52-54

Yeah, it’s been a bit slow here lately. 

Tuesday was especially uneventful (another day of reading…yippee), and I’m really starting to wonder (again) if there isn’t more I should theoretically be doing regarding a little thing called my ‘as-yet-to-be-written prospectus’. The nagging feeling of imposter syndome – that I’m not doing this right/that my project is nonsense – tends to creep up at times like this, but, let’s be honest, isn’t that just part of the fun of grad school???
Anyway

Wednesday I decided to take some time away from all the reading I have been doing – the headache I woke up with that morning may or may not have been a factor in this – and, after my weekly market stop/meal prepping, I decided to spend the rest of my afternoon before my 6pm theatre class at the high school walking around and just being in the world. Before I could fully be, however, I made a quick visit to Messieurs-Dames, where I finally learned the value in going to a salon for a (free) bang trim, versus just hacking at them yourself and hoping for the best.

The rest of my afternoon was spent looking at art.

This weekend is the annual Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain, or FIAC, and while I am in no place to shell out 30eu to go and see what’s on at the Grand Palais, I am more than happy traipsing about looking at free art installations around the city.

And speaking of artistic things….

I think I may have finally found a show that puts these ideas I’m trying to formulate regarding notions of plurality, temporality and the ‘destruction’ of the semiotic order on the stage into practice. This was a play with four actors – two men, two women – and for the first quater of it or so, the dialogue was structured in a way that although only one of the men and one of the women were ‘playing’ in the lit area downstage, when their mouths began to move, it became very obvious that the voices that came out were not theirs but those of their counterparts standing in the blacked out upstage area. As the show continued, this notion of dislocated, decentered voice and identity was explored further, with the ‘voicing’ actors – who were also mic’d – sometimes speaking to one another, sometimes directly addressing the silent counterpart of the voiced actor, even though they were responding to the latter’s words. Hell, at one point, even the formerly silent actors added their voices into the mix.
And just because it has to do with my project, I need to talk about the space. Much like my impression of the studio space at the Comédie Française, here I couldn’t help but get the impression that the actors were more ‘larger-than-life’ figures instead of characters, but this time it may have been a result of the fact that the stage space is actually wider than the house. It almost felt like it could consume you, swallow you. Comforting, but threatening at the same time. It’s beautiful.