Non classé – Scènes sur Seine

19 January 2022

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.

4 May 20204 May 2020

Confinement, day…48?

So, I know there’s a typo in the title of my last post, but honestly, I don’t really feel like correcting it because sometimes it really does feel like we’ve been stuck in this mess for 250 days.

That being said, given that the situation has not changed much here yet (though deconfinement will slowly–hopefully–be starting on May 11), anyone who is reading this right now is probably wondering “Effie? Why are you writing right now if your life has basically been one endless string of sameness for the past seven/going on eight weeks?”

Good question, hypothetical/invisible reader.

The short answer: I had a mild anxiety attack last night.

The longer answer: I haven’t been sleeping super well these past few weeks, and frankly, the mounting stress from being inside all the time has a lot to do with it. Don’t worry, I’m not about to go parading in the streets, demanding that hair salons and restaurants and bars open up so other people can put themselves at risk for my illusion of “comfort”. But I will be honest here and say that it is getting increasingly difficult to stick to the rigidity I imposed on myself when I first went into confinement.

To give an example: a couple weeks ago, I added a trip to Mamiche, a boulangerie just shy of 1km from my apartment, to my usual grocery run. The walk there took me and the two friends I was doing my socially distant shopping with all the way down to the bottom of rue Faubourg du Temple, right up to where it crosses boulevard Jules Ferry and then ends at Place de la République.

This is a walk that I normally take very regularly. It’s part of my usual early Monday morning walks to the gym, my excursions to the library, the main artery through which I access the rest of the city (well, for the most part, anyway). I could feel the muscle memory in my legs pulling me forward as we reached the bottom of the road that day, and then, at the same time, it hit me that it had been almost two months since I had last walked that far, since I had last extended my spatial radius beyond my now-routine grocery stops. The city has become smaller for me, in a way (and there are some potentially good things about this, but I’ll probably get to those another time), and I don’t think I realized the extent through which I would have to go about “taking it back”, re-appropriating this manner of existing or walking in an urban space I had come to know almost like the back of my hand until that moment when I both wanted to freeze and turn back and also drop my groceries and keep. Fucking. Walking.

I didn’t do either, obviously. I settled on a very large cinnamon bun instead. But that moment has been eating at me lately, and that destabilizing feeling of confronting the unfamiliar in what should be familiar ended up coming back again last week when those same friends and I coordinated a taco run to El Nopal (the first time I had grabbed food that someone else made to-go rather than making it myself in…about as long as this quarantine had lasted). In both cases, the necessary adaptations and limitations to our social interactions didn’t necessarily help things: say hello from a distance, no hugs of greetings or goodbyes, orbit around each other while walking down the street as though there’s an invisible wall (or alligator, if you’re in Florida) separating us.

Sometimes, I wonder if these in-person yet very limited interactions are helping or hurting things. I want to say the former, but I am also someone who (as my dissertation, and literally almost anything else I have worked on will attest) is very intuitively aware of limits/rules/regulations/structures intended to orient or impede natural and sometimes instinctive behavior. I don’t want to hug my friends because I don’t want to put them at risk in case I somehow am an asymptomatic carrier, but this mental reminder to not enter into contact has its own darker side: it reminds me of how solitary I am now, and how long it’s been since I last felt the pressure of physical contact with someone else.

This solitude came to a head last night. I was scrolling through my instagram and noticed so many posts about the New York Times’ Cooking section sponsored “Big Lasagna Night”. Basically, everyone makes an absolutely epic looking lasagna following a particular recipe, and then at 7pm Eastern Time (yesterday), all the lasagna makers and their creations would gather together on a live stream and feast…together but apart.

And I wanted a lasagna. But the only thing that I could think of, the one thing that was just nagging me was that I didn’t want to make a whole lasagna for myself. I wanted to share my lasagna. Hell, I don’t have nearly enough fridge space to store a leftover lasagna, even if I had made one. Sure, maybe I could have strategized and somehow planned things out to make a perfect little lasagna for one, but that’s not the point of a lasagna. A lasagna is ultimate comfort food, yes, but part of the joy in making it is knowing that you’re about to share in that comfort with others, that you will all dig into the same groaning baking dish, and that a little bit of the love you put into making this incredibly involved dish will get passed on to someone else.

And that’s when I cracked.

I managed to get to sleep last night eventually (mental exhaustion post-crisis tends to help with that), so I was at least able to convincingly pull myself back up to teach again this morning. If nothing else, at least that’s a break in the monotony of the everyday now (though the stress of needing to be ON IT, mentally, hasn’t been helping much).

Before I drifted off though, I did have a small moment of clarity, and that was that I missed writing here. Even though my thoughts are more ramble-y than usual, there is something therapeutic about writing all this down and shooting it off into a very public online platform for who knows how many (ok, like…4?) people to read. And on that note, I think maybe in the next few days, I’ll finally get around to doing what I told myself I would do, and kept coming back to last night: write posts about my dissertation, about the unanswered questions in my dissertation, basically, anything to keep at least some part of myself back in the theatre (at least until they reopen again).

Oh, and hopefully my next entry will be less morose.

11 April 2020

Confinement, day 20 – 25O

I wanted to write in this on Monday night / Tuesday morning.

Or at the very least, right after I finished defending (more on that in a bit).

But…then I got a bit of food poisoning from…who knows what…so I decided to take things really easy. As in doing nothing easy.

As in sunning on my floor while reading easy.

But today was one of those days where I had to read aloud to myself so I could have something resembling a conversation (or have a voice to fill the silence), hence here I am.

First thing’s first, though: yes, I successfully defended my dissertation on Monday, April 6.

And it went well. Like, really well. Like, more than I could even have imagined well.

Of course, any of the many people who have tried to talk me out of my moments of imposter syndrome-driven crisis and who was present during that Zoom call would have probably not been surprised by that. But honestly that defense was the first time I was able to get a hint of what they (and my profs) had been seeing the whole time.

Hell, I may have even finally figured out what the hell it actually was I was trying to do with this project. Funny how you have to be outside of the thing to start to see the threads of what it is you’re crafting.

Let me back up a second though. One of the main issues I came across with all this in the lead-up to the big day was the fact that nowhere on Harvard’s / my department’s website does it mention what it is that actually happens during a defense. As in, what the student should plan on preparing, and more precisely, how much time they should allot for.

Now, of course, the solution to this would have been to actually attend some of these things when I was still on campus.

Yeah.

In the end, I did get a time limit (~30min), and from there, basically drew from my many conversations with folks not in my field to craft as detailed – yet precise – a presentation of my work as possible, keeping in mind how I felt my work contributed or added something new to my field.

It’s this last part that I am convinced no one in the humanities really grasps the full extent of. When you’re working with data/numbers, it’s a bit easier to step back and see the bigger picture. But when. you’re working with ideas or concepts, it can be hard to pull yourself away enough from everything to see how it all really fits. And yet, there I was.

And I reread my dissertation one last time. On the advice of a friend, I took page-by-page notes as a means of keeping track of everything (honestly, a pretty good idea in all, even though I barely referenced my document), as well as to try and anticipate any questions on my methodology, on elements that were unclear or potentially polemical, on why I made the choices I did, etc. I think I maybe over prepared a bit.

And then the day / time arrived. I put on makeup and earrings for the first time in three weeks. I wore a black turtleneck (of course), and leggings because only the upper half of me needed to look professional (not going to lie, I was tempted to wear heels, but I test-drove that idea the day before and it was…quickly scrapped). I opened the call, people started logging in. I saw my advisor’s face for the first time in a year. I saw other folks’ faces for the first time in longer than that.

I saw in a virtual space for the first time people I cared about from my family, to my university friends, to my grad school / Harvard friends, to my Paris friends gathered together to listen to what I had to say. It was like the ultimate stage performance, only separated by many miles and connected via cables and wifi signals (and mine was surprisingly stable…well…for the most part).

And I presented. And it felt good (though also really weird because, again, as with my teaching, I could not read the room as I spoke, and there were moments in there where I thought I really was speaking into the void).

And then the comments from my advisor started.

And I felt really good. Like a meteor shooting through the sky good.

For the first time, I actually looked at my work and assumed it for what it was. And it was a triumph. Hell, one other committee member gave me unofficial “Felicitations”, which, for those unfamiliar with the French system, is a pretty big deal.

And yes, I am going to toot my own horn. I’ll toot it to the fucking moon and back again all night long, for all I care. This was six years of my life. Six years of success, but six of moments of absolute rock bottom shit and self-doubt as well. And fuck I loved the validation. I reveled in it. To think this thing that I wrote and that I still can’t help but nitpick at may be worth something.

And I don’t want this to be the last thing that I write that brings something new to the table, that adds to the academic conversation. I want to keep going.

I want to publish the damn thing.

And then write and publish more things.

Fuck it is so crazy the roller coaster that happens when you’re at the end of the PhD.

Speaking of which, I suppose I should change the heading of this blog at some point (because yeah, no, I’m not going to stop writing here). I’ll get to that eventually.

It’s funny, writing about all this really boosted my mood. I’m still holding on more or less well, but the silence was hard today. And there are still moments that I really wish I could just have a moment of physical human contact. Fuck, the weather’s getting warmer, and all I want to do is cuddle someone. Ha!

As I said during my talkback, though, I am full of contradictions. I live in contradictions. Contradictions are what make things interesting.

5 April 2020

Confinement, day 16 – 19

As of April 2 (last Thursday), 15h00, I’ve officially been on “vacation”.

I was supposed to be on a plane for New York on Friday. And today was supposed to be a drive up from Connecticut to Boston. But, of course, that is not happening.

It’s strange, I never thought I’d see the day where I wished I wasn’t on vacation, but here we are.

And a really annoying thing about it? My strategy of purposefully giving my students assignments that I would have to grade over break in order to keep myself occupied (and thus not really giving them homework over the holiday to take some of the edge of all this off) has gone completely belly-up thanks to the absolute “genius” work of the Ministry of Education.

In brief: baccalaureate exams are basically cancelled (which makes perfect sense, since no one knows when schools will open again…and yeah, that May 4 predicted reopening is basically nonsense). Instead, the baccalaureate grades will be the average of all term grades for each subject.

Now, already there are some issues here, chief of these being 1) not all schools grade the same way, and 2) the particularities of our present situation.

For the first point: I can’t speak for other schools, but I can tell you that as far as my school is concerned, we grade very hard. We don’t needlessly punish our students, but given the school’s reputation, we are very demanding of them in terms of how much effort we expect to be made when completing assignments (not necessarily that everyone must be perfect at everything, but they must at least try. We try and help those who are struggling). What this means, however, is that some of our struggling students might, on paper/just based on those marks appear to be on the cusp of failing their bac, but on the day of actually end up doing pretty alright, if not excellently.

Furthermore, and this is a more broad statement, it’s also very true that some 12th graders will literally do the bare minimum and then cram in the weeks leading up to the actual bac, and then wind up getting a decent mark. It’s a ridiculous strategy, yes, but it happens. They now have a very real chance of actually failing/scoring much lower than in a real-world scenario.

As to the second point, this one more directly concerns me, and it actually makes me a bit angry. But first, some points to consider:

My school has been very lucky in that we had the funds (and our students have parents that also had the funds) to have been able to quickly set up our “virtual” classrooms via zoom almost immediately following the announcement of school closures. As such, we have been able to continue teaching our students (technical glitches notwithstanding) as more or less “normal” for the past three weeks.
Unfortunately, it is also estimated that between 5 – 8% of school-aged children in France have seen their education fully interrupted. Reasons for this range anywhere from the school not having the proper infrastructure in place, to (and the more likely) families not having available computers/tablets or even internet access at home for their kids to use to access educational material. One of the public television channels has been airing programming aimed at high school students every day in order to give them some access to material that is part of the national curriculum, but what about students whose families don’t have a television, or for whom there is no space at home to quietly study?
In light of the above, the decision was made by the Ministry that even though the final bac grades would be an average of term grades, any grading done for assignments given during quarantine would not be counted in the third term grade average.

Basically, all the work teachers not just from our school, but other schools that have been trying to get virtual classrooms set up has been for basically nothing. It’s almost like we’re working for free.

Oh, and the Ministry wants to extend the school year through July 4.

This, all this, on top of how “on it” we have to be all the time, how much we have to make sure we are there and we show up for our kids to try and bring some normalcy back into their lives. This, while at the same time there is a minister in government who openly disdains us and our job, suggests that we are “lazy”, scoffs at the thought of instituting pay raises nationally, and generally has no fucking clue what it means to be a teacher.

And I am exhausted. I am straight up dreading what’s going to happen after Monday because even though I could feel myself carrying the mental load in terms of holding back my frustrations so that my students could let out theirs, I didn’t mind it. It gave me something to do, in any case. And now, with this, what the hell is going to happen once the “break” is over? Will I even have any of my 12th graders showing up? The school is going to send an email to parents explaining why all students should still show up and put in an effort, but holy shit it’s like these decisions were only 50% (if that) thought through.

Should the bac have been cancelled this year? Oh yeah. The system–try as they might to insist they are not–is already unequal in normal conditions, and this situation just exacerbates that. But, fuck, could they take a minute to think about the implications of their decisions beyond that first one?

The inequality gap is going to get worse by this.

And now I have to design pretty much a whole new curriculum to carry my students through to the end of the year.

At least that will give me something to do.

Maybe I’ll just make them all watch Twin Peaks and then write presentations trying to explain everything. Those would make about as much sense as this nonsense.