Parallels

I’ve been thinking a lot since my last post about when to update again. At first, I thought I’d write something during my vacation in Greece this August, but internet connectivity being almost non-existant where I was, I put that off.

 

Besides, disconnecting for a while felt pretty nice.

 

Then I came back and what with la rentrée/back to school in full swing, and the general hectic nature of September, I almost felt as though I had no time to myself to think of anything but what was happening the next day — hell, the next few hours.

 

And so I figured the best way to come back would be to write a post after seeing my first play of the season, Infidèles by tgStan at the Théâtre de la Bastille.

 

The play happened.

 

Then this past weekend, the rug was pulled out from under me once again.

 

I couldn’t help but think of parallels today while I was teaching, how similar certain events in my life have been, how I’m in a somewhat similar place now that I was a year ago. Somewhat. The difference is in the details, and the circumstances being what they are, I feel a slight tinge of hope this time around. Not necessarily  for any particular outcome, but hope in the unknown, in the not closing of a link, a connection. Hope in realizing that there are wonderful people who we want in our lives, who we choose to want in our lives. And who, sometimes for reasons we can barely comprehend, choose to want us around as well, even and especially in the shit times.

 

And I feel lucky this time around that, when loneliness almost snuck on and grabbed hold of me, I knew exactly who I could contact. That’s a pretty wonderful thing to be confident about, isn’t it?

 

I’m going to be wading through some heavy things these next few days, so you all might have to bear with me. For now though, I can say that I feel okay. Someone dear to me told me I was strong this morning, and I believed them. So there must be some truth to that.

 

I am a lion. I can still roar.

 

With that, the plays I saw this week.

 

 

The first, as I mentioned, was Infidèles at Bastille. I figured going there for my first show of the year was a good choice, given that it is still my favorite theatre in the city. And this show did not disappoint. It’s based off a script of a similar name by Ingmar Bergman, and I’m just going to take this moment right now to say I have never seen anything by Bergman. So, we can all just get that little bit of nonsense out of the way.

 

The play centers around the retelling of a woman’s infidelity, her journey from faithful wife and mother to woman who sleeps with her husband’s best friend (and the fallout that follows, especially for her 9-year-old daughter, here played by an actress in her forties. Trust me, it actually really works). The opening sees the four actors – two men, two women – standing downstage, and instead of launching straight into the narrative, begin by performing a sort of character creation exercise. Essentially, one of the male actors turns to one of the women, and asks her to describe the woman at the center of the story – who she, it becomes abundantly clear, will eventually be playing. She in turn gives a bit of information about her – her name, age, career, a bit of her personality – before, in the course of describing her family, designating the principle roles the other  actors will play (her husband, her daughter, the husband’s friend who she eventually sleeps with). From there, the play moves into the narrative, but not before some comments are made over whether or not this retelling will ‘work’ (sly glance at audience who they know are there to see a play).

 

In some ways, this sort of putting into performance of the process of ‘becoming’ that often defines a large part of an actor’s work seemed very similar to what I saw in Bovary last year. Exposing the invisible processes of the actor’s craft to draw attention to the theatricality, the fictionality of what was about to happen. It renders the whole thing less illusory but also more honest…? As in, there is no question here of anyone trying to get  anyone else to believe, truly believe anything. And it works rather well in cases like this because when small flubs happen, there is already an understanding in place about the possibility of imperfection. Imperfection, in fact, becomes part and parcel of the whole experience. And in the end, when the actors reconvene back downstage and – while sometimes quickly glancing back out at the audience – ask if what they did worked, if it ended up being a show after all, there was in that question a recognition that, despite anything that did/did not go as planned, it was still theatre. Theatre in its (almost) entirety, creation to presentation. The moment before to the moment after. Yes, none of it is « real », but does that really matter?

 

 

And the second show was one I saw yesterday, Sunday, at Nanterre. How appropriate, to find a temporary moment of solace in something I love.

 

Hilariously, the play was called Hate, but that didn’t really have much to do with my current state of mind. Just a weird coincidence.

 

The subtitle of this play (and I’m going to translate from the French), is « an attempted dialogue with a horse », and yes, before any of you ask, there was an actual horse on stage.

 

A horse, and a naked woman. Well, almost naked. She wore a belt with a fanny pack full of carrots (for the horse), and a small holster where she placed a plastic sword.

 

It goes without saying that this whole thing was really more of a monologue than a true dialogue, although about a third of the way through, the actress, Laëtitia Dosch, who also wrote the piece, also started speaking as the horse. That choice itself speaks to the overall question of power that underlines the production as a whole. As Laëtitia slowly begins to develop a more and more intimate relationship with the horse – don’t worry though, no actual sex happens, though the possibility of it is very explicitly alluded to – the question arises as not really the ‘authenticity’ of this relationship (again, horse), but the agency of one of the two parties involved. The horse’s voice can be provided artificially, but this nevertheless still anchors him as an object, as a piece of whatever narrative his human counterpart is in the process of creating. He has no true agency, at least not enough to make him a subject. The relationship, in other words, exists within the context of only one of their points of view.

 

 

It’s a rather interesting way of exploring this kind of relationship, these imbalances of power.

 

Anyway, I should perhaps write more on this, but I’ve got dinner to make. And to be honest, my brain is a bit exhausted.

 

 

But if anyone wants to reach me, you know where I am. I may be a bit under water right now, but I’ll be ok. I’ve got good people in my life, people who choose me to be in their lives in various capacities. And something else I’ve started to realize over this past year is the value of that. Fine comes with time. Besides, the sun was out today. How wonderful that life can still have such beauty in it like that.