerns lie at the core of “I Went to the House But Did Not Enter” , an intriguing hybrid piece by German director/composer Heiner Goebbels. Constructed on four thematically intersecting texts spanning the last century, the show, a “staged concert” in the now signature style of its creator (after “Eraritjaritjaka”, 2004), explores the convergent concerns of its authors to challenge the tyranny of personality and the validity of language’s attempt to master human experience. Sung a cappella with virtuoso gravity and control by the Cambridge-based Hilliard Ensemble (2 tenors, 1 countertenor, 1 baritone), these texts offer immediate applications of Eliot’s literary theories. The series of three tableaux begins with “Prufrock”, here a study in grey where the bank clerk’s objectified insignificance in the eyes of his society is forcefully rendered by the Hilliards’ efficient packing and unpacking of a drawing room’s various objects in black and white. It continues to Maurice Blanchot’s short novel “La folie du jour”, first written in 1948, as a response to the losses and terrors of war (during which Blanchot narrowly escaped execution) and a testament to the writer’s ability to live tranquilly with constant suffering (the “madness of the day”) by removing himself from experience itself. This middle section is spoken primarily by the Hilliard Ensemble and comes the closest to resembling theater, but reintroduces the objective correlative in the looming form of an architecturally British looking house facade, with illuminated interiors of four rooms. It segues next to Franz Kafka’s very brief and characteristically humorous meditation on the individual’s isolation in society, “An Excursion into the Mountains” (1912), before finishing, where it must, with Samuel Beckett and his late monologue “Worstward Ho” (1983).

Goebbels has said his interest in “staged concerts” stems from a search for “alternatives to concepts of presence and intensity, the individual and absence” and the desire to explore these with “cinematic reality” in a way that avoids emotional subjectivity. In other words, using a kind of objective correlative to arrive at an intensity of feeling in the absence of an authorial self. In Goebbel’s visual language, this can translate into settings which appear to be of no relation to the words being spoken, such as in the “Worstward Ho” tableau, placed in a plush red upholstered hotel room interior. But Goebbels reserves an ingenious surprise in the form of a “slide show” whose frozen glimpses of human life fade into footage of a running river. The still-life of “Prufrock’s” arrested anxiety becomes an affirmation of life, in Beckett’s enigmatically hopeful mantra: ”Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”.

“I Went To The House But Did Not Enter”, in English with French subtitles, Sept. 23-27, 8:30 pm, Théâtre de la Ville, 2 place du Châtelet, 4e, Mº Châtelet, 15€/26€, tel: 01.42.74.22.77.

Photo Credit: www.heinergoebbels.com

France’s Invisible Africa

2009-01-26T15:11:00.000-08:00

What does a thirtyish, white French intellectual know about Africa? The question is hardly the stuff of drama, yet playwright Ronan Chéneau and director David Bobee make of Chéneau’s struggle to answer it an intriguing performance. Chéneau and Bobee manage to satisfy a commission to write a text for dancers about the African presence in France, while essentially skirting it, Chéneau’s search leading him to the France of the banlieue riots of 2005 and of Nicolas Sarkozy’s Ministry of National Identity in 2008, and to his own position within that same society.

In Chéneau’s own account, he was living and writing in a medium-size French city, his major preoccupations art and love, when the commission arrived. If Africa was still only a dark continent on the edges of his imagination, a brief trip to Brazzaville, organized by the Centre Culturel Français there, helped him contextualize what he had only heretofore glimpsed via the media, as well as put him in touch with a Congolese choreographer, DeLaVallet Bidiefono. Read by Chéneau, this autobiographical narration serves as the mildly satirical preface to a performance that attempts through dance, video and acrobatics to poeticize a radically (for French theater) politicized discourse on the exclusive and draconian policies on integration and immigration of Sarkozy’s government, as well as a generalized racism and prevailing cultural chauvinism.

In the second, the health preoccupations and wide-eyed impressions of the French tourist thrown out of his Gallic fishbowl give over to self-loathing at being French and a wholesale rejection of France, at least such as Sarkozy has imagined it. “I hate France” is declaimed under a faded French flag; another point-blank statement, “I died the day I learned of the creation of the Ministry of National Identity”, is the prologue to a machine gun massacre of innocents to the tune of the Marseillaise.

Chéneau and Bobee never nuance their sentiments, and yet they fail to identify a focus of their resistance, hesitating between the related, yet different issues of social and economic integration of French citizens of immigrant descent, national immigration policy and race relations. While powerful, particularly in the acrobatic sequences and the revolutionary energy of the finale, the performances of the talented Franco-Congolese cast never entirely shake off a feeling of undirected displacement, mirrored by the airport boarding hall in which the piece is set, nor of self-conscious posturing, in the figure of Chéneau’s narrator and in the accumulation of politically-aimed punches.

But if the last word belongs to Chéneau, his conclusion to his struggle to find the “invisible” Africa in France, both provides hope and indicates with lucidity the road left to travel: “I dream of a day when Congolese and French will speak about the same world, with emotion, in peace and serenity. We will be Congolese and French; we will speak of the same world.” A world where, even in France, color and ethnicity will no longer mark division, but create community.

“Nos enfants nous font peur quand on les croise dans la rue”, to Feb. 14, Théâtre de Gennevilliers, 41 avenue des Grésillons, Gennevilliers (92), Mº Gabriel Péri, 5 euros-22 euros, tel: 01.41.32.26.26.
March 4-11, 8:30 pm, Maison des arts de Créteil, Place Salvador Allende, Créteil, Métro Créteil-Préfecture (shuttle bus return to Place de la Bastille following show), 4-20 euros, tel : 01 45 13 19 19 or www.maccreteil.com.

Photo credit: Tristan Jeanne-Valès

"Boliloc"

2008-06-04T13:51:00.000-07:00

You won’t find the meaning in the dictionary or even in the show of the same by Philippe Genty. “Boliloc” is an imaginary trip through time, space, memory and even the human body, meeting creatures both grotesque and fanciful, in cosmic, organic and fantastic settings. Ostensibly the story of a ventriloquist put to the test by her rebellious dummies, the show leaves the door wide open to individual interpretation. So it is with Genty, the French puppeteer famous the world over for magical, mind-bending quests in search of his multiple selves. As in shows like “Voyageur immobile” and “Passagers clandestins” (1995-1999), developing the theme of the interior voyage, he places the unconscious at the heart of all of his work. His explorations can make for dumbfounding, enchanting spectacles. In “Boliloc” however, Genty fails to excite; except for a burlesque strain developed with Belgian actor Christian Hecq, the piece brings little that is new to a familiar vocabulary of dance, marionettes, acrobatics and set design, developed over the past 30 years. Still, some nice images and enough wonders to please neophytes.

To June 29, Tues-Sat, 8:30 pm, Sun, 3 pm (no show June 8), Théâtre du Rond-Point, 2 bis, avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt, 8e, Mº Franklin D. Roosevelt, 16,50€-33€, tel: 01.44.95.98.21.

Photo Credit: Pascal François

"La Théorie de l'Echec"

2008-05-28T01:11:00.001-07:00

Le spectateur de la pièce “La Théorie de l’échec” a l’impression d’avoir découvert un nouveau talent. Hichem Djemaï, étudiant en histoire à Paris X-Nanterre, est l’auteur de ces scènes drôles, touchantes, acerbes parfois, dans lesquelles une petite bande d’amis réunis autour d’un banc de jardin nous émeuvent sur leur quotidien : banale et décevant à leurs yeux, mais colorié par tant d’espoir et délavé par autant d’échecs. Les textes sont le fruit d’une Option théâtre au Lycée Joliot Curie de Nanterre en 2004-05, sous la direction d’Élodie Chanut, qui les met en scène aujourd’hui au Théâtre des Amandiers. Il y a Idriss, le meneur du bal, confiant et rieur ; Malik, qui plaque sa petite amie parisienne parce qu’il a le sentiment désagréable de « jouer un jeu » quand il est avec elle; Walid, collégien qui veut faire comme les grands mais dont le rap finit par forcer l'admiration de tous; Morgane, une « gothique » qui se passionne pour Racine… On parle profs et meufs, ciné et cité, boîte de nuit et carte d’électeur… Ils sont vrais, débordent de vitalité et de projets, se font piéger par leurs faiblesses et leurs peurs. Bien que la pièce dépeigne une certaine tranquillité qui serait plus caractéristique de Nanterre que d’autres communes plus sensibles, dans le « 9-3 » par exemple, le langage de Djemaï, sa musicalité comme sa « muscle », et un formidable jeu d’acteurs nous font découvrir la banlieue loin des clichés et des violences gratuites.

Jusqu’au 7 juin, mardi-samedi 21h, représentations supplémentaires les 29 et 30 mai, 3, 5 et 6 juin, à 15h, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 7 avenue Pablo Picasso, Nanterre (92), RER A Nanterre Préfecture + navette, 10€-24€, tél : 01. 46.14.70.00.

Visionner un extrait vidéo de la pièce en suivant ce lien:
http://109.2.nanterre.net/index.php?2006/11/21/66-hichem-djemai-la-theorie-de-lechec

Read this article in English by following this link:
www.parisvoice.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=521&Itemid=35

"Amour"

2008-04-17T15:00:00.000-07:00

Qu’est-ce qu’il y a d’ « Amour » dans le spectacle du même nom, l’adaptation du roman « Amour, Colère, Folie » (1969) de Marie Vieux-Chauvet ? Passion, haine, peur, certes ; mais d’amour, très peu. Il est pourtant dans son absence notoire que réside toute la force de cette œuvre maîtresse de la littérature haïtienne, écrite pendant les années noires de la dictature duvaliérienne. Scabreux pour l'époque, le roman fut censuré par la famille de l’auteur, ainsi provoquant l’exil de Marie Vieux et la divorce du couple Chauvet, pour avoir osé relater l’histoire d’une « vieille fille », Claire, l’ainée des sœurs Clamont, qui manoeuvre ses cadettes comme autant de pions dans l’espoir de calmer le feu qui risque de les consumer toutes depuis que le beau Jean-Luz s’est installé sous leur toit. Or, ce n’est pas sur Claire que l’employé français de l’Import-Export Corporation a jeté son dévolu, d’où cet étrange « Amour » qui se découvre aussi machiavélique qu’intempestif.

L’adaptation signée par José Pliya, dramaturge franco-béninois et l’actuel directeur de l’Artchipel, Scène nationale de la Guadéloupe, ainsi que la mise en scène de Vincent Goethals, rendent un bel hommage à l’esprit révolté du texte de Vieux-Chauvet, donnant libre cours aux fantasmes de Claire tout en l’emprisonnant derrière ses persiennes, victime des préjugés (elle est plus noire de peau que les autres membres de la famille) et des rigidités de sa classe (qui la destine à veiller sur ses soeurs à la place de la mère défunte). L’éternel témoin du bonheur des autres qu’elle ne peut pas partager, Claire ne se résigne pourtant pas à l’effacement, ni à l’oubli : si c’est Félicia qui se trouve enceinte de Jean à « sa » place, c’est elle qui jouera l’épouse dévoyée pendant la convalescence de la jeune maman, attirant le mari comblé sur son propre lit pour jouer avec l’enfant, dont elle a fait installer le berceau dans sa chambre en prenant bien soin de ranger ses cartes postales pornographiques...

L’intimité inviolable de Claire se juxtapose aux images d’époque de Port-au-Prince (marchés, palais national, cathédrale), projetées sur un écran serpentin et modulable selon l’humour de Claire et devant lequel un jeune homme habillé alternativement en costume noir et caleçon blanc exécutera de temps à autre des pas de danse saccadés, disloqués presque : le pantin du rut inassouvi de Claire ou bien son propre double. Lorsque « l’amour » rancit pour se distiller enfin en rage, Claire prend le micro pour hurler son dépit, sa frustration et sa passion, qu’elle ne trouvera jamais le courage de déclarer à Jean, ainsi que sa peur des Tonton-Macoutes qui guettent une brèche dans la façade de la « vieille-fille » en dentelle pour lui faire avouer des histoires de famille, enterrées jusque-là. La pièce s’achève sur fond de révolution populaire, dont l’ambiance générale sera enfin digne des passions que vit Claire depuis de longues années dans la solitude de sa chambre et d’un sexe resté vierge trop longtemps.

Magali Comeau Denis donne une interprétation magistrale dans le rôle de Claire , la rendant aussi attachante qu’amère, nous entraînant avec autant de finesse que de brusquerie dans les tourments de Claire, à l’image de la sœur ignorée qui se finit la maîtresse d’un jeu qui faillit lui échapper pour de bon. José Pliya décrit le roman de Vieux-Chauvet comme « une grande œuvre chorale et intimiste » : c’est en jouant sur ces contrastes que la pièce trouve son équilibre et sa force.

Jusqu’au 19 avril, 20h, Tarmac de la Villette, Parc de la Villette (derrière la Grande Halle), 19e, M° Porte de Pantin, tél : 01.40.03.93.95.

Crédit photo: Eric Legrand

La France de Mohamed Rouabhi

2008-02-20T01:29:00.000-08:00

Mohamed Rouabhi a un sens inné de l’ironie. “Fils d’indigènes” selon sa propre formule, qui a vu le jour dans cette France des Trente glorieuses, construite en grande partie par des milliers d’immigrants qui ont eu droit à peu de splendeurs dans les mines et les baraques surpeuplés, Rouabhi a tout lu, tout entendu et tout enregistré surtout, des comportements politiques et sociaux du « pays des droits de l’homme » envers ceux qui ont eu la maladresse de ne pas y naître Français. « Vive la France ! », la pièce qu’il a écrite et mise en scène avec sa jeune compagnie Les Acharnés, n’exprime pas tant la dérision qu’elle frôle l’absurde dans son savant montage de films documentaires, cinéma, musique de variétés et rap, vidéo clandestin, publicités et discours politiques des cent dernières années en France. Rien ne lui échappe ; tout y passe : Exposition coloniale et tirailleurs sénégalais ; CRS et HLMs ; Annie Cordy et la Marianne, Aimé Césaire et Harry Roselmack, Carrefour et France 3; émeutes et brutalités policières ; Nicolas Sarkozy et Marine Le Pen… L’ironie est à son comble dans des séquences évoquant en les juxtaposant les fantasmes, les idéaux et la réalité de la société française contemporaine : à titre d’exemple, un extrait vidéo filmé en cachette montrant le tabassage d’un jeune par la police, suivi d’une déclaration d’amour aux forces de l’ordre, sur une mélodie pop des années 1970 (« Moi j'aime un galonné / Des Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité / Et quand je suis entre ses bras rien ne peut m'arriver / Il est doux comme un agneau… »).

Le spectacle, qui prend néanmoins des longueurs pas tout à fait justifiées, fonctionne à la fois comme une machine à remonter le temps de l’Empire colonial, de l’Algérie en Indochine en passant par les Antilles, tout comme il entame une mûre réflexion sur les préjugés, les peurs et les stéréotypes qui définissent encore l’espace et l’identité octroyés par la France à ses citoyens black et beur. Or, pour Rouabhi, qui dit ne s’être jamais intéressé à l’histoire de France enseignée à l’école et qui aurait reçu l’inspiration d’écrire la pièce à l’époque où il habitait le dernier foyer Sonacotra en Ile de France, c’est marqué du sceaux indélébile du mépris – celui qui peut « laisser sans voix » l’objet de son dédain - que la pièce hurle son désarroi et sa colère. D’où l’importance de ce spectacle qui essaie, par une multitude de voix et de voies, de détruire le silence qui pèse encore sur l’époque coloniale et l’immigration en France, parce que « le mépris pour notre histoire, sera toujours un mépris pour nous-mêmes ».

Le projet de Rouabhi dépasse largement une simple esthétique théâtrale pour provoquer un sursaut collectif. Selon l’auteur, dans cette pièce (sa quinzième à ce jour), « il n’est plus question de reconnaissance. Il s’agit de faire appliquer les lois et d’en exiger d’autres. Il s’agit de mettre côte à côte tous les Français et de constater, malgré les apparences, que la seule chose qu’ils ont en commun aujourd’hui, c’est d’être français et qu’être français, ce n’est plus appartenir à une quelconque idée de la France, mais à une réalité : l’héritage de 150 années de colonialisme et d’émigration. »

« Vive la France ! » alors ; sur une entraînante musique rap chantée par quatre « jeunes des banlieues » transformés en loyaux soldats de la Mère-Patrie, la pièce de Rouabhi prend tout son sens : Vive la France à nous tous, celle qui revendique une devise célèbre qu’elle pourrait appliquer à tous ses enfants, irrespectueusement de la couleur de leur peau, si seulement elle se trouvait le fibre moral de le faire.

Jusqu’au 1er mars 2008 , du mardi au samedi à 20h, dimanche à 16h, Théâtre Gérard Philippe, 59 Boulevard Jules Guesde, Saint-Denis (93), Mº Saint-Denis Basilique/RER D Saint-Denis, 10€-20€, info/réservations :  01 48 13 70 00.

Photo credit: Bellamy

See www.parisvoice.com for this review in English

The world as we know it?

2008-02-11T06:38:00.000-08:00

“In the world” is the at first elliptical, then devastating title of the newest play in Joël Pommerat’s trilogy now on in Gennevilliers : if it is possible to approach the piece wondering what place the playwright has in mind (the world of…?), it becomes disturbingly evident before long that it is the world we live in, as the privileged inhabitants of a wealthy and stable European country. A world run by a mysteriously busy, nearly invisible management, in dark suits and high heels, whose men captain business and industry as calmly as they brush their teeth, and whose women offer themselves as entertainment on TV every night with the same unfailingly cheerful songs. The world of the ruling class, and as such “Au monde” makes an illuminating counterpoint to the aspirations and concerns of the working class explored in another play of the trilogy, “Les Marchands” (see review on www.parisvoice.com). But what is wrong with this place?

As always in Pommerat’s theater, the signs are clearly posted, indicating a massive social breakdown, but no solutions : emotional sterility, merciless market forces, families who amount to nothing greater than a group of people living under the same roof, children who serve as interior ornamentation for preoccupied parents… As in other works also, the almost brutal force of the message holds a mesmerizing power by the nature of its smooth delivery, in a monochromatic palette punctuated by stark bands of light, and with the familiar audio cues of TV, radio and advertising. Rather than forcing us to avert our gaze, Pommerat commands our attention.

Against just such a desolate, muted and apparently “normal” landscape for its inhabitants, (here, some kind of vast family-owned and operated international conglomerate responsible, we are told, for the fortunes of countless people around the world), the play engages a debate on the nature of happiness, in the tension between two characters. If both can agree (oddly, under the circumstances, and in contrast to the work ethic of the working class of “Les Marchands”) that this begins with freedom from employment, they disagree on how this social revolution may come about. For the one, pure human energy will render work unnecessary by creating everything man needs to live through a process of combustion. For the other, a hysteria of production and consumer purchasing will inevitably lead to a point where no more goods need to be produced, and all may retire. Their fantastical musings coalesce around the homecoming of the one character who has a handle on reality, a brother who resigns a promising career in the military to quietly perform some as yet unknown, “profound” act. But Pommerat’s social vision is pitiless, and the brother is swallowed up by the same lurking malaise, a kind of implacable, malign force that manifests itself in the presence of a roaming serial killer and the unnervingly amplified footsteps and haunting dreams of his fellow family members. The play ends with the inevitable news that, after having mysteriously lost his sight, he has succumbed to the wishes of his father to take over the family business. And so the blind are led by the blind...

With this trilogy, which also includes “D’une seule main”, Pommerat signs a blisteringly bleak social critique, masterfully interpreted by the Compagnie Louis Brouillard. The fact that Pommerat is one of the few important French directors to also regularly apply his skills to children’s theater (“Le Petit chaperon rouge”, currently touring in the Paris area, and the new “Pinnochio” at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in March), speaks for his pedagogical intentions. His lessons are not easily assimilated but deserve our attention, for the strength of their convictions and the art and passion with which these are conveyed.

“La trilogie de Joël Pommerat”, to Feb. 17, see website for exact dates and times: www.theatre2gennevilliers.com, 41 avenue des Grésillons, Gennevilliers (92), Mº Gennevilliers-Gabriel Péri, 8€-22€, tel: 01.41.32.26.10.

Photo Credit: Elisabeth Carecchio

Footsbarn, or the Problem of Itinerancy

2008-01-28T06:37:00.001-08:00

For the ancient Greeks, drama was synonymous with the vast ampitheaters in which their tragedies and comedies were played out, and to which Western theater remains faithful, from stage and proscenium to orchestra and seating. Since at least the Middle Ages in Europe, however, companies themselves have long been lured by the open road, to go in search of audiences and to entertain them with their stories. This tension between theater’s nomadic and sedentary forms continues today, according to a debate organized this past weekend by the magazine “Cassandre/Horschamp” devoted to the state of contemporary traveling theater, on the occasion of the presence of the Footsbarn Theater at the Cartoucherie (Bois de Vincennes).

Footsbarn is a long-standing practitioner of the genre, with 37 years of travels and encounters and over 50 shows to its credit. Founded in Cornwall, England, the company works since 1990 out of a semi-permanent base in the Auvergne region of France. Alternating periods of on-site work with touring, the company is perhaps not so different from others, except that Footsbarn travels by caravan, performs under its own tent, and by nature of its traveling ethic, is consequently subject to the dangers and laws of life on the road.

According to the panel assembled for the debate, which included Fabien Granier of Footsbarn and Alexandre Romanès of the Cirque Romanès, traveling theater is an endangered species in Europe and particularly in France, where the accumulation of often contradictory legislation, coupled with considerable fear of “gypsies” and their mobile homes generally, conspire against companies who aspire to live and perform wherever the road leads them. Whereas Granier noted the “pressure” the company is constantly under to “come inside” established theaters, Romanès lamented the dilemma companies face to either compromise with the constraints of the existing system or be considered artistic outlaws, in a very real legislative sense. As the writer/researcher Alix de Morant emphasized, traveling theater is first and foremost an “art of transgression” beginning with the very borders of individual identities, for the itinerant performer who goes in search of the “other” every day, even when those others may be afraid to welcome him into their presence. Added to these potential sources of insecurity are the real costs of operating a traveling company in 2008, from the soaring price of petrol to the ensuing environmental damage in the caravan’s passage. As Sabine Clément, Director of the Centre International du Théâtre Itinérant, confirmed, “Companies set out with far less ease today than ever.”

On the eve of a tour though Britain and Ireland that will occupy the company for most of 2008, Footsbarn has dropped stakes at the Cartoucherie. Although, according to Granier, the company has been invited by the municipality of Vincennes to keep a low profile in its day to day living, one of the most exciting aspects of the company’s presence in the Bois is the opportunity to see up close this vanishing way of life. With their caravan cars neatly lined up, bikes parked outside some, laundry hanging around many, and children playing about, the company is a family and a village to itself, while the brightly painted trucks and tent are a sure invitation to dream of faraway lands. Footsbarn returns here with its most popular show, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, tailor-made, it seems, to the company’s colorful, visual, burlesque style of theater, developed through all those years on the road, drawing on a multitude of cultural expressions and integrating dance, circus and mask work. Footsbarn’s current director Paddy Hayter stars as an exaggeratedly buck-toothed Bottom and a silken haired Lysander, both played with great comic aplomb.
To judge from the company’s energy and enthusiasm (and with a median age well above 40, the troupe is no longer particularly young), Footsbarn has a long life ahead of it. If laws are made to be broken, Footsbarn is set to break a few more before it goes unquietly into retirement.
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (in English), to Feb. 3, Wed-Sat, 8:45 pm, Sun, 5 pm, Cartoucherie de Vincennes, Route de la Pyramide, 12e, Mº Château de Vincennes + Cartoucherie shuttlebus, 12€-25€, reservations FNAC or tel: 01.43.74.20.21.

Photo Credit: Footsbarn

Mittérand et Sankara

2008-01-24T05:57:00.000-08:00

“Françafrique”: the term denotes everything rotten about Franco-African relations in the decades following independence in France’s former colonies: the misappropriation of millions of francs in aid, the creation of a corrupt political class and the awarding of highly advantageous development contracts to French industry and engineering. That the current government under President Nicolas Sarkozy is at the least making noises to distance itself from the policies that were the bread and butter of French-African “cooperation” in the 1960s and 1970s (see the recent tribune published in Le Monde by French Secretary of State for Overseas Development, Jean-Marie Bockel), is testimony to the insidious heritage of French neocolonialism and the enduring power of its reputation even for the French public. That incredible and tortuous history, uniting figures as outwardly diverse as Georges Pompidou and Félix Houphouet-Boigny, Valérie Giscard d’Estaing and Mobutu Sese Seko, has interested writers from Mongo Beti to John Le Carré, and now becomes a piece of theater under the pen of Jacques Jouet.

In “Mittérand et Sankara” however, Jouet proposes a fictional meeting between two heads of state separated by much more than the Sahara : the French president who confided the secret dealings of France’s notorious “African cell” to his son Jean-Christophe (allegedly baptized “Papamadit” by his interlocutors) and the reform-minded leader of Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987, Thomas Sankara. What indeed could these two have to discuss on the dimly lit terrace of the presidential residence in Ouagadougou? But seek each other out, they apparently did, on several occasions: if youthful idealism must have fascinated the elder statesman, the latter’s political instincts undoubtedly commanded a certain attention in return. The qualities of each are to be measured in the two speeches with which director Jean-Louis Martinelli has framed Jouet’s play : Sankara’s address to the U.N. on December 4, 1984, and Mittérand’s opening remarks at the 16th Summit of French and African Heads of State in 1990. On the one hand : Sankara’s verve and convictions, arguing passionately for the defense by the international community of the rights of the wretched of the earth, even going so far as to demand a reorganization of the U.N. itself to give greater voice to the paternalistically termed “Third World”. On the other : Mittérand’s bold bet (yet to be won) that democracy would and could, with unusually strict French encouragement and means, sweep across Africa as it had done in Eastern Europe.

Imagined by Jouet, a member of the Oulipo group of writers united by a predilection for word play and linguistic jousting via pre-determined and self-imposed compositional constraints, the coming together of these two individuals, however true, is a celebration of verbal oneupsmanship. In “Mittérand et Sankara”, Jouet develops his concept of “simple theater” which prefers the verbal aspects of the art over the visual, translated here into a contest of who, literally, has the strongest tongue : each character, including one representing “Simple Theater” in the flesh, must successfully spit a roasted grain of corn into a gourd at his feet in order to be allowed to speak. The device, while not preventing the characters from delivering the entirety of their respective speeches, nevertheless creates an imbalance of power. On the night I saw the show, “Simple Theater” won hands down, leaving “Sankara” and “Mittérand” (played convincingly by Moussa Sanou and Pierre Hiessler, respectively) to briefly duel it out. The “gallic chicken” (Sankara’s expression) allowed himself a certain number of exceptions to the rule of order (Jouet’s characters are close representations of their real-life counterparts) in order to best his junior, but Sankara, as the loser, had the last word.

As one of postcolonial Africa’s few leaders to place people and country over personal ambition and desire, Sankara was not long for this world. After defending the rights of women, battling corruption and illness and tackling environmental issues like the encroachment of the Sahara Desert, Sankara was no match for a certain “Françafrique” that had him gunned down and replaced by Blaise Campaoré, who remains in the director’s seat of Burkina Faso some 20 years later, with the faithful support of France. If the clash of social ideals and political status quo are the subject of “Mittérand et Sankara”, Martinelli’s idea to end the evening with the famous La Baule speech lends the impression that the French president’s vision for a democratic Africa found its impetus in Sankara’s vision for a socially responsible Burkina Faso that could in turn change the world. Between Jouet’s play and Martinelli’s interpretation, yet two more commentaries on the period face off.

To February 17, Tues-Sat, 9 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 7 avenue Pablo Picasso, Nanterre (92), RER A Nanterre-Préfecture + shuttlebus, 12€-24€, tel: 01.46.14.70.00.

Photo Credit: Agathe Poupeney

Empire Seen by the Other : “Une étoile pour Noël, ou l’ignominie de la bonté”

2007-12-03T01:05:00.001-08:00

In the vast literature of France’s former colonies, three characters are evoked repeatedly as persuasive figures of French influence and culture: the schoolteacher, the priest and a kind of benevolent French everyman. All three reappear in an autobiographical theater piece looking at immigrants’ integration in France : proof if necessary of the road French society still needs to travel to accept its citizens born of French colonial empire and its consequences.
Nasser Djemaï is a French actor born of Algerian parents. “Une étoile pour Noël” is a one-man show inspired by Djemaï’s own experiences growing up “other” in a largely homogenous society sharing an immutable collection of cultural references, from camembert to Catholicism to Corneille. The story he relates, with humor, irony and admirable energy, follows the education of Nabil, from primary school through to his baccalauréat, and the cast of characters who shaped him, the least of whom, apparently, is his hard-working though illiterate, father. Instead, Nabil looks to his teachers, who reduce him to the value of the grades he receives; a priest/scout leader offering a rousing republican religion of the masses touting teamwork over spirituality; and an upper-class grandmother, who takes quite literally upon her shoulders the “civilizing mission” of the French colonial power and who will convince him to dye his hair blonde, take the name of Noël and renounce his family.
The story of Djemaï/Nabil is not, however, one of happily-ever-afters: if Noël thinks he sees his name written in the stars, comfortably ensconced in his new life of Sunday afternoon’s at the Comédie Française and dinners with a good St-Emilion, his fall is all the more brutal, as the subtitle of Djemaï’s piece indicates. Teacher, priest and granny all conspire unconsciously to teach Nabil the lesson of charity’s great ignominy : that all the good intentions in the world, and no more so than those espoused by the French Republic, which attempts to erase differences, while failing to overcome latent racism and an ingrained cultural superiority, cannot make a bad situation better if those who are the object of such intentions are not involved consciously and actively in those changes and the decisions behind them. Nabil learns a lesson he won’t soon forget : as long as he is “Algerian” in others’ eyes, he can never by “French” even in his own.
Djemaï takes the path of least resistance to get his message across, using humor to render ridiculous the paradoxical narrow-mindedness of a society which aspires to all things fraternal and egalitarian. The recipe works, to judge from audience laughter and press reviews, emphasizing the comedy of Djemaï’s writing and acting (ably capturing the vocal resonances and discourses, in particular, of the various social “types” represented) rather than engaging his underlying, very critical message.
As a theater student in Birmingham and London, Djemaï would have experienced, and perhaps come to gain insight into the multicultural social fabric of Great Britain, where minorities are a visible and natural presence. In that light as well, "Une étoile pour Noël" presents an interesting reflection on the republican social model as instituted and practiced in France.
To Jan. 19, Tues-Sat, 9:30 pm, Sun, 3 pm, Lucérnaire, Centre national d’art et d’essai, 53 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, 6e, Mº Notre-Dame-des-Champs, 10€-30€, tel: 01.45.44.57.34.

The Mystifications of Wayn Traub

2007-11-09T03:21:00.001-08:00

“N.Q.Z.C.” is the title of a piece of experimental theater now running at the Théâtre de la Ville, and, according to its creator, the Belgian artist known as Wayn Traub, also an abbreviation for the Inquisition. As the strange title of an equally unusual show, “N.Q.Z.C.” reveals little about what is performed on stage – a multilayered story about love, self-sacrifice and the inability of those human aspirations to overcome the survival instinct in us all - but offers new perspectives on the themes explored recently in this column.

At 35 years old, Wayn Traub is the author of a large and eclectic oeuvre that has succeeded not only in helping the former Geert Bové exorcise more than a person’s fair share of family demons, ranging from pedophilia to incest to schizophrenia, but in making known this self-described narcissist to the Belgian public, with shows proclaiming his existence to all willing to see, hear and even taste the fruits of his indisputably fertile imagination: from the nine-month long SMAK Campaign where Traub illegally exposed, for one hour a day, a personally devised coat of arms at Gent’s Museum of Contemporary Art, to the seven-part “Mises en Traub” series where the author used his personal life as immediate performance material (confronting former friends and lovers on stage, for example), and the “Wayn Cakes” performance-as-comestible project of surprise-inside gâteaux sold in local bakeries.

With a Jesuit boarding school education, training in classical dance, cinema and painting and a manifesto cum university thesis on “Animal Theater”, Traub comes well prepared to follow a personal and artistic quest for quasi spiritual redemption and metaphysical transformation. He does so through an intensive borrowing of popularized medieval and Christian iconography blended with artifacts of natural history and choreography no less evocative of 1950s dance halls than 21st century discos. This “priest of the arts” as he has been dubbed with Belgian humor seems to play his role with great seriousness. The proof is in his more developed works of theater, of which “N.Q.Z.C.” is yet a preliminary study.

Currently an Associate Artist at Antwerp’s Het Toneelhuis, Traub first broke through in the highly creative world of Flemish theater with “Maria-Dolores” (2002), where he defined a style of “opera-cinema”, interweaving genres (film and medieval mystery play), narrative (three stories of four interrelated women) and time periods in a baroque tale of universal resonance in its themes of conception, death and regeneration. The play was the first in a series, followed by “Jean-Baptiste” (2004) and “The Comeback of Jean-Baptiste” (2006), where the Biblical prophet is reborn as an internationally famous crooner. “N.Q.Z.C.” is the follow-up to these symbolically and culturally loaded pieces that are nevertheless first and foremost personal “rituals” for Bové/Traub, placing him at the center of these explorations of self-revelation through the forms of theater and the codes of performance.

Developed through a year-long experimental workshop termed “Arkiology”, “N.Q.Z.C.” is apparently the prototype for the final piece of what Traub terms the “Maria-Magdelena” trilogy, which continues, ostensibly, to find contemporary and personal applications for Biblical iconography. Judging from “N.Q.Z.C.”, it is to be wondered what that final piece will look like, as it marks a break from the “opera-cinema” style which brought Traub his success and which helped lift his personal journey out of hermetic symbolism and into a lived world of collective experience. Here, the multiple layers of narrative and time, uniting an age-old tale of lovers separated by death and a modern story of an astronaut frustrated in life and love, never break out of their labyrinthine confines to touch or excite, despite an original use of hand lights for illumination and the lighter moments of Ludmilla Klejniak’s “dance-therapy”. Termed a “futuristic ritual”, by sole dint, apparently, of its references to space exploration, “N.Q.Z.C.” fails to bring us into Traub’s personal quest or dynamize our own quests as human beings, as ritual theater is meant to do. If there is a certain mystification surrounding Traub’s work, it is well deserved here : more hoax than mystery.

Photo: Simonne Moesen in "N.Q.Z.C.". Credit: Koen Broos

Should We Be Afraid of Fall Theater?: 2

2007-10-26T03:26:00.000-07:00

Lebanese performers Lina Saneh and Rabih Mroué present this week their final work in a three-show visit to the 2007 Festival d’Automne program. “Appendice” is a fitting last word on their explorations in theater and body politics as it elucidates several issues raised in earlier pieces presented and helps answer the question I posed at the beginning of this series of articles, “Should We Be Afraid of Theater?”

After “Qui a peur de la representation?” and “How Nancy Wished Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke”, both examining, against the backdrop of contemporary Lebanese history, the body as a powerful political, social and esthetic entity, “Appendice” develops those same themes in a much more intimate framework : the story of Saneh’s struggle to find a way to have her corpse cremated, despite Lebanese law, which forbids it in accordance with the precepts of Islam. The idea she hits on, we are told by Mroué, who reads her written text while Saneh sits motionless behind him in profile, is to have her organs and limbs individually excised and burned, since this, at least, is allowed. At first, the careful enumerating of each progressively more vital organ she will have removed, beginning with her appendix, and the inconveniences she will have to accept in the absence of, for example, a stomach, reads as a grotesque joke. Between the tongue-in-cheek tone of the text and proposed website to follow the project (kinkylinah.com) and Mroué’s deliberately prolonged looks at Saneh, it is not clear whether this couple united in both art and life are serious or not. Luckily for Saneh, however, medical ethics step in to thwart her plan, by forbidding life-threatening, non-essential surgery. So now what?

As a performance artist familiar with the extreme uses of the body in the name of art and practiced by performers from Marina Abramovic to Chris Burden (see October 1 entry below), Saneh finds a ready and much less painless answer: she will ask artists to sign individual parts of her body, then sell these signed pieces of “art” to collectors and galleries who, upon Saneh’s death, will recuperate their “property” and have it either mummified for display or incinerated. As radical as it sounds, Saneh’s “Body P-Arts Project” is underway, with a dozen or so artists having signed on (and signed parts ranging from Saneh’s mouth to the air in her hair) and a dedicated Internet site featuring artists’ statements and an example of the contract of sale (www.linasaneh-body-p-arts.com). It would be pedestrian of me to suggest Saneh simply will her body to science (assuming Lebanese law allows that); seen in the light of “Body P-Arts”, the issue at stake in “Appendice” is less a question of individual freedom versus civic and religious authority, than the potential social and esthetic uses of the body as a saleable commodity, in this case as an art object, with a value and protections as deemed by the art market.

As a work of theater, “Appendice” proves the least satisfying of the three projects brought by Saneh and Mroué to Paris this fall. The piece is intriguing from the sole aspect of its set and direction, placing Saneh, dressed elegantly in black and sitting on a chair of transparent plastic, on display against a luminous white backdrop: part art object up for auction and part corpse in funereal, immobile silence. On the other hand, Mroué’s imperfect delivery of Saneh’s text in French, a language of which he appears to possess only a rudimentary mastery, seriously undermines both the subject, which reveals itself to be quite serious indeed, and the duo’s characteristically irreverent treatment of their chosen themes. Mroué is consequently forced to stick to Saneh’s well-composed text, where he would otherwise ad lib (he attempts this briefly on several occasions). One imagines a text of much greater nuance and resonance delivered in Arabic.

As for the question of the potential of something represented on stage to unsettle our beliefs regarding the forms of art, the roles of the body in it (agent, object, danger, sacrifice) and the social, political and esthetic value of what it represented there, theater, by its collective and unpredictable nature, demonstrates again it is a terribly powerful vehicle for the dissemination of radical views and visions.

Photo Credit: Ghassan Halawani/Penguin Cube

Terrorism of the Image

2007-10-18T02:08:00.000-07:00

Walid Raad is a media artist born in Lebanon in 1967 and an American citizen since 2006. He was detained by the police at Rochester International Airport in 2004 and questioned concerning the contents of his luggage. As a photographer exploring representations of violence, in particular how car bombings effect the way urban populations relate to space, he had a few suspicious elements in his bags, notably photos of federal buildings, bombings and explosions, in addition to a slew of receipts, airplane tickets, airplane security cards and the calling card of an FBI investigator. He was allowed to leave after about 2 hours.

As introduction to the performance Raad created in response to his experiences and those of other Americans and Canadians wrongly profiled as potential terrorists, he offers the following reflections:

“No matter where, it seems, a camera regularly happens to be there, when something happens to happen. So much so that it has become a cliché, a veritable commonplace, to say that today things don’t happen unless a camera is there. Of course, it takes not just a camera, but an entire network of editing, transmitting, distributing, and viewing technologies -- and agents -- that extend out from the camera, to make what McLuhan so famously and confusingly called a “global village.” But it begins with the camera and its operator, with the fact of their already having been there. […] The corollary, of course, of the cameraman’s being there is that, in some sense, we are too. The camera metaphorizes the becoming-public of the event, because we who watch and listen are also caught in the double intersection of the sniper’s and the cameraman’s viewfinders -- not as potential victims exactly, but in some other sense as targets of those vectors (borrowing the word in this sense from McKenzie Wark in Virtual Geography).”(1)

If the camera makes people and events real for the purposes of public discourse, Raad’s presence on stage in “I Feel a Great Desire to Meet the Masses Once Again”, at the Centre Pompidou for two nights last week, poses a number of questions. The technogically sophisticated and visually appealing Power Point presentation Raad spent two years researching and creating and spends one hour delivering is performance in the vein of the Chinese-Australian photographer William Yang, who delivers monological accompaniment to his slide shows of Aboriginal peoples and Sydney night life, and art in the style of the late Mark Lombardi, who drew elaborate pencil charts detailing the financial and judicial imbroglios surrounding major international banks and investment houses. The Village Voice has mused that Raad’s art « is like a detective report or a communiqué from a secret agent », with all the aesthetic and emotional feel of these. His stage presence is cool, though not impersonal; his delivery is measured, but not flawless. He is a presenter of facts compiled through his own investigations, and now that his conclusions regarding the collusion of the CIA and private aviation to transport suspected terrorists around the globe are no longer revelatory (the New York Times reported on this in 2005) - indeed, to the extent that nothing he tells us outside of the details of his detention is news, whether it be the circumstances surrounding the arrest and prosecution of fellow artist Steve Kurtz or the trial of the “Lackwanna Six” - his « show » is fatally dated in a world of 24/7 news, a conclusion Raad himself has already come to, as he tells the audience early on in the evening. So what is the significance of “I Feel a Great Desire…”? Why perform it anymore, or even at all?

To answer the above questions requires moving away from the first-degree tone of scandal and conspiracy that pervades the presentation, to examine underlying issues of identity and the uses of the image. As a reflection on the latter, “I Feel a Great Desire…” offers avenues of reflection, but on a more intimate level than the ones usually touched by the now well-documented “war on terror” and its reporting by the media. The visual uses he makes of his detention by airport police (with photos of each incriminating item) lead it to exist for us in a way it never could have otherwise, his story being only too banal amidst fear and ever stricter airport regulations. At the same time, he told me informally after the show, the image he created of that same experience – the performance - became too dangerous to circulate in the United States while his naturalization application was being reviewed, which is why he has never presented “I Feel a Great Desire…” in his new country.

As such, it seems that a much more interesting story is being told here, whether Raad is aware of it or not. The presentation begins and ends with Raad leaving Lebanon by boat under Israeli bombs: the first time in 1983, the second time in 2006. The images he records on his camera at a distance of 23 years deliberately compliment each other but the persons recording them are not the same. The first voyage is undertaken by a fearful adolescent leaving the security of home and country for the unknown (life in the United States with an older brother); the second not only has the feeling of déjà vu but is also framed by Raad’s new status as a US citizen, which allowed him to leave Lebanon on US military transport to return “home” to his wife and child in New York. Immigration Service stamps on his Lebanese and American passports testify to his travels and subsequent changed identity.

Of this evolution, its reasons and consequences, Raad remains silent, favoring collective history over individual stories, and even though the samples of work he had in his luggage that infamous day at Rochester Airport are unquestionably studies of identity. Similarly, as a widely exhibited artist and full-time professor at the Cooper Union, the implications of his performance and all the choices which informed it cannot pass unnoticed to him. Yet they are never explored here nor are they given time to germinate in the mind of the spectator, who must process a vast amount of factual information to merely follow the plot of his story.

Heeding McLuhan’s warning that “the price of eternal vigilance is indifference”, Raad repeated to me after the show that he felt very strongly he no longer wished to perform “I Feel a Great Desire…” and to move towards new themes and ways of exploring them. I noticed however that he took the calling card of a representative of the European Parliament who wished to invite Raad to preach to the masses in Strasbourg. The reign of the image of the “war on terror”, how the image presents a certain representation of this, and perhaps even inures us to its vastly destructive implications, will likely continue.

(1) Thomas Keenan, “Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television)”, PMLA 117.1 (Jan 02): 104-116 (cited in French in the program to “I Feel a Great Desire to Meet the Masses Once Again”).

Photo credit: Walid Raad

If War Was Only A Joke

2007-10-12T03:00:00.000-07:00

The Lebanese Civil War lasted over 15 years, destroyed Beirut’s cultural and commercial life and drew neighboring regional powers into intense political and military conflict. The generation of Lebanese youth who grew up against the backdrop of the hostilities includes the 40 -year old director Rabih Mroué. Although he would only have been a young boy at the beginning of the war, in a caustically humorous examination of the conflict, recently presented in Paris, he and his contemporaries become “freedom fighters” of different and variable stripes, corpses enlisted incessantly into a seemingly endless battle. The show’s title, in English, “How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke”, provides a clue as to how Mroué’s generation approaches its shared and painful history and faces the specter of renewed violence since July 2006 : a kind of deliberate naïveté where one could just wish the troubles away, eyes closed and fingers crossed. The four characters who relate their involvement in the war and the circumstances of their numerous deaths never flinch however from the causes they defend, whether they join the ranks of Communist revolutionaries, Muslim brothers, the pro-Syrian Amal party or the Christian Free Patriotic Movement. Wedged uncomfortably into a single couch, moving only when their turn comes to speak, and dressed in the threads of modern Lebanese 40-somethings, the actors and their “testimonies” blend into a single story of the paradoxical unreality of a conflict that claimed thousands of lives for little if any political or social gain. The message is underscored by the brilliant iconographical work of Samar Maakaroun and Ziena Maasri, who recreate faithfully and cleverly the posters of the glorious deceased in the colors and symbolism of the parties who claim their acts of “heroism”. Judging from the knowing laughter among the Arab-speaking members of the audience, Mroué and company touch a nerve in a society yet vulnerable to a past that threatens to repeat itself, and in so doing, demonstrate for audiences less versed in the geopolitical complexities and nuances of the region how theater can serve as a vital and immediate forum for social reflection. Drawing on the idea of the virtual worlds of video games now familiar, and ever more real perhaps, to the next generation of Lebanese youth, Mroué succeeds in showing, with “How Nancy Wished…” what is at stake for he and his contemporaries : life itself. “We have the responsibility to think seriously about our history, because we cannot continue in the way we have,” he has said. “We don’t want to die again, one more time. We have had enough.”
Note: Mroué’s accomplice in “How Nancy Wished…”, Lina Saneh performs “Appendice” later this month (see previous post for more details).
“How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke”, to Oct. 21, Festival d'Automne/Théâtre de la Cité internationale, info/reservations: www.festival-automne.com or www.theatredelacite.com
Photo Credit: Rabih Mroué, "Martyr pour que vive le Liban", photo-montage by Samar Maakaroun

Should We Be Afraid of Fall Theater?

2007-10-01T14:01:00.000-07:00

Who is afraid of the representation? The question, asked by Lebanese writer/director Rabih Mroué in a performance of the same title, shown in September at the Centre Pompidou, sets the tone of the fall theater season. To answer the question, the theories of Peter Brook are typically illuminating. Writing in "The Empty Space" (1968), Brook defines “representation” as that moment when the audience “assists” the actor in performance so that “what is present for one is present for the other”. Understood in the context of Mroué’s piece, the proposition is a dangerous one. The show juxtaposes “body art” (not to be mistaken for tattooing and piercing, as the term has come to mean in our century, but understood here as the extremely violent forms of performance art practiced by artists like Bob Flanagan, Marina Abramovic and Chris Burden in the 1970s) and the story of a shooting spree in Beirut where eight office employees were killed by their fraudulent co-worker. The performance artists whose works are described matter-of-factly in the show (including Abramovic’s notorious “Rhythm 0”, where an audience was given the opportunity to use on Abramovic's body any of a variety of displayed instruments, including a pistol and a bullet, and in which the artist nearly died; or Burden’s “Through the Night Softly” in which he rolled, naked, through broken glass under the feet of passersby on a Los Angeles Street) examine audience passivity in response to violence. By textually and visually layering the explorations of artists like these with the story of gunman Hassan Mamoun and the context of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), Mroué and his partner Lina Saneh recognize the public’s understandable desire not to participate in bloody “spectacles” such as these, while also seeming to argue for precisely greater participation in such conflicts and tragedies so as to see them prevented or at least their effects mitigated. However, the show’s dramatic framework is provided by a game in which Saneh must recite the litany of Flanagan and company’s myriad acts of self-mutilation in a given space of time, usually under 1 minute, with Mroué holding the stopwatch. In so doing, they engage in a provocative glorification of the body artist’s courage in enduring extreme pain. Needless to say, any parallel with Mamoun’s desperate act of revenge or the victims’ suffering (thereby elevated to art) would be abominable. The line is razor thin here, but deliberately so. In a world where pain is the preferred fodder of mass media, where human suffering is its preferred (because profitable) spectacle, the general public is indeed asked to participate in frequently gruesome representations of life and death, if not by suffering personally, but at least by feeling with those who do, at the risk of loosing all feeling altogether. What can wake us from our torpor? Who indeed is brave enough to participate in the “representation”? Such are the questions Mroué and Saneh are asking us, in the irreverent tone by which they are making their theater known abroad.

The program of this year’s Festival d’Automne offers a variety of opportunities to pursue the line of reflection, with an emphasis on artists from the Middle East who are using theater to communicate with society in this conflict-torn region. Mroué returns to the theme of political and social violence in “How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke” (in Arabic with French subtitles, Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, Oct. 8-14). In “Appendice”, Saneh introduces her own performance art project (tongue-in-cheek?) in which she plans to have her body parts individually removed and incinerated during her lifetime, so as to circumvent the outlawing of cremation in Lebanon (in French, Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, Oct. 22-28). Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad uses a multimedia palette to paint a vast tableau of acts of state-sponsored incarceration of supposed terrorists, following his own arrest at Rochester International Airport in 2004, in “I Feel a Great Desire to Meet the Masses Once Again” (in English, Centre Pompidou, October 12-13). And young playwright and director Amir Reza Koohestani offers his “Recent Experiences” of life in his native Iran (in Persian, with French subtitles, Théâtre de la Bastille, Nov. 8-18). From Belgium, but exploring the same question about the potential “dangers” of received performance, Tim Etchells has created a show blurring reality and representation in the style of the British collective Forced Entertainment, which Etchells directs, in “That Night Follows Day”, a searing commentary on parent-child relations, with repercussions for the artist-audience dynamic (in Dutch, with French subtitles, Centre Pompidou, Nov. 1-3). In a similar vein, Stéphane Olry relates in “Treize semaines de vertu” his reflections while attempting to follow Benjamin Franklin’s 13 virtues of temperance, silence, order and the like (in French, Archives Nationales, Oct. 24-Nov. 4) . Will his conclusion be “Don’t try this at home”? Information and reservations at www.festival-automne.com

Photo credits:
Photo 1: "Qui a peur de la représentation?": Houssan Mchaiemch
Photo 2: "Appendice": Rabih Mroué/Hatem Imam
Photo 3: "I Feel a Great Desire to Meet the Masses Again": Walid Raad
Photo 4: "That Night Follows Day": Phile Depraz

Avignon Over and Out

2007-07-19T00:43:00.000-07:00

Avignon moves towards its final week with a handful of shows and artists still to discover, from festival habitués to unknown talents. After introducing Avignon to la murga, the outsider carnival of Buenos Aires, to write a new chapter in his virulent critique of consumer society, Argentine director Rodrigo Garcia proposes “Approche de l’idée de méfiance”, a pantomime of his now familiar dramatic language – a primitive dance of bodies covered in comestibles – accompanied by Garcia’s latest reflections on his chosen theme, offered as a silent text in projection. Co-founder with Avignon Associate Artist Frédéric Fisbach of the forthcoming Parisian artspace known as “104”, Robert Cantarella makes his fourth appearance here with “Hippolyte”, an alternative writing from the 16th century of the story told more famously by Racine’s “Phèdre”. And young French actor and director Gildas Milin wraps up his “Machine sans cible”, a not entirely tongue-in-cheek experiment examining the potential applications of artificial intelligence for understanding the phenomenon of love. Finally, two untested newcomers to Avignon bring up the rear of the month-long program. The Franco-Austrian collective known as Superamas concludes a trilogy of pieces incorporating video, dance and live music to irreverently explore the social confessional offered by Internet and reality shows, with “Big 3rd Episode. Happy/end”, where American voices are dubbed over the stage action. From Bulgaria via Brussels, Galin Stoev directs “Genèse nº2”, a rewriting of the Book of Genesis, “co-authored” by Ivan Viripaev, an up-and-coming playwright in his native Russia, and the fictional psychiatric patient Antonina Velikanova, who believes herself to be the wife of the Biblical figure Loth. From the conflicts of the 20th century to the origins of the world, Avignon comes full circle to finish a largely peaceful edition in 2007.

Photos: (left) “Machine sans cible”, (right) “Big 3rd Episode. Happy/end” ; Christophe Raynaud de Lage / Festival d'Avignon

Avignon/Paris/Warsaw

2007-07-19T00:32:00.000-07:00

Two shows mark midpoint at Avignon 2007, and, by nature of their contrasts, point up a significant challenge to French theater today. On the one hand, there is “Feuillets d’Hypnos”, a much anticipated, site-specific (to the Cour d’Honneur) piece built around the writings of Resistance fighter and poet René Char, by one of the most promising directors of France’s 40-something generation, Avignon Associate Artist Frédéric Fisbach. On the other, Tony Kushner’s two-part, Reagan-era “Angels in America”, revisited in 2007 via Warsaw by one of the most promising directors of Poland’s 40-something generation, Krzysztof Warlikowski. Two adaptations of historically rooted, dense works, both drawing on the means, concerns and styles of the early 21st century, but with starkly different results. Confronted with the albeit poetic, but no less urgent reflections contained in the over 200 notes written by Char in the heat of the French underground struggle against the Nazi occupier, Fisbach imposes a smooth urban esthetic and a facile play to communicate the dark realities of Char the fighter and the irrepressible hope of Char the poet to a contemporary audience who, one feels in Fisbach’s choices, is deemed unable to similarly marry art and conviction. And so, when comparing Fisbach’s “Feuillets” and Warlikowski’s “Angels”, it appears again that the emotional and ethical core of European theater today lies beyond France’s borders. For where Fisbach errs incomprehensibly in favor of the tastes of a self-satisfied consumer society, Warlikowski returns to the attack of contemporary Polish society – Catholic, conservative, even reactionary or extremist in the director’s own words – with Kushner’s sweeping X-ray of the moral, religious and economic excesses of 1980s America at the height of the then-emerging AIDS epidemic. If Warlikowski has opted for a minimalist set where light and mirrors explore the dimensions of what is played within its walls, he better avoids the pitfalls of caricature and sensationalism in discussing gay life, especially in this detailed (5 hour long) examination of it from a now 20 year old perspective. And while Fisbach plays the Resistance cool and catty, Warlikowski goes straight to the fear and taboos surrounding AIDS and homosexuality in Polish society today, in the hope of opening an honest dialogue on these and related questions of sexuality and bigotry. The difference of approach and of intention is striking, between Fisbach and Warlikowski, between a view of theater developed in Paris or defended in Warsaw, both on view at Avignon.

Photos: (left) “Angels in America”, (right) “Feuillets d’Hypnos” ; Christophe Raynaud de Lage / Festival d'Avignon

Avignon via Afrique #2

2007-07-17T07:23:00.000-07:00

Politically engaged theater proving to be a strong current of Avignon 2007, the presence of Faustin Linyekula at this edition is a natural choice. From his native Kisangani in the RDC, to Kinshasa, Nairobi, Paris and back to the northeastern reaches of the Congo River, the dancer and choreographer is driven, he says, by the desire to help the people of his hometown dream again, in a country ravaged by 5 years of a deadly civil war that has already claimed the lives of 3.5 million people. Linyekula’s background parallels the vicissitudes of African history in the 20th century: raised to respect the customs and rites of his elders while educated by Catholic missionaries, a football fanatic and a choirboy, a Zaïrois and/or a Congolese, depending on who runs the economically poorest and geologically richest country in the world, a habitué and beneficiary of the largesse of the network of French Cultural Centers in Africa, a reinventer of himself from day to day via the means at hand, from literature and theater to dance and video. These many facets of himself and his concerns are explored in the duo of pieces he presents at Avignon : a choreography for four dancers, “Dinozord”, and an exercise in pure storytelling, “Le Festival des mensonges”. In the first, a work prompted by the death from plague of the choreographer’s older brother Kabako, Linyekula and the young dancers he trained for this piece, movingly treat the challenges of African youth and the question of the future in an area of the world where uncertainty and fear are daily companions. In the second, also a tribute to Kabako, Linyekula spins stories such as generations of storytellers before him have done: at the heart of a community, with live music and refreshments part and parcel of a shared, all-night long performance. Even at its most fantastic, the African tale is always a reflection on reality, and the “lies” Linyekula fabricates tell the incredible story of the heart of “darkest” Africa. With these shows, part of the aptly named “Dialogue Series” of works developed through Linyekula’s nomadic ateliers known as Studios Kabako, the performer proves that his art is above all a state-of-mind, with the power to create, change and, most importantly, dream.
Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d'Avignon

"La jeune fille à la bombe"

2007-07-17T07:15:00.000-07:00

Christophe Fiat is an intellectual à la française : this philosopher, poet and fiction writer crosses over with equal ease between academia, the arts and popular culture. His references range from Christopher Marlowe to William S. Burroughs via Nijinsky. His areas of interest include the Balkan conflict, the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, porn stars and mangas. His writing pays equal homage to Batman and Brecht. He jams on an electric guitar. His over a dozen performance pieces, attempting to lend a plastic construct to his writing, boast such didactic titles as “If Carrie White wasn’t the heroine of a Stephen King novel, she’d be a terrorist” and “Isidora Duncan is a crack-snorting dancer”. Tout un programme! And that is about all one can fairly say upon being liberated from Fiat’s most recent piece, “La jeune fille à la bombe”, though his stated objectives are reasonable enough: to alert audiences to the repression of individual freedoms in the new world of the declared war on terrorism. If the medium is the message, however, than what is to be inferred from what is offered on stage: two hours of a monotonal, collective reading of an ironic, karate-chopping, punk kidnapping story with locales in Afghanistan (a love affair with Massoud), Geneva (for a midnight DNA sample) and Fiat’s native Franche-Comté (radioactive vegetables and self-destructing cars)… with the performers’ backs turned to the audience nearly the entire time? Fiat claims the right to an imaginative life in a world, he says, that has “dynamited imagination itself,” to which menace he ripostes by his young woman with a bomb : a brave reclaiming of that freedom, according to Fiat, for whom King’s Carrie is the courageous heroine of anti-establishment liberties in our pop culture world.

Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d'Avignon

Avignon In The Streets

2007-07-13T05:20:00.001-07:00

Getting the public away from the "In" and into the "Off" theaters is part of the game for companies in the alternative program, brandishing posters and tracts and offering street performances to advertise the 860 shows present at this year's edition.
Photos: paris-theater

Sentimental Bourreau/"Tendre Jeudi"

2007-07-13T05:09:00.001-07:00

The collective known as “Sentimental Bourreau” is at the origin of a delightful production for the stage of “Sweet Thursday”, the short novel by John Steinbeck about a community of down-and-outs on Cannery Row in Monterey, California. Unlike many representations of American culture for the French stage, which fall into cliché out of ignorance of the realities of American society, company founder and director Mathieu Bauer had the laudable idea to travel to Monterey in search of Steinbeck’s California. If he discovered to his surprise that the shanty-towns of Monterey in the 1950s have been replaced by the million-dollar homes of the stars of Hollywood in 2007, Bauer went in search of Steinbeck’s marginals, which he found in a dilapidated neighborhood on the water’s edge in Oakland, filmed them and incorporated them into this multimedia production that is equal parts a testament to Steinbeck’s philosophy of life and a bold example of the best of the potential uses of video and live music on stage. At the center of the close-knit community formed by the bums Mack and Hazel, the prostitutes of Fauna’s whorehouse and the Latino (formerly Asian) grocery of Maria and Joseph, is the story of the marine biologist Doc and Suzy, the “stranger” to these parts. Both need someone, and both find each other, thanks to the well-meaning plotting of their fellow partners in misery. Bauer’s film is the moving backdrop to their tale, drawing in the trains, diners, ocean life and shacks familiar to Steinbeck’s community. A self-described cinephile greatly influenced by American film, Bauer frames the piece with segments from films by Preston Sturgis and Alfred Hitchcock, in particular the kiss between James Cagney and Kim Novak in “Vertigo”. Motivated by a desire, he said in a press conference, to “re-enchant the world”, he offers through his faithful adaptation of Steinbeck’s text a proposal dear to him: “to demand the right to work less in order to think more.” With “Tendre Jeudi”, the group’s first truly representational piece of theater, Sentimental Bourreau crowns 17 years of interdisciplinary collaboration, where music and video are integrated creative sources of performance and here prove themselves to be eloquent voices of expression for Steinbeck’s universal tale of the dignity of a human life and the importance of community to give that life its fullest dimension.

Photos: Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d'Avignon

Avignon via Afrique

2007-07-13T04:28:00.000-07:00

Africa finds a place in the 61st Avignon Festival, incarnated by two performers: Dieudonné Niangouna of the Congo Republic, author and performer of “Attitude Clando”, and Faustin Linyekula, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who brings two shows, “Le Festival des Mensonges” and “Dinozord”. Their presence here is remarkable, opening what is traditionally a European-centered program to the daily realities and challenges to creation in contemporary Africa and giving the diverse public to Avignon an opportunity it might not otherwise have or choose to see African theater. If their first experience of African performance is “Attitude Clando”, however, they may be falsely impressed by an apparent poverty of means - a stark set of a smoldering bed of coals under a weakly lit spotlight - when what this tightly-written monologue surprisingly exposes is the author’s affective distance from the struggle of illegal immigrants in Europe. More social marginal than clandestine worker, the individual who growls to an unseen doctor the story of his angry resistance to the life of the man whose papers are in order and can freely circulate in society - “l’homme réglo” – rejects society itself, or in Niangouna’s own words, “refuses the qualities attributed to a human being and the very reason for being or for resisting the forms of social governance”. The “Clandestine Attitude” he espouses is, he has written, “not to be legal but to be free as the wind”. A nihilistic individualism is what motivates the shadowy figure between two points of light, and not a desire to make a better life for himself or his family, motivations more commonly associated with clandestine movement across borders. The piece consequently reads more as a statement on African realities – a cry for freedom from all forms of oppression – than on the ability of North and South to meet each other honestly. An exhibit at the Ecole d’Art of photos taken of Niangouna in Brazzaville evokes a similarly solitary and marginal existence.

Photo: "Attitude Clando", by Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d'Avignon

"L'Acte inconnu"

2007-07-12T03:38:00.000-07:00

"To see the world in front of us transformed through the hormone of language" : such is the desire of Swiss playwright and director Valère Novarina. With "L'Acte inconnu", a witty and fast-paced series of reflections on his eternal amazement by the simple act of speech, Novarina offers an invigorating celebration of the creative act, in art and life. After being booed at Avignon in 1986 with "Le Drame de la Vie", Valère Novarina conquers the public in 2007 with this Rabelaisian feast of words.

Photos: Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d'Avignon

"Les Paravents"/Youkiza Marionnette Theater

2007-07-12T03:30:00.001-07:00

The stars of Frédéric Fisbach's "Les Paravents" ("The Screens") are the finely manipulated string puppets of the Youkiza Marionnette Theater, one of the few companies in Japan to practice string "bunraku" (marionnettes), and that for the last 360-years. Incarnating the myriad characters of Genet's labyrinthine work, and principally the French colons in Algeria, the marionnettes underscore Genet's biting humor and critique of these "puppets" of French colonial power in North Africa.

Photos: Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d'Avignon

Avignon On

2007-07-12T02:43:00.001-07:00

The 61st Avignon Theater Festival has clearly recovered from the professional strikes, audience dismay and artistic bickering that have plagued it in recent years. With 75% of seats sold by the first week of the month-long event, the public is back in force, lured by the program of Invited Artistic Director Fédéric Fisbach, which marks a return to the vision of Festival founding father Jean Vilar, to make theater accessible to all. Far from elitist, the program features a number of artists unknown to the public – Gildas Milin, Faustin Linyekula, Eléonore Weber – alongside longstanding Festival guests Valère Novarina, Romeo Castellucci and Rodrigo Garcia and established French directors Ariane Mnouchkine, Julie Brochen and Jean-Pierre Vincent. Fisbach sets the example with the choice of shows he brings : “Les Paravents”, Jean Genet’s reputedly un-playable and initially scandalous play about the Algerian War, created in 2002 with the Youkiza Marionnette Theater of Japan, and “Feuillets d’Hypnose”, created from extracts of the journal kept by French poet René Char about his activities with the French Résistance. Political engagement marries art in these shows meant to touch a wide audience either through puppetry, bringing to life the 96 characters of “Les Paravents”, or a 24/7 sit-in in the Cour d’Honneur, bringing the convictions of Char and Vilar home again to a festival that was roundly criticized in 2005, under the direction of Flemish choreographer Jan Fabre, as an incomprehensible exercise in artistic self-gratification. Avignon in 2007 seems to have put those troubles behind it by putting the text and the public at the fore.

Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d'Avignon

Countdown to Avignon

2007-06-30T14:16:00.000-07:00

Avignon lives and breathes theater in July, when the 61st Festival d’Avignon takes over the city’s streets and stages. After Jan Fabre and Josef Nadj, whose programs made dance an equal partner in the annual festivities, this edition’s Guest Artist is French director Frédéric Fisbach, who puts the focus squarely back on the written text : René Char, Paul Claudel, Jean Genet, Tony Kusher, Valère Novarina… Follow what’s happening with news and photos, coming soon.

Photo: Le décor de "Pluie d'été à Hirohima", collaboration artistique M/M Paris, 2006
Fred Nauczyciel/see-you-tomorrow pour le Festival d'Avignon