I really want to try and make more of a point to update this thing more frequently than I did this past year, hence why I’m writing now after scrambling to finish up some last-minute lesson planning.
To start, the question many (?) of you are wondering: how am I doing?
Raw
Raw but supported. Still hopeful, still feeling like I can give of myself, which I’m surprised by but in a pleasant way. Also feeling like I want to reach out to something but then having to contend with the fact that what’s in front of me is just air. Heavy air. Heavy, nostalgic air. Sometimes, I get a whiff of something in the air as I’m walking that sets off a chain of memories, and I feel a small pang in my heart because of the uncertainty of things, specifically, uncertainty as to the possibility of recurrence of things. And then the feeling passes, but its mark lingers on for a while. The weather’s also gotten crisper now, and I’ve begun to notice the exposed skin on my cheeks and my hands more acutely. The urge to be wrapped up in something is getting stronger, but I’ve found that sometimes confronting that urge doesn’t have to be as lonely as it first seems.
Besides, I was surrounded by friends this weekend: strong, wonderful, understanding supportive women. Oh, and chocolate. Like, literally a mountain’s worth of it.
Friday, I met with Isabella at Brasserie Barbès for a quick drink (okay two), during which time we discovered some croquettes that I would say almost rivalled the crack dumplings at Le Pacifique. We then moved on to grab dinner at Bouillon Pigalle, which was a bold choice since—considering how incredibly inexpensive it is—there is always a line to contend with. Thankfully, getting there close to 22h30 on a Friday proved to be an excellent idea, since whatever line there was moved very quickly, as most other patrons were finishing their dinners.
And really, for some steak-frites, red wine, and (first chocolate appearance) an absolutely massive profiterole filled with ice cream, I’d say the wait was worth it.
Side note though: strangely enough there were about three separate parties celebrating birthdays that evening, one of which was seated at the table next to ours. The birthday boy was gifted, among other things, one of those stereotypical, incredibly fake Native American headdresses (complete with plastic tomahawk axe and bow and arrow set). It’s times like this that I remember that a good majority of the world has an incredibly long way to go when it comes to reasons why nobody should be buying/gifting these things…ever.
Saturday was much more quiet during the day, but at least it involved some tarte au chocolat baking (yes, I’m baking again…that’s got to be a good thing…right?), and sitting on my floor consuming massive bowls of popcorn and cookies and said tarte with some other girlfriends. The original plan was to watch a film. As these things usually go, conversation kind of took over, which, honestly, is almost always the better outcome.
As to theatre-goings, there were two shows up this week, both at Nanterre, and one of which I…was not particularly fond of. Boundary Games sounded pretty up my alley on paper (I mean, an experimental piece with that title, and me working on questions of space…like…how could it not be perfect). Instead it was an hour of people pushing blankets around to ambient noise.
Ok, fine, perhaps there was more nuance than that. Perhaps one could say something about the fact that the sound effects played alternated between urban and rural/natural, or the fact that the manner in which the actors interacted/moved the heavy woolen blankets around suggested, at times, attempts to create or seek shelter, and other times literall world-building (what I called the ‘Pangea moment’ when, at a time when all the lights were almost off, leaving nothing illuminated save for the glow of the grid taped down on the floor under the black lights overhead, the blankets, now resembling small mountain ranges, were slowly pushed together into a sort of continental mass), but see the whole thing ended with some stage hands in the rafters throwing down large empty cardboard boxes. And really, all I can remember thinking at that moment was ‘dear god I hope we don’t have to watch them put the blankets in those boxes’.
Thankfully, we didn’t.
It’s a shame the show—silent, by the way, other than the aforementioned sound effects—didn’t take advantage of the stage setup to explore the notion of boundaries even further. The fact that the audience was seated tri-frontally could have provided, at least in my opinion, some opportunity to play with the stage/audience boundary that was never really tested. There were a couple moments where crossing that boundary came close to happening, but from what I saw, I think that was more due to a blanket that just so happened to fall a certain way rather than a deliberate choice to test a limit. Pity.
The second show was one I saw this afternoon, and honestly was almost coincidentally perfect in terms of its content, given that Saturday night’s conversation ended with me expressing an interest in possibly modifying my 1er (11th grade) lesson plan to focus on teaching The Laramie Project. Milo Rau’s La Reprise. Histoire(s) du théâtre (I) is only slightly connected to Laramie in that one of the central narratives deals with crafting a sort of documentary piece around the April 2012 murder of Ihsane Jarfi, a gay man, in Liège, Belgium. Like Matthew Shepard, Jarfi was getting a ride home from a bar when the men driving him started beating him senselessly, for no other reason other than he happened to be gay. Also like Shepard, Jarfi was left outside, in the cold, on the side of the road, the difference being that instead of being tied to a barbed wire fence, he was stripped of his clothing and laid face down on the street.
There was no mention in the program of any connection to Laramie or Matthew Shepard, and it’s a shame that the talkback with Milo Rau happened yesterday (Saturday) because I really wish I could have asked about this. I mean, really, how do you go about creating a piece of (somewhat…and we’ll get to that in a bit) documentary theatre about a homophobic hate crime and not think of Laramie? And yes, I am aware that Laramie was a piece of American theatre, but it made the rounds in Europe as well…so…
Anyway, the other big thing that separates the two is the fact that La Reprise is just as much about the process of creating the piece of documentary theatre about the event than it is about the final theatrical product. I mean, the first thing that happens is that one of the actors comes downstage to give a monologue on the difficulty of beginning, of starting the performance and at which point (and to what extent) does the actor become their character. Really, you’d almost think this was a play about the nature of acting, if what followed was not a recounting of the events that happened on that day in Liège. The piece then proceeded to show the ‘auditions’ of those who would be taking on the roles of several of the real-life figures, and at this was the point where, once again, a camera was introduced. Yes, everyone, once again we have a situation where a camera is simultaneously filming something while what is being projected on the screen above/behind the actors is at times a live transmission, and other times something previously recorded (though the transition between the two coupled with the fact that the actors’ movements on stage often closely matched/were only slightly out of sync with what was on screen definitely heightened the hyper-theatricality of the whole thing). To be honest, I’m still trying to grapple somewhat with the connection between the two threads—there were times where I felt as though the show was tackling two separate themes but, who knows—, but this is probably also due to the fact that I could not get the Laramie connection out of my head the entire 90 minutes of the show’s runtime.
And with that, another week gone. I’m feeling this sense of tiredness that’s been creeping up on me these past few nights come round again. That, and a general feeling of suspension.
Oh, but I did manage to write some thesis-related things this week, so there’s that at least. Yeah, I’ll try and hold on to that for now.
Scènes sur Seine 