Posts

Posted on

The Avignon 2024 write-up

I wanted to take some time to let my thoughts marinate a bit before this write-up (which, really, is going to be more quick thoughts than full on commentaries since I saw…a lot this year). Generally, I feel like I “did” Avignon better this year, both in terms of scheduling + accommodation (the difference between actually staying in Avignon vs across the river is palpable) as well as in just how much theatre I was able to see. Other than the first evening I was there, I saw 3 shows/day, for a final tally of 10, though I honestly could have squeezed in one or two more in there (goal for next year).

In terms of overall assessment, what I saw fell more in the “fine” to “rather good” end of the spectrum. No outright disasters (thankfully – though, I will be the first to admit I do like to see a big swing and a miss sometimes), but with the exception of two propositions (technically 3 since one of the two is part of a diptych), nothing really blew me away, aesthetically speaking.

With that, let’s get to it.

Hécube, pas Hécube, dir. Tiago Rodrigues

Full disclosure (though it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who knows me), Tiago Rodrigues is one of my favorite playwrights / directors working now. That being said, this piece – an adaptation of Euripides’ Hecuba, and Rodrigues’ first collaboration with the Comédie Française – is not one of my favorites of his. Similar to The Way She Dies (based onAnna Karenina, in collaboration with TG-Stan), here Rodrigues takes Euripides’ text as a base from which to craft not a true adaptation but rather a transversal reading that extrapolates the themes of the piece into an extra-theatrical context. In this case (and because Rodrigues loves a “layered” text), the piece opens on a troupe wrapping up a table read for an upcoming production of Hecuba. However, as several members of the troupe make it clear via direct addresses to the audience (much like a classical chorus…) the rehearsals, and consequently the production as a whole, are teetering on the edge of derailing due to some personal issues involving the lead actress who is about to file a lawsuit against the care facility her autistic son lives in, accusing them of abuse and neglect. 

I think one of my main gripes with this piece is that unlike The Way She Dies, there was not much subtlety here in terms of what Rodrigues is trying to do. Though overall the performances were very good, and there were some moments of intimacy (a sequence in which all the actors put on helmets to bop around to Otis Redding’s “Try A Little Tenderness” was quite beautiful, particularly as the music started getting more distorted, and the distortions also “infected” the actors’ movements) that balanced out the larger ensemble tableaus, the kind of “classical piece – contemporary resonance” commentary Rodrigues was trying to develop was, unfortunately, very obvious. Yes, there is somewhat of an evolution of Euripides’s text “bleeding” into the lead actress’s real life, but this evolution loses potential potency when it is made blatantly clear from the beginning that each character in Euripides’s original text has its contemporary equivalent. In contrast, while The Way She Dies does interact with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (indeed, the physical book plays a pivotal role in the piece), it considers not just the potential of the text beyond theatrical adaptability, but also the very question of interaction with a text, of the personal relationship of engagement/interpretation that is intimately developed between it and its various readers. And here I also missed some of that subtle flirtation with the various boundaries of the “real” that Rodrigues also played with not just in The Way She Dies, but also in Bovary, Sopro, and (probably my absolute favorite of his works) Catarina et la beauté de tuer les fascists.

Bref, I don’t like being hand-held and ‘so obvious if you miss it you’re blind’ signposting. 

Anyway, this last bit maybe sounds like I hated it, but I really didn’t. It was fine. Not my favorite, but fine.

Though I will make one last gripe.

This piece was staged at the Carrière Boulbon (basically a former quarry), but rather than take full advantage of the available space, the staging remained largely concentrated down / center stage. In contrast, the sound and lighting design were much ‘bigger’, or at the very least seemed (in terms of volume and mixing for the former and contrast for the latter) to be more conscientious of the scope of the venue. The piece is coming to Epidaurus at the end of this month (though I won’t be seeing it), and I am really curious to find out how a piece whose staging suggests a more fixed indoor space does in one of the largest venues I at least have ever attended a performance at.

Les Feluettes de Michel Marc Bouchard

This was the first of the four “Off” shows I saw this year (aka a 400% increase from last year’s total of zero. Progress), and while I do have a preference for original work, this adaptation of Bouchard’s 1987 play seemed intriguing enough, so I figured, why not.

And maybe this is just my own research/academic background + biases talking here, but when I see a piece that 1: takes place in a prison; 2: centers on homosexuality; 3: engages directly with notions of theatricality, the first thing that comes to mind is Genet (the fact that this piece also directly involves a priest / the homoerotic nature of Catholic iconography just adds to the connection). And when I think of Genet, I think of a highly stylized, precise, ritualized, eroticized, in short kind of a bitch to pull off but when it works it works, theatre. It’s a kind of theatre that really leans into the ritual element of the form as well as its potential to blur established lines of social demarcations, particularly when it comes to distribution of power, and this is also what makes it so intriguing to watch – again, when it works.

Again, as with Hécube, this piece was overall fine, but in general, I feel as though it may have been played a bit too loose, that is, lacking the poetry and precision of the theatrical gesture that would have given it that…edge…it needed. And it’s a shame too because a piece whose central conceit involves the use of theatre as a means through which to extract a confession of a past wrong (aka, the Hamlet method) needs that level of precision that pushes against realism to move towards an overwhelming artifice and thus unleash a cathartic response that itself reveals a certain “truth”. What I saw here was a tad too safe in terms of performance choices, but as with Hécube, there were a couple actors (namely the actor playing the prisoner who played the victim’s mother who seemed to be one of the few to understand what kind of piece they were in) who kept the energy up enough to keep things moving well. 

Los días afuera, dir. Lola Arias

This year, Spanish was the invited language at the festival, and this was the first of the three Spanish-language shows I saw this year as part of the “On”. While overall the show was nothing groundbreaking in terms of general staging, the overall political potential – particularly when it comes to the cast and the manner in which their stories are presented here – shot this show close to the top of my list of favorites.

The piece is a cross between a documentary theatre and music hall revue, with the cast being made up of former incarcerated individuals in one of Argentina’s women’s prisons (I say individuals in part because one of the performers is FtM trans, though they do specify their reasoning for not insisting on being incarcerated with those who share their gender identity). However, while the piece does acknowledge the realities of the prison system and – more globally – the challenges that come once one has to “re-integrate” back into society, it does not dwell on this longer than it needs to (in any case, as these are the dominant narratives when it comes to prison literature and art, to focus just on them would arguably have been a bit redundant and reductive). Instead, the piece allows each of the individuals to speak more of their lives outside, what they’re doing now, what they want to do in the future, their passions, etc. In short, it’s a piece that works to give back full subjectivity to its performers, and I think for the most part it works because Arias doesn’t use actors to tell these stories.

And I don’t think it should go unsaid that this group was able to get visas for everyone to leave the country to tour with this show because, if nothing else, it brings attention not just to the level of privilege required to simply get on a stage but also the number of stories and perspectives that are still shut out because of restrictions on movement and spatial access. 

Anyway, the show is coming to Paris for the Festival d’Automne. I might end up seeing it again.

Qui som ? dir Camille Decourtye and Blaï Mateu Trias

You know that feeling when something is so engrossing visually/aesthetically and then just…throws that away in the third act? 

This was that.

This was less a pure text-based theatre piece and more a mix of theatre, dance, circus and performance art, and up until the “surprise” at the end, I was living for it. The basic conceit of the piece is an examination of notions of community – moments of confluence but also of dissonance and the consistent, fluid navigation between the two – particularly in relation to questions of ecology. This latter element also extended to the stage design, the central set piece being a large curtain made of what looked to be strips of black trash bags. Towards the end of the piece this curtain, which was previously draped over…something…evoking some kind of craggy rock formation, was fully raised and began oscillating first gently, then more violently evoking a tidal wave. And while it was oscillating, some performers emerged, first climbing through the wave, then getting periodically “washed up” and “pulled back” as the wave became more violent. The sequence concluded with the wave almost vomiting a glut of used plastic bottles, the latter invading the stage to the point where the performers could not simply move but rather had to trudge across the stage afterwards. The visual commentary on the necessity for ecologically minded action, as well as the open discourse on the possibility of (re)imagining notions of community that closed the piece were striking (though, like with many eco-minded pieces, the central argument delocalized the center of responsibility from larger multinationals to the communities of everyday individuals).

And then the post-show happened.

I should note here that the piece was advertised as running 2.5 hours, so when the curtain call arrived after about 1h45, I was a tad suspicious. Had the show been cut since its premier?

No.

It turns out that the extended run time takes into account the post-show “spectacle”, during which the troupe, all of whom play instruments, comes out, and motions for the audience to follow them out in an almost carnivalesque parade. This ends in the courtyard of the venue, where the audience are greeted with a small bar and…

A gift shop.

Yeah, it was about this time that I remembered I had seen one of this group’s other performances at Bobigny a few years back, and it also ended similarly. 

And I don’t want to begrudge a troupe who – like most artistic troupes and especially in this time of more insane budget cuts by the French government (because god forbid we raise taxes on the rich…the horror) – is likely only selling the “pay what you can”, screen print to order posters (and also pottery which…fine) to make a bit of extra cash to get by, but there is something about this final nudge to consume that left a bad taste in my mouth. And it’s a shame because, had it not been for this, the show likely would have made it into my top for this summer.

Alas.

Promesse, text: Anne Rehbinder, dir: Antoine Colnot

Get ready because this is going to be a short one.

The second of the “Off” shows I saw, this one was a theatre/dance piece that centered on the question of what it means to be a woman / feminist.

It was…fine. The discourse seemed a bit predictable and safe, but fine.

Moving on.

Mothers, A Song for Wartime, dir Marta Górnicka

This was the piece I saw at the Cour d’Honneur at the Palais des Papes this year and the first on my shortlist of favorites from this summer. The show ran just one hour, but it was one of the more intense hours I can remember spending at the theatre (honestly, I think the last time I felt this tied in from the beginning of a performance was when I saw Prometheusat Epidaurus a couple years ago).

The cast, as the title of the piece suggests, is comprised entirely of women – most either mothers or grandmothers, though there were a couple of 20-somethings and one young girl among them – the majority of which are refugees from Ukraine or Belarus, along with a couple of Polish women who had opened up their homes once Russia’s invasion of Ukraine broke out. These women form a collective choir (the entire piece is sung / chanted through with one notable exception), while in the audience Górnicka spiritedly conducts them. 

And from the opener, it was as though a wall of sound was pushed out, engulfing the house, amplified by the acoustics in the space, grasping us unrelentingly and holding its grip until the end. The songs ranged from a mix of Ukrainian folk songs to pre-Christianization songs sung around/about war, but the central question at the heart of the piece concerned women, particularly the systemic use of violence against women during times of war. Periodically, while the women were singing, on the back and side walls of the Cour d’Honneur were projected various (and I’m guessing periodically updated) statistics regarding instances of rape/assault in the occupied territories, with lettering so big that, like the singing, it could not be ignored. 

The piece is unapologetically political and, given the urgency and immediacy of the situation it is addressing, arguably rightly so. And it oscillates between depictions of collective versus individual trauma quite poignantly in the process, showing how these women (among others) are, unfortunately, connected, while still granting space for individual perspectives to avoid the risk of clichéd reductionism.

In what is arguably the piece’s most powerful sequence – the Mothers’ Monologues – the women all sit down on the stage and then one by one stand and tell their stories. None of these are particularly graphic in detail. Rather, it is in the unsaid that the personal tragedy / trauma is most effectively communicated. And it, like the precision in the choreography and the sheer vocal power of the collective chorus, leaves no room for mixed interpretation, even in – and arguably especially due to – its vulnerability. The voices that are often ignored or silenced in times of conflict are now the loudest in the room.

The show is also coming to Paris in the fall (at the Rond Point), but, as with Hécube, I do wonder what this change to an indoor venue do to its potential impact (really, I cannot overstate how pivotal the acoustics were here).

Les Meutes, dir. Éloïse Mercier

Another one for the “Off”, again about the state of womanhood, though this time concerning heterosexual relationships. Again, nothing too ground-breaking, but I will say that the stage design for this piece (particularly the lighting design) were quite well done. 

Other than that, the basic conceit: sometimes, women can be “wild”, lone wolfs, etc. And men, while they can start off sympathizing with this – maybe even going to far as to being a co-conspirator in their wildness – will inevitably try to “tame” these women, to the ultimate destruction of the latter.

Moving on.

Wayqeycuna and Soliloquio, dir. Tiziano Cruz

I’m grouping these two pieces (which collectively make up the second item on my aforementioned favorites shortlist) together in part because they are actually two parts of what is normally a triptych, though the third piece (which I believe is the first in the sequence) was not programmed for this year’s festival. In short, both pieces address questions of art (and the market surrounding art), representation, (de)colonization, and reparations/social justice. Cruz, an indigenous artist from Northern Argentina, was originally trained in classical, Aristotelian theatre technique, yet, following the death of his sister (largely due to systemic state negligence of indigenous populations), he began to question both his estrangement from his roots, as well as the dominance of Western forms of artistic expression at the expense (and commodification) of those it deems “Other” or “Alternative”. 

Ultimately, while I am not entirely sure Cruz makes a full break from Aristotelian codes in either of the two pieces (though he himself also acknowledges the difficulty in this endeavor), I did find his unapologetic stance and criticism against the ways art is produced and consumed now to be very refreshing – particularly in the degree in which his approach does not spare those of us in the house and more or less implores a certain introspection regarding our own manners of consuming art. 

While Wayqecuna – a purely solo piece, the last in the series, but the first of the two I saw – was a more reconciliatory piece, exploring final stages of personal grief relative to a reconnection with identity and, finally, a possibility towards moving to new ways of thinking about art and one’s relationship with it, Sololiquio was more openly militant. The piece opened with a 45-minute pre-show “walk” / “manif” led by Cruz along with members of several local organizations, including those representing the Latin American community in the region, as well as a group advocating for and primarily composed of local traveler / Roma communities. In the accompanying manifesto to the program (and which was read aloud in both Spanish and French), Cruz details how part of his ethos involves actively choosing to work with marginalized groups / communities, bringing their attention to the center, as well as to the systems put in place to keep them on the margins. It is in approach that, much like Arias’s Los días afuera, directly engages with the question of who gets to represent themselves on stage and on whose terms, though Cruz arguably demands more from his audiences (and rightly so, I’d argue). Further, in both pieces, there is very little hand holding done (except when absolutely necessary) when it comes to Cruz’s integration of certain signs and symbols whose meanings “we” as the Western “center” are not necessarily privy to. These moments of deliberate alienation are, I would argue, when Cruz most clearly articulates his ethos. We cannot expect, after all, to move towards a true decolonization of art if the art we produce continues to use the semiotics of the colonizer, or at least attempts to fit indigenous signs and symbols into these pre-determined “neutral” molds.

In the end though, what better way to encompass why we need more theatre that pushes against established modes of representation and discourse than the following reactions from some patrons at both shows who apparently missed the point:

  • Putting hands in prayer pose and bowing to Cruz while exiting the theatre (both shows end in about the same way, with music and with Cruz downstage bidding everyone farewell) because this has become a universal symbol for “spirituality”
  • Commenting on how this reminds you of that one holiday you took in Peru once where you met an indigenous family during your tour and my wasn’t it wonderful that you were able to experience an “authentic” culture first-hand?
  • (Upon leaving Soliloquio specifically) Confused at why the piece was so angry/pessimistic after the pre-show preamble and hoping the sequel piece will at least be a bit happier. 

Anyway, you can’t expect art – even and especially political art – to impact everyone the same way, if at all.

Dear Jason, Dear Andrew, dir. Sébastien Barrier

The last show I saw both in the “Off” program as well as for the festival.

It was supposed to only run 1h15. It ended up running closer to 1h40, and this is not including the fact that it started fifteen minutes late. 

But it was…actually quite fun. Particularly in how self-deprecating Barrier was to himself (it was a one-man show). 

In brief, this piece, which is somewhat autobiographical and (one would hope) fictional (though the Facebook messages Barrier frequently referred to looked pretty authentic) chronicles Barrier’s discovery and love of the British post-punk band Sleaford Mods, and the somewhat obsessional parasocial relationship he developed with them. In a series of Facebook messages projected onto the screen dating back to (supposedly) 2017, Barrier attempts (rather awkwardly – though also hilariously) to build a connection with the band, claiming he would like their permission to use some of their music for an artistic project he was working on (oh look…meta).

The band, of course, does not respond. 

Barrier gets increasingly desperate. 

His obsession with Sleaford Mods also begins to invade his personal life in other ways, notably in his own group’s playing of their music during various not even remotely related to punk events in his town in Brittany. And yes, he has videos of those. Which he shows. It is secondhand embarrassment at times, but also it speaks to a vulnerability, a willingness to laugh at and question oneself, to recognize one’s own limits while at the same time engaging with the question of the meaning art can bring to our understanding of ourselves. 

It really was a shame then that at one point, one of the managers of the theater had to come in and tell him to hurry up and get on with it because he was running over time (the show was supposed to end just after midnight…it was close to 1am). So, yeah, the ending was a bit rushed (pity), but overall, I am glad that this was the show I ended things on this year.So, there it is. The round up for Avignon 2024. Next year the goal is to do 4 shows/day (in roughly the same amount of time…or maybe stay one day longer). 

Posted on

Back at the Odéon after almost 60 years: Les Paravents

            To what degree can a piece of art – particularly a theatrical performance, given the degree to which it straddles the line between permanence and ephemerality – be considered independently of its own history?

            I have debated this question before, mainly with Gwenaël Morin’s 2018 production of Re-Paradise at Nanterre, then more recently with Rebecca Chaillon’s Carte noire nommée désir when it came to the Odéon last winter after its run in Avignon. In the former case, as I elaborated in my dissertation, the question arose from the fact that Morin’s staging took a moment that was spontaneous in the Living Theatre’s original 1968 production – the dancing in the streets at the close of the performance – and inscribed it as “text”, thereby also maintaining a distinct audience/spectacle divide that was otherwise blurred into something more complicit (or collaborative) fifty years prior. Conversely, with Chaillon – one of the few pieces I have made a point of seeing twice –, one thing I asked myself during the second performance I saw at the Odéon was how many people were there because of the “scandal” that the play caused in Avignon*. The gesture that sparked a reaction in the moment, in other words, becomes reduced to a kind of “artefact”, a thing that elicited a certain response once and now we wait and see if the same response will reproduce itself again rather than allowing for the gesture to regain a kind of ephemerality, existing on its own within the context of that particular performance and granting space for new, organic, spontaneous responses to it.

            Granted, with the subject of today’s post – Jean Genet’s Les Paravents staged at the Odéon by Arthur Nauzyciel – the almost 60 years between its original Paris premiere and now mean that anticipation of scandal or violent outbursts during the performance is more than just a little unrealistic. Yet, at the same time, the fact that the production is being staged at the Odéon means a revisiting of its history is all but inevitable. When the play – inspired by and written during Algeria’s war for independence, though Genet deliberately does not give any specific geographic designations in the text– first premiered in Paris in 1966 five years after its initial publication, the Evian Accords had only been signed four years prior and the memories of the conflict were still fresh. France was, in a sense, still traversing a kind of existential crisis period if we could call it that, what with the remaining fractures of WWII (including the denial – at the time – of just how many people were willing collaborators), as well as the disastrous attempts to keep a hold on Indochina as well as Algeria. Its geography was being redrawn as well as its constitution (the Fourth Republic collapsed following Algeria’s independence). Thus, when in his latest piece – staged, mind, in a State-funded theatre, a brand new concept at the time, given that the Ministry of Culture was only created in 1959 – Genet directly critiques not only colonialism in a broad sense, but also the army and Western Europe’s inflated sense of superiority**, certain groups (three guesses as to where they fell on the political spectrum) were very much not happy about it.*** 

            The outbursts that broke out both in the house and outside the theatre towards the close of the play’s initial run (think: chairs, bottles, eggs, tomatoes, and firecrackers being thrown onstage, as well as, on May 4, 1966, a pre-show protest of about 500-600 members of the right/far-right – including the group Occident – outside the theatre) rather expectedly ended up becoming synonymous with the play itself, given their amplitude. Honestly, I would say it’s almost understandable to find it difficult to think of the play – and in particular any production of it – as independent of these events. But this difficulty arguably becomes more pronounced once the play returns, for the first time since 1966, to the original site of conflict.

            Could this question of how to address the play’s past while allowing it to move on from it be part of the reason why it has taken so long for it to come back to the Odéon? Maybe. At the same time, I would also propose that the fact that it is an absolute monster of a piece (an unedited version would last 8 hours…and even I have my limits when it comes to “marathon” shows) and Genet’s theatre is not exactly known for being “easy” to perform/produce have made it a…let’s say…less than popular choice for directors/theatre troupes. It’s a shame, really, though, because the text is quite beautiful and its approach to notions of liberty (much like the rest of Genet’s oeuvre) merits engaging with, particularly as it can offer possibilities for thinking outside a cycle of removal-(re)installation of various systems of power that we seem to be stuck in, despite the fact that they have never truly lived up to their promise of liberation.

But enough of the preamble: what of Nauzyciel’s production?

I will freely admit I was skeptical at first. As usual, I tried not to “spoil” myself by looking too much at production photos or promotional videos, but one thing that was pretty much unavoidable was the realization that there were (almost) no screens in a play titled Les Paravents (The Screens in English). Generally, I’m not much of a “purist” when it comes to this sort of thing but given how insistent Genet himself was on the presence of screens on the stage in his own (extensive) notes on the play, their absence did give me pause – as did the giant white staircase that comprised the majority of the stage design.

Yet, if one of the reasons for Genet’s insistence on the presence of screens was that they be a constant reminder (particularly because of his insistence on their placement next to a “real” object) of the artifice and theatricality of what was happening on stage, perhaps the same effect could be produced with another visually theatrical device. Indeed, one of the first things that came to my mind when I saw the large white stairs were the movie musicals of the 1930s and 40s – think 42nd Street or just Busby Berkeley in general – whose most memorable numbers are pure spectacles of dazzling costumes and precise (and precisely synchronized) choreography. In this context, the stairs, and any other elements of the set design, are physically located on a studio soundstage, but on film, they could be anywhere, topographically ungrounded except for in an imagined somewhere – a space that cannot exist except within the fictional context of the film. They have thus become inherently theatrical. And, to return back to this particular case, to my own pleasant surprise – they mostly worked here.

Adding to this, given how much of Genet’s text (particularly towards the latter half) turns into a dialogue of sorts with the dead, one could almost go as far as to call this set piece a kind of “stairway to Heaven” to be incredibly clichéd about it. However, an ascending trajectory (a transcendence, if you will) is not a given. Indeed, there is much more emphasis on weighty, downward movement in the staging, particularly when it comes to the trio of the famille des orties. When, during the opening tableau, Saïd first enters at the top of the stairs and begins his descent, he moves, slowly, methodically, as though walking on a tightrope. This was likely a nod to Abdallah Bentaga, a young acrobat and one of Genet’s former lovers, to whom Les Paravents is partially dedicated. It is also a movement that is inherently theatrical, particularly as it further “fictionalizes” the space both in its suggestion of the existence of a tightrope, as well as the extent to which this suggestion affects the manner in which Saïd descends the stairs, moving this latter movement even further away from the “real”. 

The degree to which artifice is emphasized also extended to the costumes – a clearly false, almost plastic-looking, wig on a female colonist; the obvious padding worn by Sir Harold and Mr. Blankensee under their clothing; Warda’s wig being a clear nod to the one worn by Madeleine Renaud who played the role in the original production – as well as the props – very obviously wooden guns painted baby blue or pink for the soldiers of the colonial army; Sir Harold’s absurdly large glove that is also his informant. Yet, as with Saïd’s entrance, it is in the characters’ movements, particularly the degree to which they are de-natured, that brings a both consistent and I would say even approaching uncomfortableawareness of the materiality (or the fleshiness) of the bodies on stage engaging in a process of crafting fiction that, at times, takes them to the point where the possibilities of imagination confront the limitations of the real. The “screen” of performance and physicality, if you will. For instance, Malika, one of the sex workers in Warda’s brothel, almost always adopts the pose of Degas’s La Petite Danseuse de quatorze ans whenever she has to traverse the stage, yet in doing so, she also extends her arms behind her to their full tautness. This references, of course, the rather unnatural – or fantasized – position of the original statue, as well as draws attention to the fact that the actress herself must also stretch and hold her body in this position in order to maintain the aesthetic. It is neither subtle nor natural, in other words. Similarly, the Lieutenant – who is made up to look like Charles De Gaulle in a costuming/makeup decision that would have been almost unthinkable in 1966, but which I think it is fair to say Genet would have found rather amusing – moves very delicately, his upper-body gestures undulating and extending all the way to the tips of his fingers. In contrast, his lower half – by the way the actor carried himself – seemed comparatively heavy, as if all its force was concentrated in his pelvis. Watching him move was, in fact, almost like watching a body in conflict with itself (though I do not mean this as a bad thing – given the character, I think it works), wanting to both transcend as well as give into and embrace its more base, abject, desires.

There is, to a degree, an erotic element in the above, though this is arguably pushed further in the character of La Mère (the Mother) – who, as an aside, was probably my favorite of the evening. Like the Lieutenant, she carried her weight in her pelvis, though unlike him, she left her arms hanging low, oftentimes resting them on her thighs or even itching/rubbing at her inner thighs, notably climbing very close to the area between her legs. This inevitably draws attention to that area, thus the erotic potential of the gesture. But, like with most iterations of the erotic, the gesture gets close to but never quite reaches “completion”. At the same time, given this particular character’s status and relationship to not just marginalization but also abjection – like most other characters, she speaks a language that is (often) highly poetic structurally, but whose imagery/general content are more base if not outright scatological – this attention to her pelvic area in her manner of moving also brings attention to the fact that this region of the body is one that simultaneously evokes desire as well as secretes fluids / emits odors that could potentially repel that desire. A liminal space of a kind, in other words, one that straddles the tense line between attraction and repulsion. And, if I am being honest, I would have liked to have seen this tension leaned into a bit more generally – particularly when it comes to the question of the abject / repulsion. Perhaps it was the stark white of the stairs that seemed a bit…too…clean. However, when you have the Lieutenant speaking in one tableau about how his men should aspire to stain their clothes with mud, blood, and cum, and in another you have Warda picking at her teeth with an absurdly long hairpin and then spit a barely perceptible glob, the question does arise as to whether or not there was some kind of holding back on the part of Nauzyciel and/or the actors.

Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that they should have gone the complete other direction and just had the performers throw globs of indeterminate substances at each other for the sake of being visibly “foul”. For instance, the scene that once sparked fury in 1966 in which the dying Lieutenant is given the chance by his troops to breathe the air of his homeland (France) one more time via the latter farting in his face is here staged with the Lieutenant splayed out in the arms of his men while they perform synchronized body rolls around him, pointedly pushing their buttocks out at the end to suggest pushing the “wind” out of them and toward his face. It was both aesthetically beautiful and delightfully silly (I mean, given the play’s reputation and history as described above, it was also more or less the moment those familiar with the piece were waiting for, so it almost had to pack a bit of a punch). But, even if the abject was not more explicit, say, by punctuating the body rolls with fart noises, I found that it was nevertheless physically embraced here to a degree I thought could have been more consistent.

And since this is proving to be quite long already (granted, this play is also a beast in its own right so, it’s fitting), a final word on the question of screens.

As mentioned previously, there were no screens here that corresponded to Genet’s original vision of them, but there were several reinterpretations of screens. I alluded to some earlier when I spoke of the question of theatricality in the performance styles and gestures of the actors, but other than that, there are also four instances of the presence of screens in Nauzyciel’s staging that merit attention. The first is the screen – or rather the frame of a screen – that is lowered onto one of the steps to frame the action happening in the steps above. Here, it is the public that will inevitably “fill in” the screen, the boxed frame evoking a television set or the rim of a movie screen, both objects associated with another kind of spectacle. The second instance (though chronologically, this is the final screen to appear) occurs during the second act, which opens with a large screen lowered at the very top of the steps, with only one long vertical slit sliced in it acting as a kind of passage from one side of the screen to the other (and yes, this slit did suggest a vagina, and yes, this was very likely intentional). This screen represented the passage into the world of the dead, with each character signaling their arrival – or even, rebirth – into this realm first with a kind of shadow play from behind the screen before stepping through the slit. 

I have chosen to close on talking about these last two instances of screens together both for aesthetic reasons – specifically, these are both instances that feature screens onto which images are projected – as well as for some larger questions they left me thinking with regarding the relationship of Les Paravents to the events that were occurring at the time of its writing as well as continued critical association of the play with those events.

The first of these final instances involves the stairs themselves. Beginning towards the latter third of the first act and continuing in the second, black and white images and videos were projected onto them, though of course the structure of the steps meant that the images were also quite distorted. These images were, in fact, archival footage, taken from 1) a 1949 reportage on the landscapes of Algeria ; 2) a 1956 report concerning army reinforcements for Algeria (note: at the time the French government still considered what was happening in Algeria as a “special operation” – in case anyone else needed another example of the worst parts of history repeating themselves – rather than a fight for independence) ; and 3) footage from an August 1956 protest in Algeria. Together, they also represented the first instance of this staging directly tying the play back to Algeria, grounding (or at least semi-grounding) it where before it was geographically (and to a certain degree temporally) untethered. The characters on stage may not specify where they are, but the images superimposed over them via the projection at minimum symbolically tie them to a real, lived, historical moment. The dialogue with History continued in the intermission as well as the opening of the second act, when an actual screen is lowered and onto which colonial-era maps of Algeria are projected (during the intermission) followed by a filmed segment in which an older gentleman reads a series of letters written by a young French doctor stationed in Algeria in 1957/58 (at the opening of the second act). According to his director’s note, Nauzyciel states that his decision to bring the war more directly back into a piece that does not directly mention it is his own way of confronting a, what he terms, general amnesia (or at least the risk of one) surrounding Algeria’s war of Independence in France, given how little the subject is still discussed (at least from his perspective). The taboo of sorts that existed when Genet began writing his piece – when a blatantly obvious war could not be officially labeled as such – still hangs over the larger collective memory like a kind of sword of Damocles. Yet, even when considering the fact that, sixty years onward, this collective memory or lived experiences related to the war are slowly fading, I do wonder if this kind of confrontation with the historical / the real (even with the images being purposefully distorted in some cases) made the most sense for the context of this piece. I do not mean to suggest the images / videos were not impactful here – the content of some of the letters, particularly how laconic / blunt they were at times regarding not only how absolutely screwed the French army was, even as early as 1957, but also how aware they were regarding the use of torture against prisoners, was particularly effective, even if some of the looks the gentleman gave to the camera were a bit too on the nose. Rather, I wonder if this explicit grounding risks diluting some of the political power and potential of the text, especially when it comes to the larger questions it poses on the nature of power and cycles of dominance/submission which, while they are often later tied to historical moments, also exist independently of those moments. 

To return to the question I posed at the top of this post, there is also a part of me that finds it amusing that, in the projection of archival as well as testimonial footage of the war (among other aesthetic choices), Nauzyciel’s staging almost ends up embracing the critique lobbied at Genet by the press in 1966: that the play was a direct critique of the war in Algeria, despite Genet’s instance at the time that it was only inspired by the war, not a direct representation of it. Yet, Genet, also did later (in a letter to director Roger Blin) rather cheekily say that the play both was and was not about Algeria, and I think it is this uncertainty that the inclusion of the archival material risks losing. There is, in fact, a good deal of political and critical power in the embracing of temporal/spatial ambiguity in theatrical representation. Yes, it does mean, in a sense, that the fiction on the stage is happening nowhere, but in this negation, there is also the possibility that it could be happening anywhere, thus granting the text a freedom to speak beyond just a particular historical moment. 

For the sake of not making this thing any longer than it already is, I’ll just end things on this little nugget. Something to mentally chew on, if you will.

*For those unfamiliar: the play directly tackles questions of racism – and its intersections with gender, class, sexuality, etc. – particularly on the black female body in France in a darkly satirical tone that, in my opinion, is unfortunately too rare on stages these days. Anyway, in a surprise to no one who has been paying the remotest amount of attention to the rise of right/far-right discourses in Europe and elsewhere, during and after the performances, some of the actresses were verbally and physically harassed by white patrons. One performer in fact opted to take a break from the show for her own well-being once touring resumed following the festival. Chaillon in fact adapted the text a bit to directly acknowledge the aftermath of Avignon in the Odéon performance.

**At the same time, given that this is Genet, his critiques are also much more nuanced than what may be suggested here (I just don’t have too much time to get into that). In brief: no one “side” really escapes this play unscathed. Even the famille des Orties (aka: Saïd, his mother, and Leïla) end more or less where they started: in the lowest most abject dregs, yet Saïd and Leïla are also the only ones who receive some kind of veneration in the end, largely because of this and their general refusal to be folded into any kind of system of social order. 

***I was doing some more in-depth research on the 1966 premiere of Les Paravents prior to seeing the show for a side project, focusing especially on reactions/critiques in the press. One thing that stood out: the degree to which the discourse of right/far-right has not really changed regarding things it does not like. This is both hilarious and disturbing (I’ll let those of you decide where you fall on this). 

Posted on

My brain is tired, yet here I am.

These writing…“pauses” really are getting to me.

Anyway.

Hello again after…(approximately) 4 months! Life (and by life I mean work) really did decide to throw me for a loop this year, what with innumerable college applications to sort out for students (ah yeah, I do that now), teaching feeling generally just more loaded than ever, and the added nonsense of having to navigate between two school sites (yeah, the admin at my establishment made some fascinating decisions last year because school is a business and businesses need to be in a perpetual state of expansion). Every time I have sat down to gather my thoughts a bit after getting home from a show, I’ve just felt nothing. Empty. A vide, if you will. 

It’s like my brain is too exhausted from just constantly juggling other things that I’ve had to leave behind writing, something I avidly enjoy. But damn does capitalism really love sucking the joy out of things.

In any case, I am here now, so with the small bit of bandwidth I’ve managed to scrounge up from somewhere, here are some thoughts on the current theatre season.

Its…fine.

There have been some exceptions to this (see: Carte Noir nommé desire, which I saw again, as well as another piece which I will briefly touch on in a bit), but for the most part, what I have been seeing hasn’t left me with anything that lingers on after the show is done. Perhaps it’s because – aesthetically speaking – not much of what I have seen has proposed something new regarding the approach to staging / performance / audience relationship. Then again, it could also just be due to the fact that going to the theatre as much as I do almost inevitably means I have more chances of encountering something aesthetically familiar than not. 

It is nice, though, when a surprise does come, and Hatice Özer’s Le chant du père at the MC93 on January 21 certainly was a welcome surprise. Semi-autobiographical and very intimate (staging it upstairs in the Salle Christian Bourgois helped), the piece is also something of a dialogue between Özer and her father who appears on stage with her. Yet rather than confrontational – a tone which a piece with the premise of a young person whose defied their immigrant + working class parents’ wishes and pursued a life in the arts could have adopted – the piece is steeped fully in melancholy. It’s the kind of bittersweetness that comes when one at once embraces traces of one’s past or origins, yet the very act of doing so simultaneously reveals how much has been lost – likely permanently – and the weight of these losses on one’s identity. 

And though I cannot go as far as saying that Özer’s own history as she presented it on stage exactly mirrored my own, there were certain resonances in it that stayed with (and still in some sense are) with me after the performance ended. For one thing, Özer’s family hails from Anatolia and, for anyone who is not familiar with that region in modern-day Türkiye, the cultural and historic ties of the region with Greece are hard to ignore. This goes beyond the Ottoman years, as well as the genocides and (many) migrations and population exchanges in the area (though one really cannot minimize those). If you were to listen to the music, particularly the kind of blues that’s played in cafés that (on both sides of the Aegean) are largely (if not fully) dominated by men, even if you cannot understand the lyrics, there is an inherent sadness in the music, in the way a sustained note becomes almost like a thread, stretching out as though in search of something (or someone) that has wandered off, attempting to bring them back in. 

Özer’s father is a musician, and, after she has finished setting out and pouring some tea, comes on stage from sitting in the audience, sits at the wooden table which – along with two chairs – makes up the sparse furnishings, drinks a tea, and then picks up his saz, and begins playing and then singing. Just prior to, and intermixed with this, Özer has told us some stories of her father – his gift for music, how she decided one day to just go into one of the cafés he and other Anatolian transplants to France frequented sometimes for hours to see what was keeping him in there. She does hint at the start of the piece that these stories, like all her father’s stories, are a mix of truth, fiction, and a bit of what I can translate as “mystery” or “uncertainty”, yet what does become very clear by the piece’s end is that the question of an adherence to “truth” does not really matter so much. It does not, for instance, change the basic fact that Özer’s father (and her mother) had to leave their homeland to try and seek a better life, that their French is an immigrant and working-class French and that their daughter – in her words – speaks Turkish like a child. 

Language – and communication more broadly – is rather central in this piece, and in that sense, one could also consider the folk songs Özer’s father plays as a kind of language, an attempt to “re-inhabit” the body with melodies which are inextricably tied to place. Thus, it may (slightly) bridge that remaining gap that a loss in the poetics or subtleties of spoken/written language has left following the act of migration. 

On a more personal note, other than the question of being able to speak one’s “mother” language (which I could certainly relate to), as well as Özer’s recounting of the difficulties she encountered at school when teachers could not (or – equally as likely – would not) pronounce her name correctly, what really weighed on me was the question of existing as something of an “in-between” – not entirely of one place or another one. I mean, for fuck’s sake, I may have been born in California, but there’s no way the name “Ifigenia” is not going to evoke the image of a “somewhere else”, the name thus becoming its own evidence of a migration. Hell, this is not a unique experience for other first-gens – and I cannot ignore the degree to which my white and class privilege have and continue to “shield” me from the ugliest sides of this. In my own case, though, I’ve also managed to go through a good portion of my public life using a shortened, more “palatable” version of my name. I have also come very close to losing the first language I learned to speak, and if it weren’t for my own initiatives, I would have probably lost numerous other cultural, historical, and culinary ties as well. My name says one thing, yet my lived experience, and the minute I open my mouth say another, no matter how many attempts towards closing these small gaps I have taken.

To return to Özer’s piece, the wonderful thing about theatre – and I am going to be cheesy here for a minute, sue me – is that the space and the medium are already pre-disposed to plural and alternative modes of language and dialogue. Of course, theatre is not a panacea, and no matter how close the act of (re)playing the gestures or rituals of a removed place approaches a lived memory, it will never be enough to erase the reminder of loss. But, as Özer, during the latter half of the piece, begins to “plant” long stalks of these small yellow wildflowers that grow abundantly in that part of the world all around the stage, something about the way this abundance of plastic flowers approximates a field – an unabashed construction of a place that itself likely a mix between the imagined and the “real” – felt, good. As in, settled good. As in, the recognition of the in-between as a possible new space in itself good. Unfixed and ephemeral, still, but somehow better than trying to force the dominance of one side of the familial / cultural divide over another.

For the sake of not getting too in my head on this (and because I did intend for this to be brief – though these things never are for me), I’ll end things here. Hopefully, I’ll be able to write more consistently soon, and maybe find the habit of regular post-show writing again. It’s hard to get back into the academic mindset – or rather, the researcher’s mindset – when things have been getting in the way for so long. Still, I’m trying. 

Posted on

Virginia and William

It seems odd – or off, rather – to be writing right now.

But it’s also the first time in quite a long while that I’ve had enough down time to actually get to writing out my thoughts on what I’ve seen so far this season, so I figure I may as well just take it. 

I won’t lay out my feelings here (those who know me know exactly where I stand on this and that’s fine enough for me), but I will close with taking a second to point out the overwhelming hypocrisy that is characterizing a vast majority of media responses to current events – October 7 of course, but particularly now the siege and very likely ethnic cleansing in Gaza, as well as the (expected but no less vile) opportunistic co-opting of these tragedies by the right/far-right. 

With that, the two pieces for this post:

Another reason I am making a point of writing now is also the fact that the shows I am going to feature were – for now – the only two that left some kind of impression on me. Granted, this does not mean that it was necessarily a good one (I found both somewhat unsuccessful, but for differing reasons), but as I was saying to someone recently, after going to the theatre as often as I make a point of doing, sometimes just feeling a…thing…even if it is not overwhelmingly positive is better than leaving feeling perfectly neutral about the last hour(+) spent watching a performance. Call it an inevitable result from going to see as many things as I do, but it does take quite a bit to truly move me. 

Also, both pieces happen to be based on works of English writers…so…it kind of makes sense to write about them at once anyway.

Écrire sa vie (based on The Waves and other texts by Virginia Woolf), dir. Pauline Bayle, Théâtre Public de Montreuil, Oct. 7, 2023

I’m not entirely sure if anyone has ever asked themselves why Woolf’s work (other than possibly Orlando, but I think I have an idea as to why) has never been adapted for the stage, but should anyone in the near future find themselves pondering over this question, I would advise them to look to this piece. This is not to say that it was a total disaster – in fact there were one or two moments I found quite beautiful (the synchronized movement sequence among the six players being one of them). Rather, what it more speaks to is an inherent limit in some of Woolf’s work that, oddly enough, is tricky to translate to the stage if one is not particularly attentive to it.

I’ve talked before about the idea of the plurality of the body on stage (see: Bovary but also my dissertation + book), with particular emphasis on the fact that the body in performance on a stage is at once the body of the actor as well as that of the character(s) they are incarnating. This, one could argue, comes somewhat close to Woolf’s treatment (or destabilization/destruction) the literary subject, yet the problem with theatre is that, unlike in written fiction, one must contend with the fact that the aesthetics of stage performance still more or less insist upon a 1:1 association between the actor on stage and whatever singular character they are playing in a given instance. Flowing in and out between two or several subjectivities is thus rendered almost impossible when the physical body still acting as a primary signifier for an audience. Of course, exceptions exist (see again Bovary, particularly the sequence at the end when Emma confronts Flaubert), but based on what I saw here, I think those exceptions would have to be relegated to either a small moment that reveals the – let’s say – cracks in that 1:1 representational system, or something that is constantly engaged with.

Given that Écrire sa vie is mostly based on Woolf’s The Waves, I really think it’s the latter option that should have been taken.

The piece – which begins with a bifrontal staging but then moves to a fully frontal one about 2/3 of the way through – centers around six friends who are meeting for a beach picnic to celebrate the return of a seventh friend from the army. Though it is never specified what time period we are in, the costuming, as well as the particularities of the references to war made throughout, suggest we are in the late 1930s (never mind that at one point we are all asked to join in a singalong to a modified version of “Hey Jude”). Like in Woolf’s novel, the majority of the piece centers around the friends’ interpersonal relationships, how they see one another and consider themselves as individuals within the center of it all. Unlike Woolf, however, the fluidity in stream of conscious – the almost wave-like way in which one character seeps into the story/narrative of another – is missing until the latter half of the piece. At that point – which followed a kind of air raid that destroyed the celebration – all the actors come back and semi-switch costumes. I say semi because the new outfits they wore leaned more towards borrowing colors or patterns from another costume rather than an exact copy. They then began to play a version of a childhood make-believe game they had already played earlier in the show, only this time the names they call each other are those associated with the costumes they are wearing, rather than with who they played earlier. This leads to confusion, culminating in a final moment in which each character states who they “are” while trying to “properly” identify the others.

And while I see what Bayle was trying to do here in terms of developing a commentary over the way in which our relationships with those close to us help shape who we become as individual subjects – they are, in part, the multitudes we contain, as several characters in the piece suggest – I do wonder why she chose to have this happen so late in the piece, after the 1:1 relationality between actor/character had already been established and confirmed. In some sense, having this come so late makes it seem almost forced, rather than organic or fluid as a way to harken more closely to Woolf’s text. It’s a shame, really, that it feels so stale because even amidst the tragedy of impending war, there is still a larger celebration of the randomness of life that underscores this. But I think also that for it to really have worked, the piece would have needed to lean much more intently towards the ludic element of the children’s games the actors played, destabilizing fixed identity from the start. Doing this with six actors, however, especially taking into account the randomness with which Woolf’s explorations of subjectivity – particularly through her stream of consciousness writing – flow on the page, is understandably tricky, hence my suggestion earlier on why Orlando seems to be better suited for stage adaptation (its comparatively easier, for instance, when you just need to keep track of one character who shatters the illusion of the actor’s body on the stage rather than several).

Avant la terreur (based on Shakespeare’s Richard III and other texts), dir. Vincent Macaigne, MC93 Bobigny, Oct. 8, 2023

Ah, we meet again Vincent. 

After a six-year absence from the theatre to focus more on his acting career in television and cinema – I finally watched La Flamme + Le Flambeau for the first time recently, and let me tell you, his guest appearances on both were…a trip – Macaigne and his special brand of spectacular excess and destruction are back. And to get this out of the way now, no he does not seem to have tamed any of the aesthetic down quite yet. 

Now, I was going to write something much more detailed about this one (because like with Je suis un pays, I have…thoughts), but I was informed last night when I was sharing my impressions on the piece with someone who had seen it a few days after I had that since last Sunday, Macaigne has made some edits to the production. Chief among these is the reduction of the run time from 3.5 hours to 2.5 hours.

I mean, look, already the 3.5-hour runtime listed the afternoon I saw it was an improvement from the 4+ hours of his last piece, so I guess we can take this development as a sign things are moving in a…tighter…direction. At the same time, this is still a show funded largely by public money, and given how production-heavy Macaigne’s work is – as well as how strapped almost all public services are in France currently –, I do wonder if perhaps these edits could not have been made sooner. Perhaps during rehearsal? In any case, most of my notes are now useless, but there is one key moment that survived the cut that I would like to speak about, mostly because it deals with a moment in Richard III’s reign that is not detailed in Shakespeare’s play directly, but that historians are – I believe – pretty much in agreement that the last Yorkist king of England had a hand in: the Princes in the Tower.

Before getting into this, yes, Macaigne’s piece is a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s play – and by extension of Richard III’s reign. As such, there are some elements that deviate further from the historical record than Shakespeare’s piece does. These include the swapping of Richard’s oldest sibling, King Edward IV, with a woman, Elizabeth (that she shares a name with Edward’s wife, Elizabeth Woodville, is likely a coincidence), a character named George (no, not George Duke of Clarence…he’s still here) who seems to be an amalgamation of Buckingham and – maybe – Tyrell, and key for our purposes, the reduction of the two aforementioned princes down to just one – Andrew. 

Further deviating from Shakespeare and the historical record is the fact that though at the start of the performance the audience was commanded to close our eyes and imagine ourselves in the 1480s, there was no real adherence to historic-temporal coherence. In an early sequence – one that arguably has a sizeable bearing on the significance of the one I will get to in a moment – Richard projects videos taken from his supposed Instagram “For You” page on a series of television screens on stage. The images are all real, and if one were to watch the videos on their own, one might be momentarilyshocked at the instances of intense violence, but watching a never-ending sequence of horrific accidents makes it difficult to ignore not just how disturbing by nature these videos are, but also what our appetite for them says about us and, perhaps, our numbness to violence.

And this brings us to the prince in the Tower. 

This is the longest sequence, I believe, excepting those where someone has a monologue. The sequence happens in two camera shots. The first is backstage, where Richard goes and grabs Andrew from the cage where the boy has hidden himself and begins to strangle him. The second happens immediately after and it is on stage and almost right in front of us. Richard drags Andrew back behind a box that is up slightly stage right; however, we have cameras that are to the side and above that show him strangle him and we see that fully frontally. This is shocking. However, the message I believe that McCain is trying to get across is rather clear, and will likely be clearer now, given the extensive cuts. 

Just before the scene happened, Andrew had his own monologue. Essentially, unlike in other plays where the new generation comes out and chastises the old generation, Andrew also recognizes the fact that the older generation is one that was itself begot by violence and came up in violence. I am thinking, for instance, when George early in the play talks about how his parents would always repeat to him how life was better before he arrived. Thus, if one is coming from that violence, then what else can one expect except to continue to perpetuate violence? In any case what Andrew does is he essentially forgives or pardons the old generation. At the same time, he also makes it clear in his speech that the urgency with which the whole piece is underpinned by is not going away anywhere, that the terror that’s in the title of the piece is coming. We are about to run face first into it, and we have to act and do something and the only thing we might have working on our side is the fact that this kid is talking and showing us that there is a possible other way if only we listen to him if only Richard essentially humbles himself and gives up power willingly.

The problem, of course is that Richard does not want to do that, even though it is very obvious to him and everyone else that what he’s doing is going to lead to mass destruction. And it is as a result of this that we get Richard strangling Andrew on stage, the boy’s convulsions seen not directly, but by proxy via the overhead and onstage cameras. It’s a confrontation, in other words, not just with the violence that was also found in the images projected on the screens earlier, but also with our own gazes and thirsts for violence that keep those images popping up on our algorithms.

Thus, the implication in the killing is essentially unabashedly displaying what they generations in power now are doing or have been doing to the rest of us for the past 15 to 20 years. This gets even more interesting when considering the ages of the actor playing Richard because he is about the same age as McCain, who would be classified as Gen X because he was born in 78. This is often thought of sometimes as the more apathetic generation or the new lost generation but there is a sense of responsibility there anyway: ignorance of the violence that characterizes one’s upbringing only serves to kick the can down the road rather than break the cycle definitively. And so, we kill the canary in the coal mine, so to speak. We sacrifice the young so that the old do not need to ask questions about the stability and viability of their system. There is an urgency in Andrew’s speech, augmented further by the manner of his death. Laws of succession aside, there are strong implications for our present moment in seeing an adult strangle a child who was trying to warn him of his hubris. At the same time, Macaigne’s aesthetic is also a little bit tiring to me at this point because it’s been done over and over again. At the same time though I can see why he reverts to this because the urgency has never been heeded to. I will say this is, I do think this piece was more successful somewhat than his previous piece six years ago because it doesn’t fall into the trap of conservativism that I saw in the latter, but I’m not sure what to definitively think about it.

We’ll just have to wait and see, I suppose.

Posted on

Avignon 2023

Hello…again.

It’s certainly been a while (I think this may be the longest pause I’ve taken in my writing since I started this blog), but it’s not for lack of material to write on (my theatre bookings were still packed – as usual).

No, this time, let’s just say that my teaching schedule got decidedly fuller following the December holidays, and as such, some things had to be temporarily set aside.

But now that is, thankfully (hopefully), done with, and we can get back to our semi-regularly scheduled programming. 

A quick announcement before beginning: my book has been officially published!

I’ve left the publisher’s link here for those who may be interested. Do note that if you have institutional affiliation (and your institution has an agreement with Springer Nature) the book is also available open access. 

Some thoughts on that whole experience: overall a whirlwind, but one that I would like to do again at some point (I have some ideas for a future topic), if only to get to relive the feeling of opening the package of my author copies and holding one of my “babies” in my hands for the first time (doubly significant since I never got to hold a Harvard-bound hardcopy of my dissertation given…the whole pandemic…thing). But anyway, if you read here and either you decide to read it (or have requested your uni library to purchase a copy), I’d actually love to know, if for no other reason than I want to see how my “baby” is doing fully independent of me. 

And now to the reason why we are here:

Avignon.

Yes, my dear small (very small) group of readers, I have finally popped my Avignon theatre festival cherry, which is quite hilarious when I think about it, given what my research is primarily focused on. I still maintain, however, that my primary reasons for hesitating (other than the fact that a great many things would be passing through Paris at some point anyway – so much for decentralization), including the fact that the thought of being in the South of France in the dead of summer with no beach nearby gave me great pause, to say nothing of the need to plan this months in advance, were legitimate enough for my avoidance, but this year – on a literal whim – I decided I was finally sick enough of people’s shocked expressions when I told them I’d never been to put the hesitations aside and see what all the fuss was about.

In short, this is going to very likely become a new summer ritual (a pre-Greece mini holiday, if you will), albeit with the following amendments going forward:

  1. Stay a week rather than three days (got in late afternoon on the 8th, left early afternoon on the 11th…it was not nearly enough).
  2. Book accommodation much farther in advance (and actually in Avignon because, as nice as Villeneuve was, going to and from the city center was a bit annoying).
  3. Bring a fan – better yet, bring one of those mechanical fan spray things that soccer moms used to use on us during/after games.
  4. Get the Avignon Off card. 
  5. See shows programmed as part of the Off.

As that last point makes it clear, I only saw shows that were programmed in the main festival this year (and only three at that), but for a first time, I’d say this wasn’t too bad.

Regarding the shows: funnily enough there was something of a theme that tied the three together, as disparate as they were in terms of form and subject matter. In a word, that theme is “Hell”, though – with one very notable exception – this should not be taken as a pejorative. While the first show I saw was somewhat “hellish” in the infernal frustration I felt while watching it (more details on why below), the second and third pieces evoked ideas of Hell to much more deliberate – and I would arguably say more successful – artistic and political ends. I’m hoping, then, that the aesthetics (and risk-taking) seen in the latter two bode well for the future of Tiago Rodrigues’s tenure as artistic director of the festival (because, let’s face it, given my very obvious fondness for his work as a playwright, his appointment was another reason why I decided to come this year). 

With that said, onto the (hopefully brief) rundown of my thoughts, in chronological order:

Welfare (d’après le film de Frederick Wiseman), mise en scène de Julie Deliquet, Cour d’Honneur du Palais des Papes, Saturday July 8, 2023

This one was a bit of a last-minute addition, as some last tickets opened up about a week before I was set to head down. I will be honest, I was not too keen on seeing this piece (and my instincts about why may have been right), but given that it was opening the festival at the Cour d’Honneur (and that Julie Deliquet is only the second woman in the festival’s 77 year history to be given that honor – which says…a lot), I figured it would at least give me a chance to experience what is acknowledged as the most prestigious of the many venues reserved for performances.

As the title suggests, the piece is an adaptation of Wiseman’s 1973 documentary of the same name which chronicles the activity at a welfare center in New York. Deliquet’s adaptation retains more or less a realistic tone while integrating two of the standbys of classical tragedy: unity of place and unity of time. Rather than re-situating the narrative (both territorially and temporally) in France or at least taking it to the modern day, Deliquet instead chooses to keep to the 1973 setting, revealed as a sort of YMCA-like gymnasium-turned-help center as stagehands work to slowly take down the makeshift “dressing rooms” while the audience files in as an adapted raising of the curtain. It is December, the holidays are around the corner, and for the next 2.5hrs we are going to bear witness to the trials and turbulations of a broken system with the understanding that, though the narrative takes place only within the span of a workday, it is doomed to occur again in almost Sisyphean repetition. 

Before I get to my own thoughts, I want to quickly reference this New York Times article published on July 9 which touches on many of the same issues I had with the piece (though I will point out one thing: Cappelle’s claim that the working class is “hardly well-represented” in the profession of acting is perplexing to me, given that, unless you are one of the very rare prestige performers, you are very likely straddling a fine line between making a decent living and falling off into poverty with how unstable the industry is here. There is a reason, in other words, that the status of “intermittent worker” as applied to those in the performance industry is its own economic/tax category here). Yet, I would also like to expand a moment on one of the primary reasons why I referenced my experience watching this play as “infernal” earlier: namely the dissonance brought about by maintaining the documentary’s realism and then staging the thing in this particular space.

In short, it’s frustrating, in a way, how here we have a piece that talks about how broken a country’s social aid system is being staged in a festival that has – let’s face it – lost quite a bit of its “Populaire” roots and imaginings, to an audience of out-of-towners (many of whom come from Paris for the occasion), most of whom paid at least 40 euros for a seat, and who – on top of that – have very likely never had to experience a welfare system first-hand. And I do not mean to suggest here that these kinds of stories should not be on our stages, but rather that why we are watching this, who is watching (that is, what kind of gaze is dominating the audience space), and – key here – where we are watching are essential questions that all need to be addressed before a project gets a green light, or at the very least during rehearsals. 

The “why” part of the equation was, of course, easy to pick out. In the interactions between the social workers and those visiting the center, there are what should be very uncomfortable resonances to today, not just in the American context (where social aid has basically been all but stripped of any meaningful funding to actually be able to offer help), but in France as well, where the current administration has made it almost its mission of continuing a politics that dates back to at least Sarkozy of stripping public funding wherever it can. A piece like this, then, should be here to offer a dialogue. Yet, in continuously watching those who’ve come in for help slam into a brick wall of bureaucracy where even a slight acknowledgement from a social worker who only has so much empathy they can dole out before they, too, run out of gas is not enough to shake the perpetually nagging notion that these folks are not, and likely will never be fully heard, the obvious gap (at least in this space) between the stage and the house only grows wider instead of closer. One of the questions that came to my mind after I left the theatre and was walking back to Villeneuve was whether or not the piece would have been more successful – all other dramaturgical decisions remaining unchanged – had it been staged in a more intimate space, if for no other reason than to make the feeling of perpetual entrapment inescapably palpable to those who have (again very likely) had the privilege of never having needed to experience it. Yet, even this has its own limitations, though I would say these are more ethical than just strictly dramaturgical.

I touched on this somewhat in my dissertation (and in my book – oh look, a shameless plug) when I talk about Ils n’avaient pas prévus qu’on allait gagner at the MC93, but one of the other things that nagged me about this experience was the degree to which the portrayals of the people on stage more or less conformed to codified perceptions of certain social/racial/economic groups which I will differentiate from the documentary because, as this is a theatrical adaptation and performance, the choice in how to play certain characters, the gestures, body language, vocal inflections, etc. belong just as much – if not more so here – to the craft of the actor and the aesthetic vision of the director as they do to their source of inspiration. Playing a certain way is a choice, in other words, and I wonder again here about the ethics of adopting the names and stories of people who existed, yet whose marginality (as well as the fifty years separating Wiseman’s documentary from the present day) makes the question of appropriating their stories and adapting them for the theatre very murky. As with the other piece mentioned above, the crux of the matter lies in who holds the power to tell a story, and whether the structures of that power maintain or destabilize already established social hierarchies. 

There was one point in the second half of the show where one character – a former professor, or at least someone who was very educated based on his speech patterns and references he dropped in during his exchanges with other characters – makes an allusion to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as a way to describe the tragic – yet at the same time absurd – purgatory of his own predicament, and I wonder if here there was not perhaps another thread that could have been followed. Leave the need to adhere to realism behind, take advantage of the size of the space and heighten the absurdity to that Beckettian level which is itself steeped in unignorable darkness. I am very aware that the suggestion I offer here breaks away almost entirely from what I saw on my first night in Avignon, but staging pieces that, in the end, only serve to demonstrate a certain reality without taking aesthetic and dramaturgical risks to interrogate and destabilize modes of representation is a great general frustration I have with theatre these days (and not just in France). 

Speaking of risks, however…

A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela, texte et mise en scène de Carolina Bianchi, Gymnase du lycée Aubanel, Sunday July 9, 2023

I should probably start by posting a content warning for this one, given that both the subject matter and the staging of the piece give a rather visceral look into sexual assault, and, beyond that, manners of representing or dialoguing with these experiences in theatrical and/or performance art mediums. 

It was also the only piece that was playing during my stay that was strongly discouraged for those under 18, which I admit intrigued me. Those who know me well know that I don’t shock easily (and to push it further – that I gravitate towards things that claim to “push boundaries”), yet oftentimes I find that pieces that come with such warnings tend to over-promise and under-deliver in terms of actually proposing something that shakes sensibilities rather than reproduce the same tired tropes and discourses. We cannot all be Sarah Kane premiering Blasted at the Royal Court Theatre for the first time, in other words.

Yet here, Bianchi, who bases this piece in part on her own experience of being drugged and then raped ten years ago, arguably succeeds in at least partly pushing back against certain elements of the “empowered/revenge” narrative. While this often serves to frame the aftermath following an incident of assault/rape, it does so – as suggested by the piece – while ignoring the underlying root of the problem: namely the hellish reality that many women (and here it should be understood that I am using the term in reference to cis, trans, non-binary, and genderfluid/nonconforming folks who may still outwardly present as “feminine”) have to navigate when the threat of losing one’s bodily autonomy is constantly looming over one’s head. It doesn’t matter, the piece argues, how many times one can repeat that “our survival is our revenge”. This does not change the fact that a violation of the body happened. A car on the stage – a central prop piece in the latter half of the show – sports a license plate that reads “Fuck Catharsis”. There will be no emotional release and recovery; there are only the stories and experiences of these events which we in the house will bear witness to in all their raw intensity without any promise of empty “transcendence”. 

One thing that does give me pause, however, is that this piece is billed as the first part of an eventual trilogy, and, more precisely, that it takes some cues from another very famous literary trilogy: Inferno from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Obviously, I have not seen the other two parts of the trilogy yet (nor do I think they have been created), but referring to Inferno as one primary source of inspiration (the piece opens with several lines from the opening canto projected onto a large screen), and knowing how the rest of that trilogy progresses, I am really hoping this is a one-off reference and not necessarily a sign of the future progression of Bianchi’s work (though, to be honest, I would actually be more surprised if she did follow a Inferno–Purgatorio–Paradiso trajectory). I don’t think the intensity should be diluted, in other words.

And intense it was, starting from the opening when Bianchi, alone on a starkly, uncomfortably white stage (and wearing a white outfit herself), entered and launched into a monologue which evoked more an opening of a conference than a theatre piece. On the screen behind her, she projected Botticelli’s series Nastagio degli Onesti, inspired by the story of the same name from Boccaccio’s Decameron, which, to keep things brief, involve a woman being hunted down by a knight who kills her, dismembers her, and feeds her to his dogs, only for the “infernal hunt” to begin again in the morning. All this because the woman had the audacity to reject the knight’s advances, driving him to suicide.

Typical.

This serves as the pretext to open larger conversations around violence on women’s bodies and the treatment of said violence in art, and performance art in particular. Pushing the limits of the body on stage is not something that is entirely foreign in the latter context, though it is not something spectators are often confronted with (or expect to be confronted with) in theatre. To this end – and using her own experience of rape, as well as her experience researching the story of Italian artist Pippa Bacca, who was raped and murdered outside Istanbul in 2008 while on her performance/road-trip Brides on Tour – Bianchi announces that, rather than finishing reading through the hefty stack of papers on the table in front of her, she will be drugging herself again this evening. We watch her mix her drink on stage – on stage she says she has spiked it with a drug colloquially known as boa noite Cinderela (good-night, Cinderella), the same one that was used on her, but in pre-performance interviews, the substance has been clarified as a mixture of tranquilizers – take several sips, begin to slur her words, crawl on the table, and fall asleep. This is all while the screen on the back continued to project the subtitles of what remained of her introductory text in English and French (Bianchi spoke Brazilian Portuguese). There was silence for what felt like ages. Surprisingly, at least from what I could tell, no one left.

Then the rest of the troupe enters, the initial set is dismantled, revealing a much darker space behind. Bianchi’s body is carefully placed on a dingy mattress, and then dragged down center stage to join a circle of other “graves” featuring either full skeletons, partially decomposing corpses, or piles of sand – another addition to the cycle of violence. She is eventually undressed and then placed into a satin nightgown by three troupe members, while the others make off into three pairs upstage, dancing and grinding on each other in a way that suggests that one of the pair is close to falling into a nightmare. Meanwhile, the three troupe members near Bianchi simulate touching her and themselves. She is still knocked out by the tranquilizers.

When speaking of her experience prior to drinking her cocktail, one key point Bianchi emphasizes is the primary side-effect of the drug used on her: memory loss. She knows what happened to her because her body bears the marks of it, yet the black hole left in her memory because she was not mentally present during the act itself has, for her, made the act of reappropriating the experience, owning it, in other words, participating in the kind of “cathartic” discourse alluded to above almost impossible. How far can language or visual representation go when we cannot access an event that has fundamentally demarcated our past from our present? It’s a Rubicon that we did not want to cross but were made to, our past, present, and future selves collapsing into a moment that remains unobtainable. 

At one point, towards the end of the piece, there comes what – based on the reactions of those in the house with me – could arguably be said to be the most graphic portion of the piece. Bianchi’s body is lifted from the mattress and placed on the hood of the car, her underwear removed and, using gloves and sanitized equipment, a speculum and small camera are inserted in her, the image of the inside of her vagina projected onto a screen down stage left. 

This is all done very clinically – indeed, one can think of the invasiveness of the medical examinations that often follow cases of rape and/or assault – yet the fracturing of the image of the inside of one of the most intimate parts of her body with the rest of her body as well as with portions of her “speech” projected as text onto some of the screens upstage, serves, I believe, as one of the strongest aesthetic representations of the piece’s central thesis. These three elements, while they are all of Bianchi cannot be united back into the singular subject that was Bianchi prior to her rape. The violence in the gaps left by their stark separation (the spatial dynamics of the text upstage, Bianchi’s body down center, and the live feed stage left further enhance this) is thus not only representative of the violence of the experience but of the impossibility of performing any kind of resolving or healing ritual in the hope of something resembling re-unification of the self. This will not change the fact that the rape happened, and this is where I would say Bianchi’s piece is its most radical in how it gives no other option but to look, be confronted with, and actually listen to them while removing any expectation of “healing”.

Eventually Bianchi wakes up again (as an aside: this was rather touching, as in order to wake her up, one of the troupe members places themselves at her feet and gently wiggles them to stimulate her before going to grab her a can of soda), and though obviously in order for any of this to have happened, there needed to have been consent from all parties, the rawness and vulnerability expressed on her face as she came to was striking. How do you go through night after night performing in a show that you won’t remember? 

I still have some thoughts about this piece circling in my head, but I think overall (and because I need to move on) it’s safe to say that I liked this piece far better than the one I saw the night before.

And the same goes for the last piece on our list:

Le Jardin des délices, mise en scène de Philippe Quesne, la Carrière de Boulbon, Monday July 10, 2023

Funnily enough, the final show I saw was originally the only one I had purchased a ticket for in advance (seriously, the virtual waiting room for when the online box office opens is almost as chaotic as getting tickets for Taylor Swift – and I mean this sincerely). I didn’t mind though. Quesne is someone whose work I have really missed seeing, and given that it was being staged in an outdoor space that had not been used for about seven years (we had to take a bus to get there – I’ll spare you all the story of me sprinting in 100ºF heat to reach the bus because the bus from Villeneuve decided that schedules are…optional), I made it kind of my personal must-see.

And it was good to see Quesne’s work again – really good. I think he is one of the few (if not the only) theatre-makers working now who could create a piece on the apocalypse without burying it in an overwhelming mountain of depression, which is saying something. I’ve written about his other shows I’ve seen enough already, so I’ll spare most the formal details, but in brief, as usual, the piece eschews a clearly linear structure for a kind of post-dramatic diorama effect of different actors interacting with each other and with their environment. The only thing approaching a kind of story are the bookends. The piece opens with a bus being pushed onto the playing space – there is no explanation as to why it is broken, we just accept that it is. The group of actors exists the bus, then goes to fetch a rather large egg that it rolls onto and then nestles in the dirt before forming a circle around it and performing some kind of ritual. Again, no indication as to what the final endgame is here – indeed, I would say it’s not until the very end when the egg is “cracked”, a giant triangle is projected on the back wall of the quarry, and the actors try, in vain, to scramble up to it, that we maybe get a sense of purpose in the opening –, but, being familiar with Quesne’s work, that is kind of the point. 

Further reflecting this is the origin of the piece’s title, Bosch’s 1510 triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (which, as an aside, is not the name he gave to his own work, but anyway), and specifically the delightful chaos of the second and third panels (the world post Fall of Adam, and Hell, respectively). This work is one that many scholars over the centuries have taken great pains to try and decipher, made all the more difficult not just because of how much  is going on, but also how random it seems to be (there is a particularly silly image in the second panel of a naked man hoisting a mussel shell in which there is another man over his head that is somewhat reproduced here in the form of a little cabaret dance number which is just as Monty Python levels of silly as it sounds) that it almost seems to eschew cohesion. Yet, what Quesne proposes here by taking inspiration from Bosch is that, as during the time the artist was working on the piece, the world was undergoing a great deal of change, so to are we confronted now with some profound existential questions on how we live and/or structure our lives, our communities, and our relationship(s) with the world. This kind of questioning is itself rather chaotic, and Quesne – being very conscious, as usual, with the materiality and possibilities inherent in the spaces he works in – uses the large, almost otherworldly qualities of the quarry to his advantage in creating an aesthetic out of this chaos. 

It is truly a shame I only saw the piece once (though it is – or at least should still be – streaming on Arte) because while primary set pieces took place in the middle of the space (poetry readings, musical numbers, small speeches, mini recreations of imagery from Bosch’s work, a little magic trick, etc.) oftentimes, one or two of the actors would wander off to occupy themselves with something else to the point where, like with Bosch, the eye almost does not know where to look. But there is also a certain…poetry…to the way Quesne stages this plethora of action, to the way it reveals the material possibilities of the space, and the way the characters interact with each other in it, sharing a mutual unapologetic delight and curiosity to explore their environment. One could almost call them a rag-tag team in the middle of a kind of sci-fi western (feel free to make a Firefly reference here), and, in a sense, this little budding community is one of the only constants of the piece. 

Part of this latter point may also have to do with the fact that this piece also marks the 20-year anniversary of Quesne’s theatre company, Vivarium Studio. There were, in fact, a couple of performers who I recognized from other pieces of his I’ve seen. But part of directing a troupe like this for so long, and which has welcomed new members and said goodbye to former ones throughout the year, is the centrality of the need to constantly (re)create community. Yet, the piece does not make any grandiose statements about this community creation, instead presenting it as a kind of given part of being in the world. There is no great moral lesson deriving from conflict here. Indeed, there is barely any conflict as, even in instances where one actor steps on another’s toes, so to speak, the situation is more or less resolved without fanfare (there are bigger fish to fry, anyway). 

This is further enhanced by the sheer immensity of the space relative to the size of the actors (and one of the reasons I am questioning whether the piece will have the same effect when it tours in the fall, particularly at the MC93). It is, of course, absurd when, at the end, these little “ants” scramble to grab ladders that are obviously far too short, lean them against the wall of the quarry, and climb up to try and reach the center of the triangle. In the end, they end up huddled behind the eggshell (see the third panel of Bosch for the likely inspiration), but I don’t think I would read this ending as defeatist or nihilistic. I would say instead that it speaks more to the fact that though we must actually acknowledge the immensity of the challenges that are ahead of us, we also cannot do so while relying on established (and individualized) modes of problem solving. We must think differently, of course, but there is something to be said about the role of ludics (play) and creativity in this, particularly when done in communion with others who may view the problem through a slightly different lens. It’s not consensus…it’s something else. 

Like the piece I saw the night before, this one is not necessarily designed to please everyone (though this is more about a question of form rather than content), nor should theatre in general be created that way in the first place. There was a rather buttoned-up woman in front of me who kept texting throughout a vast majority of the piece about how incoherent she thought it was and why did this have to be the show that relaunched this venue, etc. (oh yeah, I read her texts over her shoulder, part of the whole spectators as a part of the overall experience of the spectacle thing), and it’s a shame that going into experiences with some kind of open curiosity isn’t more of a given. Ah well, I guess. That being said, as the last piece of my first (but definitely not final) Avignon festival, I am glad I ended things on a high note. And as this has already dragged on infinitely longer than I anticipated, I will end things here.

Until the rentree.

Posted on

A Trolley Problem

So, I normally prefer to wait a couple of days or so before writing on a show I’ve seen but given the insanity that is my pile of papers to be graded (and while I’m *allegedly* on holiday, no less), I’m going to break with that and instead dive right into the piece I just got out of seeing thanks to my slightly rambling voice notes. 

Don’t worry, I’ve toned down the rambling to a somewhat more legible and organized text.

As usual, I will be spoiling things (though given who reads this, I do not think that will be a problem). Suffice it to say, however, that after being slightly underwhelmed by Dans la mesure de l’impossible at the Odéon last month, I can confidently assert that Tiago Rodrigues has once again cemented himself in my mind as one of the best playwrights working today who really takes advantage of all the aesthetic possibilities afforded by live theatrical performance, even – and in this case especially – when such action could create instances of intense (but very likely purposeful) discomfort.

Let’s get into it.

Catarina et la beauté de tuer des fascistes, texte et mise en scène de Tiago Rodrigues, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, October 26, 2022

A family has reunited in their house in the Portuguese countryside for a yearly celebration. A long table has been set, as waiting for a feast (the “Não Passarão!” printed on the white tablecloth is a nice touch), the wine is flowing, and everyone is dressed to the nines.

Except “the nines” in this case mean long skirts, blouses, and shawls, evoking peasant dress of the early – mid 20th century (side note: I think my grandmothers had blouses that were very similar to some of the ones seen on the performers). This is true for both the women and the men in this family, with one notable exception who we will get to presently. In addition, they are all called “Catarina” regardless of gender identity or presentation, not after some long-gone matriarch, but rather of her dear friend, the first Catarina, who was shot three times in the back by a fascist soldier during a workers’ demonstration. Next to that soldier, however, stood another, the husband of the aforementioned matriarch of this family of Catarinas, whose inaction that day would result in him receiving three shots in the back from his wife, a promise to her friend to avenge her as well as ensure the injustice done to her will not go unpunished in the future. Every year, then, the family of Catarina’s gathers to kill a fascist, with each new member being fully initiated into the ritual at 26. After the execution, the fascist is buried under a cork tree. 

This year, it is the second-to-youngest Catarina’s turn to kill her first fascist, yet, unlike her predecessors, she does not pull the trigger. Instead, she hesitates, and so begins a dive into not only her own moral dilemma regarding her own family’s history and legacy, but also larger questions about revenge and, of course, how to fight back against fascism. 

It would be easy here, for instance, for a lesser playwright to craft a piece that centers its thesis around the notion that killing is morally wrong and/or that a mission of killing fascists makes those carrying out that mission almost as bad as those they are targeting. Thankfully, Rodrigues’s piece is more nuanced than that. As the younger Catarina points out, for instance, her family has been killing fascists for 75 years, yet this has done nothing to stem the rising tide of fascism in the country, including its ascent to the highest offices in Parliament. At the same time, however, when she counters by proposing that the family change strategies and instead work to change the minds of those who vote for fascism through writing articles, posting flyers, giving speeches, etc., her mother (also Catarina) rightly retorts that expecting a fair fight within the rules of democratic fair play in this case is impossible, precisely because the opposing party is known for openly flouting those rules anyway. Yet, what both (along with the other Catarinas) also acknowledge at different points during their dialogue is the fact that after this ritual, they will all go back to Lisbon to carry on with their lives until the next year’s killing.

In this above exchange over the dilemma regarding how one stops fascism, however, one can also note a critique of not only legacy, but also arguably of the frictions that have underscored antifascist movements both in the past as well as today. These “Catarinas”, for instance, are not just descendants – or offshoots – of a singular person, they are both a multiplication as well as a pluralization (and likely fracturing) of the “original” body as well as its singular purpose. The original has thus become contradictory in its continued propagation of itself, so we thus see in the mini Catarinas not only an inherent plurality that was already present in the original Catarina (as it is in all individuals), but also the inherent pluralities and contradictions in the many movements that align themselves as anti-fascist and must find a way to co-exist. Returning to the piece, the dilemma that young Catarina and her mother have, then, has less to do with the “legitimacy” of fascism or its place in public discourse (both agree that it is something that must be fought against), but over different understandings of notions of morality and justice that ultimately shift the focus away from the much larger problem that is fascism’s continued rise in the country which neither of their two perspectives on its own has managed to stave off (as evidenced by comments made at the start of the piece regarding recent policies made by the new government). One thing that the older Catarina does bring up, however, is the importance around speech, specifically, the danger in allowing a fascist to talk, to spread their rhetoric and infect the larger political landscape like a virus, thus becoming harder to stamp out.

I’ll return to the question of speech momentarily, but first I must get to the second dilemma that comes up in the piece: the infamous trolley problem. In short, after Catarina starts having doubts during the start of the piece, her uncle, remembering that she had a particular affinity for riddles as a child, poses the trolley problem to her, supposedly to help her get out of her head and not think too much about what she is about to do (what counts, after all, is that she makes a choice, that she acts, in this case by shooting her fascist). Predictably, however, instead of ultimately choosing between whether to divert the runaway train so it hits her village or so it hits a lone house with her mother inside, Catarina declares there is a third option: putting herself in front of the train tracks so that she is killed, and the weight of her corpse would slow the train down. Her uncle, however, is very frustrated with this, claiming she has ruined the exercise, but also that it does not actually matter since she will have to make a choice at some point anyway. Yet, Catarina does make a choice, though it is not the one the other Catarinas would have liked. She chooses to not act, in a sense, putting herself between the bullets and their initial target in an act of self-sacrifice that speaks to, perhaps, her hope that some kind of justice that is larger than what is being carried out will prevail and put an end to what she and her family have been fighting with the efficacy of repeatedly lobbing off heads of an ever-growing hydra. 

This, then, brings us to the final monologue in the piece – featuring the one actor mentioned earlier who is not dressed in peasant wear – following a last round of chaos that sees all the Catarinas save one (young Catarina’s male cousin, Catarina, who does not speak much, save for when he has his headphones in) shot dead and the fascist prisoner still alive. And it is in this final act, as is usual for Rodrigues’s best pieces, that the piece’s full embrace of theatricality comes in like a sucker punch to the face.

See, the fascist set for execution that day was a speech writer, arguably the one who can most easily disseminate propaganda because he has a way with words, or the power of the pen in the art of communication. After dusting himself off, readjusting his tie, and slipping on his jacket, he who was formerly silent comes down center stage and starts giving – and I’ll just be blunt here – one of the most blatantly fascistic monologues I have ever heard in my life. There is zero attempt to hide what it is he is doing or the ideology behind his words, given his open use of coded language or symbolism (dog-whistling) as well as his, at one point, gesticulating that comes very close to a Nazi salute, yet in his open-ness he also directly confronts those of us seated in the house, whose presence had already been acknowledged several times by the other actors before the start of this final monologue. Yet, he is a survivor, one who not only escaped an execution, but also who we had watched squirm in fear at the prospect of death approaching. Such a trajectory could normally be used to inspire sympathy on the part of an audience, but here that expectation is ultimately used against those of us seated in the house. We are being confronted, yes, but more precisely, we are being confronted with the fact that, when this man starts speaking, we in the house are at risk of ourselves transforming into that soldier from the story that serves as the origin myth for the Catarinas: the one who sat by, saw what happened, and did nothing.

In essence, this final sequence works the way it does largely because it happens in a theatre, and more precisely because it also forces a confrontation and open acknowledgement of the fact that those listening to this monologue are in a space that is governed by a certain set of rules and regulations for audience behavior. Namely, we are to sit down and shut up and not participate nor react directly other than a laugh or an applause. Granted, all of these “rules” are themselves artificial, given that theatre prior to the 19th century was very much not like this as far as publics are concerned, but the way in which these rules have been largely internalized by theatregoing publics meant that, to a certain degree, this last monologue became something of an endurance contest to see how long this guy could go before someone shut him up.

Eventually, towards the end of his speech, there were people in the house who started speaking up or vocalizing their disapproval. I started hissing and stamping my feet at some point, but I also remember thinking to myself that I wanted to say something or boo this guy earlier, but I didn’t. I didn’t because I realize now that while I was being confronted with his rhetoric, I was also listening to it in a space that imposes a silence on my presence there. I then found myself thinking: would I be looked at as a weirdo, as someone who was taking this performance too seriously, if I did react how I wanted to? At the same time, nothing that man said was outside the realm of possibility for anyone in politics who aligns themselves to the right of the political spectrum (and honestly yes, I will go far enough to say that). Eventually the reaction and response from the crowd did get him off the stage and the lights went out, though it took a minute for anyone to start applauding (it was almost as though that moment between the end of the piece and the return to our own temporal reality needed to be prolonged a bit). But what was truly fascinating about this was the way in which here theatre functioned as a means to reveal both the little holes or fissures through which this kind of discourse can flow through unobstructed, as well as how almost used to it we’ve become to the point where it can slip in and flourish right under our noses before we even think to stamp it out, and that is terrifying.

I’ll end here with one final comment on the constant quoting of Brecht in the piece. On the one hand, yes, the use of another playwright whose work was dedicated to raising class consciousness as well as fighting against right-wing totalitarianism and/or fascism does make sense here, especially considering that one of the fundamental characteristics of Brecht’s theatre is the alienation effect, and its role in raising a greater collective consciousness as to the larger superstructures that shape our society (particularly in terms of distribution of power). Yet, while Rodrigues’s piece never aesthetically hides that it is a work of theatre, it also does not go quite so far as to try and replicate alienation. Instead, it makes its public complicit, particularly in its re-shifting of the locus of action onto each seated audience member during the last monologue. Call it a new kind of consciousness-raising, maybe.

Oh, and for the record (and not that this counts for much), Catarina’s mother was right…shutting them up is paramount.

It may be time to go back and listen to the Dead Kennedys a bit…while grading.

Posted on

I wish to make a complaint…

Right.

We’re going to skip the usual apologies for not being here writing about things. I was busy with the book. I’ve been writing plenty (…ish). But right now, I’m in a funny little limbo space which involves waiting for my copy editor to get back in touch with me (and maybe finalize a publication date…no I’m not silently freaking out about this, why in the world would anyone think that…?), and I need stimulation. Thus, here we are.

Bref.

The theme with theatre so far this season (so…one piece that I’ll get to in a bit plus what I saw this summer) can be summed up as follows:

Why are we putting this show on?

This question applies less to new works and more to restaging of classical pieces – and coincidentally was inspired by what I saw this summer at Epidauros.

Honestly, after the undeniable success of Aris Biniaris’ direction of Prometheus Bound in bringing Aeschylus’ text unabashedly into the 21st century, injecting it with a timeliness and urgency that are often absent in productions of classical Greek texts, my expectations were high. Alas, the show we saw this year was Sophocles’ Ajax, and if this summer’s experience taught me anything it is “Why the fuck is anyone producing this show?”

Truly, I ask you who are reading this, a piece that centers around two men having what essentially amounts to a dick-measuring contest over who gets another warrior’s [Achilles’] armor has what, exactly, to say about our contemporary existence? Of course, the answer to that question may be some rather nuanced or complex insight into our own relationships with notions of pride, glory, militarism, etc., but given that the overall aesthetic of this piece seemed to jump around between tragedy, comedy, and – during one bizarre sequence – modern dance piece that vaguely evoked German Expressionist cinema à la The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, without any discernable reason, my only take away of the whole experience was “We did this because it was on the repertoire rotation. Yay?”

(And yes, now that I don’t have to worry about maintaining an air of critical impartiality, the opinions come out).

This brings us to tonight’s production commentary:

William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, mise en scène de François Orsoni, Théâtre de la Bastille, September 13, 2022

Before I get to this, I need to acknowledge how odd this season at the Bastille is going to be. This is not only due to Jean-Marie Hordé’s retirement after 32 years as artistic director, but also to the fact that, administratively, the theatre is technically in transition mode. Up until now, it has officially been classified as independent (so, neither public nor private). While it does receive some subsidies from the City, as well as from other public and private organizations, for a good part of its history as a theatre, it existed in a state of financial precarity, with Hordé’s programming choices and directorial approach being part of the reason why it reached some state of financial stability at all.

(As an aside, this is all very brief, I know, but we don’t have time to get into the nitty-gritty of it here).

Following Hordé’s retirement, the theatre will be reclassed as a public theatre (though which classification it will receive remains unknown), joining the country’s larger network of such theatres / cultural spaces, as well as becoming eligible for more substantial State and/or Regional and Departmental funding (though given the direction public funding for basically anything has been going these last 20+ years, it remains to be seen how much that will actually change concretely). Yet, what this also means is the risk of a fundamental change in the theatre’s identity in terms of productions, namely: will a space known for being both daring/innovative and, at times, literary (these may sound like polar opposites, but I assure you, they don’t need to be) fall victim to the “exchangism” and stagnancy that has plagued other public theatre houses? At this point, who knows (a lot of this will largely depend on who the Ministry ultimately selects to take over the position – as in, will they actually pick someone with a truly daring vision and not just a surface-level air of one which will sooner or later betray an alliance with the status quo rather than an active questioning and destabilizing of it). For now, the 2022/2023 season is the last one Hordé completely designed, so I’ve made it a point to see practically everything.

But for the love of god, why in the world did we have to start with Coriolanus?

Much like with Ajax, this production, if nothing else, answered the question as to why no one really produces Coriolanus anymore. Come to think of it, I don’t think I had ever read it in any of my theatre classes prior to seeing it. A quick google search will reveal that one of the many roadblocks contemporary audiences have with this piece is how blatantly undemocratic (and, yeah, I’ll go there, fascistic) it is – though this is a complaint that stretches back to the nineteenth century as well. The titular character, despite being the center of the tragedy, is, to put it mildly, an unapologetically vain asshole. He goes off to war to fight the Volsci and, after claiming victory for Rome, is elected consul but hates it in part because he has to play the role of a politician who must endear himself to the common people (though, as it is mentioned several times, his war wounds should be proof enough of the love he has for his country), and, unfortunately, Coriolanus openly despises the common people.

By the way, these same common people are also starving due to lack of bread, but I digress…

Anyway, the long and short of it goes like this: Coriolanus becomes consul – Coriolanus is an asshole – tribunal takes advantage of this – tribunal manipulates the people (because of course, they are easy to twist about like that) into turning against Coriolanus – Coriolanus is banished – Coriolanus pledges loyalty to his former enemy and vows to help him attack Rome – Coriolanus’s mother convinces him not to attack and to draft a peace treaty – Coriolanus realizes he’s been an idiot, agrees to peace, then gets stabbed by his enemy because of his betrayal and because his enemy realizes that Coriolanus actually has the potential to gain people’s respect after all.

Also, the people are still starving in the end, but whatever. Some plot threads don’t need resolving, I suppose.

Granted, Shakespeare did write this play during a time of great duress in England. Queen Elizabeth I had just died (well…uncanny), James I had just come into power, the theatres reopening after two years of closure following a plague (also uncanny), and a series of popular uprisings in the Midlands following the enacting of new enclosure laws and privatization of access to lands that – surprise – led to a rise in hunger amongst the peasantry. 

Again, the people are starving. 

In his director’s note, Orsoni acknowledges the current as well as historical problematics around staging this piece (notably, how fascists used it to further their own agenda in the late 1930s), while stating that the key for him is striking the balance between Coriolanus and the tribunal that ultimately works to oust him from Roman society. The result is a piece that gives you no one really to root for, except, maybe, “the people”, this nebulous mass whose existence Shakespeare’s text not only questions the legitimacy of, but also reduces down to the status of object used to further the interests of others. 

At the same time, this particular staging did play a bit with aesthetic convention when it came to telegraphing the social/class status of its characters. Coriolanus, for instance, wears an adidas track suit – zipped up only halfway – and slides (at one point with socks) for the majority of the piece, and speaks with a certain affected gruffness that is otherwise often used in performance to designate someone on the lower and/or working-class end of the socioeconomic ladder. In other words, his way of being on the stage in all its “boorish-ness” goes against the codified image associated with someone of his station. A career military man (as he is) may be gruff and lack in some finesse, but not necessarily to this extent.

In contrast, the tribunal especially – and to a certain degree the people as well – speak more clearly, if not with an affected refinement in their speech, then with no discernable additional affectation to their voices that would immediately place them on a particular rung on the socioeconomic ladder. Yet, where one does get a sense of social stratification is in the question of space: Coriolanus essentially occupies the stage – as well as has the capacity to jump down to the space immediately in front of the stage in a sort of crossing of boundaries – while the tribunal + the people are (with little exception) relegated to the lower space in front of the stage (and seated on chairs for the most part). The spatial divide only further enhances the dilemma already present in the performances: those who are “lower” are, after all, seeking to depose a leader who openly despises them, yet they also do so while exploiting a supposed weakness that largely informs the leader’s hatred in the first place.

The Roman Republic, in other words, loses its legitimacy precisely because that which allows for its existence – the will and voices of the voting citizenry – is presented as unreliable because of how it is used by others with more influence.

Now, I do not want to go so far as to say that this is the ethos of this specific staging because I do not believe it is. There is a reason, I think, why the plebians are played more “nobly”, so to speak, than the patricians. But it does speak to a quandary within the text itself that, I believe, makes it incredibly difficult to translate the commentary that I think Orsoni was trying to develop (a critique on power, ambition, selfishness, and what gets lost in the struggle for influence). And again, I find myself wondering why this piece in particular was the Shakespeare piece that had to be adapted, other than the circumstantial parallels (one of them purely coincidental) between the time of its writing and ours. 

At the same time, it is getting incredibly late, and I have an early workout in the morning. 

Until the next rant review.

Posted on

Some news…

It’s been rather quiet here lately. 

I would say this is due to the amount of work / grading that started piling up right before the Christmas holidays (and that I only just managed to finish dealing with last week) but having to juggle several piles of exams while maintaining a blog and other projects (aka: a dissertation) isn’t exactly new for me. I should, theoretically, be used to this. No, the lack of posting right now I think arguably is derived from a couple of factors, one of which is more positive than the other.

So, we’ll start with the good: over the holiday break, I signed a contract to get my dissertation published.

I set a deadline to turn in the final manuscript at the end of August – because let’s be honest, teaching right now is anything but predictable, as far as workload is concerned – but I would nevertheless ideally like to have finished with it earlier (end of spring if we’re being optimistic). I have to rework my introduction and conclusion to add some things that came up during the Occupations at the Odéon and other theatres last spring (and also make the Intro in particular less…dissertation-y) and replace two play critiques with some other ones I actually would have originally included had I seen them sooner, so needless to say, I’ve got my editing work cut out for me over the next few months. But I am glad I waited a year before revisiting this project and getting it book proposal ready. Looking at it with fresh eyes not only makes me appreciate it a lot more, but it also helps immensely with the whole cutting/editing thing. Distance has made me less self-critical, I guess. 

It is also somewhat hard to believe that this is actually happening, particularly given how quickly the process from proposal submission to peer review to contract went. Other than the four weeks between the submission for peer review and the official feedback, everything else happened within a matter of days. To be honest, given the timing of everything (I actually signed the contract on Christmas Eve), I was almost expecting having to wait until after the new year to receive any feedback at all, much less discuss contract specifications. In any case, what this does mean is that now my academic work is actually going to be out there for other people to engage with (because let’s be honest, no one is really going to be combing through ProQuest or university dissertation databases for research), so I may as well get any lingering notions of imposter syndrome out of the way now (yes, those still exist even post-dissertation defense. Surprise…)

So yes, editing and rewrites are going to take up almost any chunk of time that I have that is not already devoted to lesson planning and grading. But I did also mention a slightly less positive reason for my lack of writing. It’s nothing really serious, per say. It’s more an irksome annoyance. 

Basically, this season (with some exception) has been, shall we say, lacking.

Oh, there have been some pieces that have stood out (again, I had a LOT of grading to do that just kind of got dumped on me at once…thanks exam schedules that make no sense), but for the most part, even reserving tickets to go see a show has been kind of…meh. The exceptions are the MC93 and the Théâtre de la Bastille (absolutely no surprise on that last one), but as for Nanterre and La Colline, my desire to go back to either of them right now is rather mixed.

Let’s start with the first one.

I already started to feel a bit apprehensive about going back to Nanterre a couple years ago (god, what is time anyway now), after Philippe Quesne announced he would not be renewing his tenure as artistic director there. This is partly because one of the reasons I really enjoyed going to that theatre in the first place was because of his approach to programming. Not everything was exactly a roaring success, but it was different, it tried things, it pushed the formal limits of what theatrical performance could be. And it was working. I mentioned this in my chapter on his time at Nanterre, but one of the things that consistently stood out for me every time I went to a show was how young the audience skewed. This is an anomaly. And one would normally think that maybe – just maybe – having an artistic director who has seemed to have tapped into something to get a new generation of audiences interested in devoting a little bit of their time to come and check out what was on offer would be, I don’t know, a good thing, especially when so much conversation centers around how difficult it is to get new publics in seats.

(As an aside: the above also taps into questions of decolonizing the theatre space, something that is badly needed, but would merit its own dedicated discussion. So, for the moment, know that I have that in the back of my mind, even if I won’t be explicitly discussing it right now).

I knew this season going back to Nanterre was going to be different regardless of who was at the helm because the theatre was undergoing major renovations, but I don’t know if I can properly explain how fast my hope turned to disappointment following the two shows I have seen there so far.

The first of these was a holdover from Quesne’s time there (thank you COVID for delaying it at least…). It was weird. It was experimental, post-dramatic (hell, post-post-dramatic), different, and it gave me a slight tinge of hope that the creative spirit would still have something of a home here.

And then a nonsense production of Henry VI happened that was just full of so much confusion and at the same time predictability that I actually regretted giving it a chance in the first place. Yes, this is very harsh. No, I am not putting any of the blame for this on the actors (several were actually quite good). This is all on director Christophe Rauck who, coincidentally, is the new artistic director at Nanterre. Granted, I should have known this would happen, given how “classical” his programming choices were skewing based on the season announcement, but…I am a person who believes in chances, sometimes to my detriment.

So yeah, I will likely be going back, but not as frequently.

As for La Colline, even if the debate surrounding the production of Mouawad’s Mère (specifically, his choice on who to work with for the music, and his absolutely tone-deaf response to legitimate critiques and questions from the #MeTooTheatre movement) had not happened, I very much doubt I would have gone to see the thing anyway. Simply put: I have been bored with his pieces, and his programming choices, for a while now. Honestly, if I wasn’t working on La Colline for my dissertation, I doubt I would have gone as regularly as I did during my research.

Funny enough, I am actually working on re-editing my chapter on La Colline right now, and I am a bit surprised as to how much I held back on some criticisms I have about his approach to artistic direction. Editing while still maintaining some trace of “objectivity” is going to be a…fascinating experience.

So that brings us to here. Currently, I am sitting on my couch waiting for a technician who should have been here 30 minutes ago to help me deal with some internet connectivity issues. Alas, I do not believe this individual is coming. Thank goodness for unlimited phone data. 

Posted on

It’s 01h00, and I have several thoughts…

Some of you (and in particular, those who follow me on other platforms) are probably wondering…

‘Say, Effie, you’ve been to quite a number of shows since you last posted. Why haven’t you written about any of them?’

Good question. In short, it largely has to do with two factors: the craze of my work schedule these past few weeks (because I still just can’t say no to things when there’s a payment involved, so guess who’s back to translating transcripts on top of a 22h/wk teaching schedule? Me), and the simple fact that I haven’t really seen anything to inspire the need to write about it yet. Given that I’m no longer in dissertation research mode, I’m giving myself a lot more leeway when it comes to putting more energy into critical engagements with pieces that either I didn’t like (though a strong dislike for something hasn’t really been a deterrent for me writing about it in the past) or worse, felt very ‘meh’ about. Yet, perhaps this also speaks to my larger frustrations with the state of theatre right now, something that has only gotten even more punctuated post-dissertation.

This in particular brings me to some things I have been (and am still somewhat) wrestling with regarding my manuscript revisions, specifically putting my own voice into things. Reading over my chapters again, I do wonder sometimes if the way I outline things truly speaks most accurately to my own views not just as a writer / researcher / scholar (etc.), but also in terms of where I align myself socially and politically. In other words, I personally value honesty and transparency in these things, yet I do wonder sometimes if I come off as disingenuous, if I read as though I speak in cliché. 

More precisely, recently I’ve been ruminating over these questions (and personal judgements over my own work…as usual) with regards to eventual revisions / rewrites I am going to have to do on my conclusion, which, along with my introduction, is very likely going to be the chapter that changes the most if (no…“when”) I successfully get this thing published. One of the biggest things that has been giving me quite a bit of grief lately is an argument that I introduced in the original text – and that I want to develop further – regarding the need for continued State funding of public theatres / the arts in general in France. For one thing, the very notion of having to in some way defend the presence of the State is something that runs counter to my own politics regarding the need (or, you know, not) of this particular type of power / organizational apparatus. Yet, at the same time, even if I were to advance a formulation such as “If the State had to continue to exist, it should do so on the basis that it actively distribute its financial assets towards assuring truly equitable access to a plurality of forms of creative expression” (and note that I insist on the “if” there), that still does not address the fundamental problems on which the relationship between the State and culture / the arts in France was built on. And this is arguably where a lot of my frustrations with much of what I see come from.

(As an aside: though I wish I had time to write a detailed take-down of the latest manifest posted by Mouawad regarding his decision not to suspend a performance of an upcoming show due to the histories of some of those involved with cases of assault and, yes, murder, and his labeling of the #metootheatre movement as a “witch hunt”, time and other commitments have had to take precedence. Needless to say, however, it is likely going to be a VERY long time before I set foot in La Colline again. I bring this up here mostly because situations like this – in which predators are being protected and those who speak out against them are attacked – also make up a large part of my frustrations. For this, however, I want to focus on something that runs more deeply, yet also very much intertwines with this.)

One thing I think it is high time to acknowledge is that the decentralization project – particularly in the early, “official” days under Malraux, was a kind of colonialist project. Implanting centers of cultural production / diffusion in various territories, each with a direct link back to a centralized power (an arm of the State, if you will) with the aim of crafting or cultivating the imagining of a “unified” nation both in terms of concrete territory and in the linking of this territory to an abstract sense of identity is, in a rudimentary sense, colonialism. Look, we’ve planted our flag here. Now this territory is linked with us, which means our identity is also tied to holding on to this territory, etc. (you’re going to have to cut me some slack here, as it’s close to 1am and I am in full ramble mode). While the ideal of financing the creation of any and all pieces, supposedly without prejudice, seems rather nice on paper, it rings somewhat differently when one starts to reckon with the colonialist touches that this attitude is, in a way, a product of. I mention this briefly in my dissertation, but though it was ambitious, Malraux’s decentralization project was not exactly universally welcome, territorially speaking. Indeed, there were several critiques being leveled at the time of the planning / building of the Maisons de la Culture that they were being more or less imposed on the towns they were built in, rather than rising up organically.

In other words, a project that states as its aim that it wants to foster more creativity eschews the kind of grassroots development that could not only have allowed for this creativity to blossom, but to do so on more localized – indeed pluralized – terms, does so first on establishing a certain perception of itself as dominant / the common reference point. That is, it’s not just theatre that’s being created here. It is theatre that is being created under the umbrella of a certain imagining of the role of the theatre in the greater social fabric, specifically, an imagining that is derived from Malraux’s own conceptualizing of the role of “Culture” in shaping both an individual as well as the community / territory to whom that individual belongs. While this imagining has evolved over the years – now we’re, of course, in the neo-liberal “what [monetary] value does or can theatre bring to our society” stage – the presence of any kind of central imagining at all is already rather limiting as far as creativity is concerned. The way a State – and consequently, any extension of the State – imagines itself can have a tremendous effect not only on what kinds of spaces it creates, but what conditions it puts in place in order to access these spaces. These conditions can range from economic barriers to educational and /or professional qualifications to questions of language and jargon (specifically, a not-quite-implicit preference for certain terminologies or phrases to describe particular situations or relational dynamics, especially when the use of alternative vocabularies could result in a) the exposure of the illusory nature of these relationships and b) the destabilizing of a sense of control those in power have over delimiting / determining access to space), but regardless of how they show up, the fact that they exist at all to me speaks to a certain impossibility for any kind of existence of a truly pluralized – hell a truly decolonized, since fully decolonizing all spaces is something I fundamentally believe needs to happen within and outside the arts – theatre space so long as the decentralization model, and the State’s role in the development and imagining of this model, remain critically unexamined. We cannot, in other words, take it as a “given” that the State has a certain benevolence regarding the funding of cultural projects. This kind of complacency is what leads to the kind of creative stasis and frustration seen now, at least in my opinion.

This is not, however, to say that there are not folks doing very interesting work here. There are. Creatively and thematically challenging works about, yet the way the funding schemes are set up mean that not only will these works be almost in a constant state of competition among each other for – essentially – scraps, but it also becomes far more likely that voices that are already either underrepresented or shut out will continue to be so. 

So with that, when I posit that “If the State had to continue to exist…” I truly mean “If” because as of right now, an alternative – and much more creatively open and autonomous and sustainable – model does not exist. That doesn’t mean that it can’t. But I think, and I’ll close on this, that part of the way we can get to a point where we can realize the possibility of creating such a new model is through both seeking out and seeing / reading works by artists whose voices are continually marginalized, yet who still speak out to pointedly critique this system, as well as embracing the notion of plurality (the politics of the ‘s’, as I call it) and – most importantly – not ignoring the tensions that arise when one confronts this notion directly with the State and the way it imagines itself through the avenue of cultural production / development.

Posted on

First review of the season! (Alternative title: procrastination via writing…)

Technically right now I should be working on prepping a talk from my somewhat scattered notes for a conference this Friday, but the need to jot down some thoughts on the first show I saw this season has taken precedence in my already very full brain so…here we are.

And anyway, I’ve still got tomorrow (Sunday), Monday afternoon and all day Wednesday to deal with organizing my notes. 

So, with that out of the way, let’s get down to it. The return of theatre commentary / critique for the 2021 – 2022 season begins, as it should, with a return to the Théâtre de la Bastille:

Illusions perdues (d’après Honoré de Balzac) dir. Pauline Bayle. Théâtre de la Bastille, Sept. 16, 2021

Before getting into the details of this, I want to open with a conversation I was having yesterday that more or less captured one the thing that’s been nagging me about this piece since I left the theatre. In brief, the initial topic of conversation was the upcoming Spielberg remake of West Side Story, but this later evolved into a larger questioning of the ubiquity of revivals and remakes in (especially) the American theatre and film industry – that is, the use of already established IP as an assurance of returns on investment – versus the focus in France (at least in the public theatre where it is more or less mandated) on créations, new works, many of which nowadays do not even have a published text version that could then be used to produce a hypothetical “revived” version at some point in the future. In short, it is a theatre that is decidedly of its time, thus making any return to previously produced / written works subject to more direct scrutiny in its act of recall.

In short, in the choice to bring something “back to life”, so to speak, one must not only contend with the general “why”, but more precisely with “why now”. What, in other words, about the present moment makes it urgent to bring a piece / a text back again, especially when there are years if not generations of temporal distance to contend with? This is in no way to suggest that revivals are fruitless endeavors (see, especially Aris Biniaris’ truly exceptional Prometheus Bound at this year’s Athens/Epidaurus festival…which I should have written about but didn’t), but rather that the production/rehearsal phase demands a level of critical engagement that goes beyond the obvious.

Which brings us to Pauline Bayle’s Illusions perdues. I’ll start by getting this out of the way: the performances themselves were excellent, particularly Jenna Thiam as the lead Lucien. The fluidity with which the other four members of the troupe switched back and forth between multiple roles was also especially well done, as was the minimal stage design with the central, white square, flanked on all four sides by the audience evoking the crushing intimacy of a boxing ring. The energy was there. The run-time was just shy of 2.5 hours, but I never felt it particularly dragged. Even with the many cuts made to Balzac’s text in fashioning the script, the choice to focus on his dialogues did give us, for the most part, well-rounded characters, even if some were only inhabited by a performer for a moment. And yes, while I normally find the whole “oh look there is a person being rude / interrupting the performance in the audience…oh wait it’s actually another actor” thing a bit trite, the fact that it was consistent rather than an “ah-ha! Gotcha!” moment, that we could trace the actors in their various seat (and costume) shifts amongst the public, meant that the space as a whole became wrapped up in the urgency of the shifts and transformations being imposed on Lucien. There was no room for respite, for escape away from prying eyes, in other words. 

And yet, even with all this, one thing I could not help but think, and that is still itching at me now, is if this piece, and in particular the point of view that Balzac’s novel – and by extension Bayle’s adaptation and staging of it – has something to say about our current era. That Balzac’s text can be read as something of a forewarning as to the impeding dangers of capitalism (note: the novel depicts a Paris on the brink of the Industrial Revolution) is not, in itself, a new perspective, at least with regards to current discourses (well, at least in the circles I run in) about the urgency for an anti-capitalist model. What I was left wondering by this piece, in short, is what else did it bring to the conversation, other than a few easily telegraphed connections, and story beats that have become almost too familiar. Lucien, young, green, naïve, arrives in Paris from Angouleme with dreams of becoming a great writer. Lucien then realizes that the machinations of the world he’s entered into are basically in direct conflict with his desires, and suddenly finds himself tangled in a mess of power and money and influence. Lucien falls. In the end, Lucien sells out. The audience watches. 

Yet, as true as it is that the advent of capitalism and the cult of money and profits has resulted in societal and cultural shifts, especially with regards to interpersonal relationships, capitalism is not exactly unique in this. Moreover, this cannot be the only facet of capitalism that is depicted and thus placed up for public scrutiny and critique on the stage, as – like the Paris in Bayle’s production, or, hell, even more accurately, a hydra – capitalism has many (violent, exploitative, destructive) heads, and concentrating on just the one is not going to do much good when the others are snapping at you. What I am saying, in other words, is that we need different kinds of storytelling in our theatres, and in our critiques. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I made the argument for re-thinking what, in France, had historically been conceived as territorial decentralization to a decentralization of thought. We urgently need other perspectives on our stages, other ways of approaching / appropriating / interpreting text because the alternative is that discourse gets stuck and publics can only see half the picture. Do we need more stories of young folks with big dreams coming into a city only to have reality sucker-punch them in the face? Maybe we do. But maybe we should be actively making space for possibilities to approach them differently.