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:
- 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).
- 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).
- Bring a fan – better yet, bring one of those mechanical fan spray things that soccer moms used to use on us during/after games.
- Get the Avignon Off card.
- 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.
Scènes sur Seine 