theatre in Paris – Page 4 – Scènes sur Seine

26 February 2018

148 – 154

Processed with VSCO with s3 preset — Well…it’s certainly been a while

I forget sometimes how tricky it is to blog when one has visitors over. Suddenly going from routine, and at times dull activity to a flurry of things makes it difficult to keep up with what happened when. In lieu of trying to revisit every detail, I’ll just go through some of the highlights (also known as: things I actually took photos of).

Tuesday

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I want to start off with this bit, not just because it came first chronologically, but also because I really feel as though I need to mark this rather monumentous occasion in which I actually convinced my sister – who neither speaks nor understands a word of French – to come see a show with me. Granted, I actually had a copy of this play (Martin Crimp’s The Treatment, for those wondering) in English from when I worked on Crimp in a class for my Master 2 at Paris IV a few years ago that I gave her to read beforehand, but there is definitely a difference between reading a text and having to sit through hearing it being performed to you in a language you don’t understand.

The title of the play is used primarily in reference to what, in the film industry, would be the name for the outline of a screenplay, but certain other connotations – notably, ‘treatment’ as in a means to curing an ailment as well as ‘treatment’ as in how one behaves towards another – are evoked as well. The narrative revolves around a woman, Anne, who at the play’s opening is seen telling her story to two New York film producers. Said producers – a married couple – are rather fixated on a portion of Anne’s story in which she recounts how, occasionally, her husband would tie her to a chair, tape her mouth shut and just speak to her. They ask Anne if she struggles, if he beats her, berates her, touches or assaults her during these episodes. She answers no. It quickly becomes clear, however, that the producers are not very satisfied with this “No”, and here marks the moment in which Anne’s story starts to become no longer entirely ‘hers’, where Anne’s person is no longer ‘hers’, where it is in the process of ‘becoming-creation’ or ‘becoming-character’, ready to be re-embodied – and I mean this in the almost vampyristic sense that Method actors use to talk about their process of transforming into a role. Deprived of her story in the sense that she no longer has exclusive autonomous control over its presentation or interpretation, Anne is slowly reduced to object – a means through which the producers could reach their final product: a successful cinematic experience.

Given how central the art of filmmaking is to the arc of this play, it’s not that surprising that the staging and technical elements – especially in terms of the ever-present use of projections, with title cards, and even scrolling credits at the end – borrowed very heavily from cinematic tropes/language. Beyond that though, the play itself seemed very…traditional, I guess. Frontal, of course. Moments of stage violence were performed using gestures/choreography that would be very familiar to actors or even anyone who has ever sat in on a stage combat class (there was, for instance, a slap that was telegraphed to the point where I had to wonder if eliminating the illusion of it by making the choreography big enough to notice that it was, indeed, choreography, was not a deliberate choice). Really, to be quite honest, I’m not entirely sure what more I have to say about this. It was…fine…I suppose, but I feel as though I’ve seen enough examples (notably Dans la peau de Don Quichotte) of theatre that used video projection/cinematic elements in ways that allowed the two forms to engage or dialogue with one another rather than just having the latter be…there. Ah well. At least we had excellent tacos at El Nopal before the show (mmmmm).

Wednesday

Processed with VSCO with c6 preset — Don’t let the bright colors fool you…it was freeeeeeeezing outside

Back to the BNF for another day of reading before I start to put together something resembling a lit review for my eventual prospectus. Honestly, given what a long mess my notes doc is starting to look like, I’m pretty amazed at how much reading I’ve been able to get done/how easy it’s been to fall back into old research habits (namely: if the thing doesn’t seem like it’s going to work, put it down, and shove it to the side. No use in trying to force anything).

Another cold front has hit Paris this week (and will continue into next…yay), but that didn’t stop my sister and me (and what looked like literally everyone else in the city…seriously, what in the world were all those people doing there) from heading over to the Grande Mosquée de Paris for some tea and pastries. Ideally, the time to come here would be when the weather is a bit nicer so that one could actually sit and enjoy the garden, but…eh, beggars can’t be choosers. Besides, no one should really complain when the (really excellent) mint tea costs only 2eur (the pastries are 2eur each as well).

Thursday

Processed with VSCO with e2 preset — Happy hour…round 1

If you guessed today started out with yet another trip to the BNF, you’d be absolutely correct. See, even with people visiting my life is sometimes annoyingly predictable.

The evening though did end up being pretty epic, what with meeting up with a friend for Happy Hour at l’Ours Bar (hello 6eur cocktails), then a quick stop at Urfa Durum for Kurdish pitas (holy shit the lamb one was so gooooooood) before going to some other bar for dancing (the name of the place still escapes me. I blame the pita…yeah that was it). Really though, any night that ends with a ride back on not one but two night buses is one that definitely deserves to be marked as a good one.

Friday

Saw Black Panther (yay!), then went back to Mamma Primi for dinner (another buratta pillow…double yay!). Otherwise kept things relatively low-key.

Saturday

This may (or may not, for those who know me really well) come as a surprise to you, but when my sister finally confirmed the dates of her visit, one of the first things I thought was ‘Yes, finally I have an excuse to go get dim sum.’ Not that one needs an excuse per-say, but it’s definitely more fun when there are multiple people involved. The same friend who we met up with on Thursday also tagged along, and together the three of us trekked allllllll the way down to the 13th arrondissement to the institution that is Tricotin. I first came here about five years ago with an acquaintance who I had met up with to watch the Chinese New Year’s Day parade near Hôtel de Ville. It was freezing (like today), snowing (unlike today), and both of us really craved a big bowl of noodles in scorching hot broth. She suggested Tricotin, and I followed. When I arrived and saw that not only did they have a large selection of soups but dim sum as well, I was sold. It helps that it all tasted really good too.

I won’t lie though, I was a bit worried about going back there today, as it had been a couple years since I had last eaten there, and the restaurant had undergone a renovation project in that time. Needless to say, my fears were promptly assuaged as the three of us quickly polished off: bbq pork spare ribs, pork and shrimp dumplings, bbq pork buns, beef in a rice noodle crêpe, those same five-spice and pork fried dumplings that my friend and I had gotten at Le Pacifique a few weeks ago (though the ones here were slightly less successful) and sticky rice and chicken steamed in a lotus leaf. Someday, I’ll try and get a more substantial group together to see if we could order the whole menu of dim sum offerings at once, but for now, I’m content with working through the thing slowly. Given that we each only paid around 10eur for the meal, I don’t think my wallet will complain too much (and honestly, knowing how much the ‘trendier’ dim sum places around here charge, there’s really no other reason to be going anywhere else).

Sunday

Today marked the arrival of my sister’s boyfriend from Chicago, and so began another day of walking. Or semi-day, rather. The plan was to start near the Eiffel Tower (hence the photo at the top of the post) and then make our way back towards Hôtel de Ville while walking along the river, but as they seemed keen on visiting the Musée de l’Armée (and as I had no interest in spending money on a ticket), the walk was cut a bit short on my end. Ah well, not too much to complain about. The annoyingly biting cold has made the whole idea of walking rather unappealing to me lately. Spring seriously cannot come soon enough…

19 February 2018

141 – 147

Processed with VSCO with a6 preset — Shepard Fairey wall at L’Aérosol

I’m going to call these next two weeks “The weeks of catching up on as much sleep as I can, although this could be determined by the loudness of the hammering next door”.

Anyway

Overall, other than a rather…strange…incident on Monday in which I walked into my premiere (junior) class only to be greeted with a broken-English version of ‘Happy Birthday’ (no idea where they got this idea, or why…also, my birthday’s in November), the beginning of the week was relatively quiet. This may, however, have something to do with the fact that I purposely planned a very low-key week for my students, what with the holidays coming up.

Moving on to Thursday:

I never saw a show at the Cité U theatre when I was a resident there, though this would be very much in keeping with this strange thing I do of not frequenting places that are insanely close to where I live. Maybe it’s my affinity for walks, but I always preferred venturing out a bit to a destination. But I digress…

In keeping with the whole ‘international’ vibe of the place, this particular play was produced by the New York City-based Nature Theatre of Oaklahoma, an independent company primarily focused on producing experimental work. (Though…is it really still that experimental if everything is kept frontal? Then again, this is a touring production, and budgets and constraints have to be respected). The basic premise – at least in the first thirty minutes – was an incredibly stylized scene set in a saloon, employing many of the codes and mannerisms associated with Hollywood’s vision of the Old West. Characters would stare one another – and at times, the audience – down, burst into violent fights seemingly at random, spit tobacco into a spittoon, all while musing over the nature of happiness, and the conditions that may have to be in place to attain it.

I’ll be honest, I was a bit skeptical about this show during the opening act, mostly because, given how stylized it was, things moved very slowly, deliberately, and my energy level was not at a point where keeping up for two more hours would be a real possibility. Then the rest of the show happened.

At around the 30-minute walk, the actor playing the bartender, who, up until that point had remained silent, called his brawling customers to attention and pulled out a screenplay he had been working on. This, he said, was his masterpiece, and he would very much like to get some feedback on it. The next hour and twenty minutes (oh yes) essentially consisted of him monologuing, telling the story of a troupe of dancers (who ‘coincidentally’ shared the same names as the performers on stage…who were also collectively part of a dance troupe back in Ljubljana) who went off to Irak to settle the conflict between the insurgents and UN/US soldiers through dance and performance. Needless to say, it did not end well for them, but the level of absolute absurdity being displayed on stage made me almost forget how close to falling asleep I was during the first part of the show.

After the performance ended, there was a talkback with the directors and the cast organized by the professor of the seminar I am taking this term. A couple of take-aways from this: first, none of the actors performing that evening had actually ever spoken on stage prior to doing this show. They were all dancers, and thus more accustomed to using their bodies to communicate with their audiences. As the directors specified, though, part of what they seek to do with their theatre is find moments of tension and discontinuity (the deeply existential text coupled with the Old West aesthetic and gestures in the first part of the performance is a reflection of this as well), so for them it was a deliberate choice to take this element of performance entirely unfamiliar with their actors and make them not only confront it but work to become more comfortable with it.

Second, and also related to the notion of speech and performance, none of these actors were native English speakers (I picked up on this almost immediately when they started speaking – the show was entirely in English, by the way – but on the metro ride back afterwards, some of my fellow classmates pointed out that it took them a bit to pick up on that. Accents, markers of foreign/otherness, are funny that way). When asked about the experience of premiering the show in New York, one of the performers mentioned she felt a bit strange at first doing so because – to an American audience – these people on stage were not only co-opting – or ‘stealing’, as she said later – their language, they were playing with it, breaking it down, bending its codes. Quite frankly, given the current sociopolitical climate in the United States, a play performed in English by non-English speakers could not be more perfect or timely.

Friday was rather quiet – a much-needed moment of decompressing before the holidays really set in.

Saturday

The photo at the top of this post is taken from the museum portion of L’Aérosol, a repurposed space in the upper part of the 18th now dedicated not only to the preservation (or rather ‘museumification’) of notable street art/artists, but also to the ever-constant creation of new works on the outside of the building. I had been wanting to check this place out for a while, and was finally able to coordinate a time with a friend of mine to do so.

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According to their website, once nicer/warmer weather finally sets in, the outdoor area around the building hosts food trucks, performances, workshops and more for the community and visitors. There’s a lot that can and should be said about the process of taking works/artists that were formerly subversive and, in a way, ‘legitimizing’ them by displaying their works in an organized fashion in an incredibly codified space (and thus layering on to said works the same codification that they were actively created in opposition to), but when the only other option is another abandoned building right next to the Peripherique, a museum and art space is not the worst of things that could happen, particularly when, other than the actual museum which costs 5 euros to visit, the space remains open and easily accessible.

Then it was off to le 104 for a quick coffee (as well as to watch a guy juggle clubs for a good 45 minutes) before walking down to République to meet some other friends for, yes, another coffee. I don’t think my caffeine intake has been that ridiculous in a while.

Sunday

This morning signaled the arrival of my sister from New Orleans, and the official start of my semi-vacation (punctuated of course by periodic moments of working because not only do I have some exams to grade, I’ve got a bibliography to organize)! We celebrated her arrival in style with brunch at Holybelly (thank goodness she arrived insanely early so we could get there before the crowds truly descended on the place).

The rest of the day was mostly filled with walking around/attempting to stave off her jet-lag. As far as touristy things go, we did manage to fit in a stroll through Père Lachaise which was pretty nice, given the sunny (yet still cold) weather we’ve been having lately. Now, if only it were sunny and warm…

11 February 2018

133 – 140

FAB557BE-9BE4-4AD6-84BA-FB36C2EB792A — Oh hi….

You know who’s really excited there’s only one more week before schools go on a two-week holiday? Me.

In the meantime, the week that was.

The theme overall for this week was snow, namely, the 8 or so inches we got on Tuesday. Last time I was here when there was snow that actually stuck around for a while was in winter of 2013, and although there wasn’t quite as much this time as there was then, what we did get made for some nice looking landscapes.

Processed with VSCO with hb1 preset — Just a light dusting…

It also meant I got to revive my snowman-on-the-windowsill…thing…from earlier this year.

Now to the usual breakdown:

Sunday

Ah the Super Bowl, an event I only half-watch anyway, and almost entirely forgot was happening until I was reminded of it. This year, instead of going to a small bar (likely all the way near Saint-Michel, aka, the other side of the city) to watch the broadcast (which started at 00h30, yeah that’s half past midnight), I had some company to watch it at home.

You know what’s a fun thing? First, realizing that yes, French people (like two of them) have actually gone to play in the NFL before, and second, the game is actually broadcast on French TV with French commentators. This does mean that you miss out on all the commercials, but being French TV, the broadcast actually doesn’t cut away to ads all that much. It actually makes the pacing of the whole thing a lot less frustrating. Imagine that.

On the menu were orange chicken-inspired chicken tenders, carrot and celery sticks, and a skillet cookie for dessert (no ice cream though; forgot to buy it). Oh, and beer. Because America.

I passed out pretty much right after halftime, and good thing too because at least I got some amount of sleep before going in to teach on Monday. From the look of some of my terminale’s (senior’s) faces, however, I think some of them may have stayed up watching even past when I did.

Tuesday

You know the movie Quills? The one with Geoffrey Rush as the Marquis de Sade? Well, continuing in the tradition of adapting films for the stage, this was the latest in my long list of plays I’ve seen this year.

The best description I can come up with for this: 1980s new-Romantics, decadent, Robert Mapplethorpe, neon, tantalizing nightmare. Yeah. The stage of La Colline – normally very large and imposing – was shortened from above with an overhanging set of lights, giving the whole scene a rather squat, rectangular look. On the stage itself was a platform flanked by two large mirrored panels who, at their apex came together on a circular part of the platform that periodically rotated to signal a change in setting. Actually, the use of the mirrors – two-way mirrors, to be more precise – was perhaps the most intriguing part of the production aesthetic, as at times, the fact that the lighting could be used to illuminate (either partially or fully) a person or persons on the other side of the mirror made for some rather marked spatiotemporal traversals. Flashbacks, for instance, saw the image of an actor physically onstage reflected in the mirror, interacting with the physical body of another actor on the other side of that mirror, present but approaching the illusion of ‘image’ by virtue of the lighting design not completely highlighting certain facial/corporal features. Further, although this was another frontal show – to be expected from pieces that are designed to go on tour and thus be easily adaptable – the fact that the mirrors, when the two-way feature was not in use, reflected the audience back at ourselves created, in the first place, an illusion of theatre in the round. Secondly, given that the play takes place in a mental hospital, I could not help but liken the almost pit-like effect created on stage by the coupling of image of the audience with the actual layout of the room to that of a surgical theatre. Knowing how the play ends – that is, with the continued dismemberment of Sade’s body to deprive him from writing – I wonder if this was intentional.

Jumping ahead to Friday…

The big event this weekend was, without question, the wedding of a good friend and former Cité U housemate of mine to his girlfriend of five years (who he met when a bunch of us crashed her friend’s Halloween party…funny how life is sometimes). Friday saw the arrival of another of our Cité U comrades from Grenoble, and as she was staying with me, I decided to take the afternoon off to check out an expo with her.

The expo in question – dialoguing the works of Sophie Calle and Serena Carone – was held at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (or the Museum of Hunting and Nature), à museum I had been curious about for a while, but had yet to visit. The photo at the top of this post is from said museum, and hints at its rather extensive and…eclectic collection of taxidermied animals. Aside from a room on the ground floor dedicated exclusively to Calle and Carone’s works/pieces, the expo itself was interwoven amongst the permanent collection of the museum, making it something of a ‘hunt’ to walk through to try and find all the objects/texts, in other words, everything that did not necessarily belong, inserted among everything else.

1AC938F6-DA2E-4140-9851-D20A7DC1DA67 — A literal interpretation of feeling trapped in a relationship…

Part autobiography, part fiction, the expo explored questions of life, death (which…makes perfect sense given the setting), and the relationship we have to ourselves, our bodies, and those closest to us. My absolute favorite part, however, came at the end when Calle posted a compilation of personal ads through the ages – written by men seeking women, or rather, hunting for them -, which were at once hilarious and unsurprising in terms of how much they reinforced the fact that although the modes of male objectification of the female body have changed through the ages, the basic structure of said objectification has not really gone anywhere (a woman ‘sans tache’ or unstained at the turn of the century became a woman with an ‘ample bosom’ in the 1980s). I will say though that the panel featuring statements culled from Tinder profiles that rounded out this section kept my friend and I laughing for quite a bit (photo below, but be warned…it’s in French).

358791D7-4CD8-4CDE-89A2-CEDB65E4AE81 — Should note how much proximity has risen to prominence in these sorts of interactions

Dinner that night was somewhat strategic: eat enough to feel pretty full to the extent that a small breakfast and perhaps a snack would tide us over until the feast that awaited us Saturday night. As such, we went out to Crêperie Josselin near Montparnasse (side note: yes, this is my favorite crêpe place in this city).

B8E2CD6E-D63D-4674-9B1E-516B00BABA30 — There’s chèvre, spinach and cream stuffed in that buckwheat galette, and it’s beautiful

Saturday

After a quick breakfast of tartines with butter and jam, coffee, and a pear, it was off to Poissy (spare croissants in our bags for an afternoon snack) for part one of the wedding festivities. In France, weddings take on a decidedly civil affair, with the legal ceremony taking place in the town hall, presided over by the mayor (couples can then choose to hold an additional ceremony at a church if they wish). The majority of the talking is done by the mayor, as well as, at times, by another civil servant, who, among other things such as mentioning one or two points about the couple and their history, reads the portion of the French civil code relating to the statute of marriage. Thankfully, this means that the whole thing went by pretty quickly, and before we knew it, our friend – the second in our group – was a married man.

Following the ceremony, we had some down time before we headed 40km out of Poissy to the reception venue, so we headed to a café to caffeinate ourselves up in preparation for the evening ahead. Then it was off to the Domaine des Clos Vallées for a night filled with food, wine and dancing. We got back into the city at around 4am. I promptly passed out upon reaching my bed. What a marvelous way to spend an evening reunited among old friends!

Sunday

And because I never take a break from anything, this afternoon saw a trip to the Théâtre du Rond Point to see Emma Danté’s Bestie di Scena (Bêtes de scène).

Processed with VSCO with c8 preset — A rarity these days: a show with a run-time shorter than 2 hours

You know how in the opening number of A Chorus Line, the actors end by forming a line downstage, holding their headshots over their faces, vulnerable under the lights in front of an unseen, but vocally present, director? Imagine that but the actors, as they come downstage, start to disrobe, ending up naked and attempting to cover themselves up against the stares of the audience. As the name suggests, this show has, at its center, the notion of actors as performers, as bodies that are both watching and, notably being watched, observed, judged in some cases based on their capacity to entertain and thus sometimes reduced to performing animals instead of being recognized for what they are – human beings with their own opinions, projects, agendas, insecurities. An actor, in sum, is never just a shell for a character to inhabit; an actor occupies that in between space of being in the process of both leaving and retaining themselves, being doubly-present. But, what if, for an hour, the actor fully descended into animality, into pure physicality, slowly leaving behind any corporal insecurity to stare down openly, frontally, those who watch them?

There were also times when, while watching this, I was reminded of my time doing Viewpoints workshops at Irvine (minus the whole being naked thing), what with the way the ensemble moved together through the space, the dynamics of their relationships to one another, and the fact that the show felt at once both choreographed and partially improvised. Ah to be back doing that again…

4 February 2018

127 – 132

Another weekly breakdown. Let’s do this:

Monday

You know what’s fun? Showing up to yoga only to find everyone standing outside the studio looking confused. No, class was not cancelled. Train delays (caused, in part, because of the Seine overflowing into some of the lines) meant that the girl who was usually at the front desk was…not at the front desk. And our instructor did not have her keys. Normally this would not have been an issue for me, but I was counting on class ending relatively close to on time that evening, as I had to run to a show after and needed to figure out my dinner situation. Thankfully, one of the owners of the studio – who lives like two doors down – was just reaching home and came running down with the keys, cutting a potential 30 minute delay down to 15.

I decided to stick around anyway – even though I was going to be cutting it pretty close in terms of being able to eat something. We practiced head stands. I…almost got it this time haha.

Staying did, however, mean I had to book it over to the Théâtre de la Bastille afterwords, but at some point during my post-yoga sprint, I remembered that there was a small café/bar on the premises. This being France, I assumed – correctly, thank goodness – that they would be serving some sort of actual food there, and that it probably wouldn’t be too expensive. The (very generously-portioned) quiche and salad pictured below cost me 6 euros. Just going to add this to the list of reasons as to why allocating a good portion government funding to theatre/the arts is a good thing (along with ridiculously affordable ticket prices).

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The show I saw that evening – Quoi/Maintenant – was something of a social satire, and probably one of the only outright comedies I have seen since being here. Premise: rich, bourgeoise, liberalist/capitalist family hires a maid to look after their house/their 12 year-old son. The matriarch of this family also fancies herself an artist, and works as an assistant for some eccentric painter/sculptor who she also probably slept with at some point. In the end, the maid kills the family with the bouillabaisse.

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Oh and the son and painter are both played by the same actor – an older, bearded gentleman who, although he did not look like a 12 year-old, had the same boundless energy and mischievous playfulness of one.

And I think that was my biggest takeaway from this performance: how just plain fun it was. There were moments when it became evident that one of the actors fudged up a bit, but instead of trying to cover it up, they just rolled with it – one of the advantages of satire, you can actually get away with this sometimes if you’re already a pretty solid ensemble to begin with – drawing the audience in to their world as they did so. This isn’t groundbreaking theatre or anything. But sometimes it’s just good to have a bit of cheeky fun with it all.

Thursday (yeah, Tuesday and Wednesday were pretty quiet)

I have a feeling a new tradition may have started today: Thursday evening drinks with a new friend, who also happens to be a PhD. Tonight’s edition was held at Red House, and I can safely say that I and my _____ negronis really welcomed the moment of relaxation after another long week of teaching and BNF…ing.

Friday

Right, now to the photo at the top of this post. Back when I first moved back, I had taken my mom to grab food at this place called Pizzeria Popolare, one of several restaurants run by the Big Mamma group. Although our meal was very good, I still wasn’t convinced that I understood the hype around this and all the other ‘Mamma’ restaurants that justified nightly hours-long waits. Well, the meal I had this evening changed that. I understand the hype now.

Processed with VSCO with u2 preset — The hype is this burrata pillow.

The night before, I was invited by some friends to join them for dinner Friday night at Mamma Primi, located in the 17th arrondissement and, as the name suggests, heavily focused on primi piatti, aka pastas. As we were five – and this restaurant, like all their restaurants, does not take reservations – we made sure to show up early, like 45 minutes early, to get our places in line before the restaurant opened at 19h00. We were originally thinking of showing up at 18h30. Let me tell you, those 15 minutes made a huge difference.

I’m going to skip over the décor and whatnot, except to say that the whole place was very tastefully decorated with a keen eye for the fact that literally everyone would be taking multiple pictures of everything during their meal (and yeah, I’m including myself in this too….whatever). On to more important things, namely, the food. We started the meal off with cocktails – for me, a twist on a gin fizz with gin infused with eucalyptus that provided a nice counterbalance to the drop in temperature outside to make me wish it were summer again – as well as some parmesan and olives (top photo) and that bouncy, bulging burrata ball pictured just above. Then came the main courses – and wine, of course – and this is where I had my little ‘epiphany’. And it came in the form of pasta with braised rabbit.

The minute I saw rabbit on the menu (which, being seasonal, changes relatively often), I knew I had to have it. I actually quite like rabbit – surprising, I know, given that I used to have a pet bunny -, but it’s not really something I usually make for myself at home, since my preferred way of eating it involves the kind of low and slow cooking that demands a few hours of one’s time. This one was served with fresh, homemade pasta with a sort of sweet/sour sauce. I’m not lying when I say I had to struggle a bit to keep from devouring this thing in one fell swoop. The rabbit was melt-in-your-mouth tender, the pasta perfectly al denté, the sauce layered with a depth and complexity of flavor that almost makes you want to run your finger along your empty plate to pick up any stray drops. Hell, this thing almost made me miss American-sized ridiculously gargantuan portions at Italian restaurants. I say almost because first, quality generally outweighs quantity in my book when it comes to food, and second, having correctly-portioned food meant that I was able to make it through all the courses feeling pleasantly satisfied but not overstuffed to the point of bursting.

Processed with VSCO with s2 preset — Splitting this tiramisu helped in the not-feeling-full factor.

We ended the evening with some cocktails and dancing at Lulu White, whose playlist was pretty on-point that night, what with all the 80s Madonna, Prince, Michael Jackson (among others) they were playing. It helped also that we were incredibly lucky to snag a table, thus able to set our things off to the side while we danced off our dinner.

Saturday

So for the past couple of weeks, the people in the apartment next to mine have been embarking on a big renovation project. Given that I’m usually away teaching/at the library in the mornings, I haven’t been subject too much to the nonsense that comes along with these sort of things. Until today. That’s right everyone, 09h30 found me being woken up by a hammer banging something on the wall directly on the other side of my bedroom. Sigh.

As a way of consoling my annoyance, after doing my weekly market run, I ventured out to le Caféothèque (yeah, wanted to get pretty far from the noise…) to grade some exams over a hot chocolate, the universal cure-all. The night ended with some drinks at a bar near Ménilmontant, as well as the hope that Sunday morning would not result in another rude wake-up call.

28 January 2018

121 – 126

7AF48237-7C4C-47B9-810F-F897FD93EEDF — Nanterre

Yes, yes, I know. Another week with nary a daily update. Once again, the week got the better of me.

But, I’m not really complaining either because if anything, this week was absolutely packed with theatre.

Let’s start with Tuesday night.

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Unlike pretty much everything else I choose to see, this play was a pretty straightforward drama, but I will say that as far as 3+ hour plays go, I can’t remember the last time one went by so effortlessly.

And really, you have to give a show credit for being able to draw you in for that long, but given that the subject matter was a story that travelled back and forth between the last days of the French colonial occupation of Vietnam to the country’s eventual reopening in 1996, it’s almost amazing that the show was only three hours long.

Also, one side of the stage was set up as a real, functioning kitchen run by one of the characters. And by functioning, I mean that they were actually making and serving food to some of the other characters/restaurant patrons. There are only so many steaming bowls of pho you can see being consumed before you really start to lament the sad little sandwich you grabbed at the last minute because you knew otherwise you would not be eating until incredibly late that evening.

Yeah, I got home pretty late that night (thankfully there was chocolate cake at home!) and I had to be up at the crack of dawn the next day. 8am teaching everyone. It’s real.

Right, on to the next thing:

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Imagine mixing theatre, cinema and radio together into one cohesive show, and you’ll get this. The premise: while poking around at a rummage sale, the troupe – La Cordonnerie – stumbled across a script for a never-produced re-imagining of Don Quixote centered around a library worker – furiously trying to digitize the catalogue before the Y2K bug ‘hits and deletes everything’ – imagining himself as Cervantez’s titular hero. What results is a projection of the film the troupe made from this script, yet what becomes very clear from the start is that, although the film was clearly produced with modern cameras, it is otherwise silent.

Yeah that’s right everyone, the actors on stage were also acting as foley and voice-over artists, the stage slowly filling with gadgets and knick-knacks that by the end made the whole space look rather like a garage right before a yard sale.

What’s more, at a certain point, after it becomes clear that the actors on stage not only appear in the film, but also provide their own voice-overs (using a rather clever trick of holding a mirror up to see the screen behind them as they remained facing forward), the otherwise very frontal space begins to take on a sort of stratified depth. Maybe it had something to do not only with the simultaneous – yet also temporal-crossing – appearance of certain actors’ bodies on stage and screen, or even with the displacement of voice that although it resonates from the body present on stage is difficult to disassociate from the image of the actor on screen, but I wonder if one could consider this a way of using frontality that otherwise avoids a regression towards a flattening mimetic representation.

And speaking of mimesis…

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I’m not entirely sure how well I can describe the trip into uncanny valley I took last night with Susanne Kennedy’s adaptation of Fassbinder’s Warum Läuft Herr R. Amok? at Nanterre, but here’s an attempt anyway.

First thing’s first: the play, as mentioned, is based on a Fassbinder film, but to be more precise, it is a literal word-for-word staging of a film that, as emphasized by Kennedy, was largely improvised. Imagine, then, the process of taking improvised text – text that is by nature not only impulsive and fluid but also firmly anchored in a present sociotemporal situation – rehearsing it and codifying it to a point where it loses almost all semblance of humanity to become merely an approximation of it. This reduction of ‘natural’ or ‘ordinary’ behavior to its bare-bones, its ‘skeleton’, its ‘codes’ extended into the movement and gestures of the actors, who seemed more like avatars on the SIMs, aliens behaving in ways they assume a human behaves than – I don’t want to say ‘real’ bodies, at the risk of seeming to promote a realistic aesthetic that I am quite frankly…not a fan of for the most part – an actual….body…if that makes sense. This SIMification extended into the costume and makeup design. The banality of the costumes made it so that several characters were switching characters back and forth, with everyone playing either the lead male or the lead female at least once. As to the makeup, the photo above doesn’t really do it justice, but this is where the uncanny element was incredibly evident. Instead of traditional makeup, the actors wore latext masks that were designed to mold to their natural faces, while, once again, only producing a surface-level approximation of all their individual characteristics, bone structures, wrinkles, dimples, etc. The end result of all this, other than the previously mentioned inescapable presence of the uncanny, was an almost agressive mimesis, made even more so by the fact that on the rare instances in which unmasked actors did appear, it was – with the exception of a moment at the end – via video projection, corporeality and materiality rendered flat.

There was a point to the whole rendering strange of otherwise banal, quotidien speech and gesture (the play closes with the titular Herr R (Mr. R) killing his wife, son and an unfortunate neighbor), but one thing that’s still itching at me is the question as to why there was a need to tell this story about a man who, driven mad by the aggressive mundaneness of the everyday, ends up releasing his frustration in an act of violence, at this present time. Not to take away from the staging itself – there is something to be said about the use of frontality, the literal screenifying of a stage with a wooden frame, in the creation of a simulation of human interaction – but as I was walking in Ménilmontant afterwords on the way to meet people, I couldn’t help but linger on this question.

Anyway, I’m going to be returning back to this thing during my seminar on Tuesday, so we’ll see if my thinking changes at all.

Some final highlights:

Friday was another house party at a friend’s place where I once again confirmed the difficulty I have with staying away from really good cheese.
Technically today, I was supposed to have a tutoring session with a student. Unfortunately, this student did not choose to tell me about a tournament they were attending this weekend until after I not only crossed to the other side of the city, but also waited outside their building trying to contact them for twenty minutes. There’s a reason that, back when I still took private voice lessons, my teachers insisted on charging for any non-emergency cancellations less than 24hours before an appointment. Ah well. Not to be discouraged, I took advantage of the fact that not only was it not raining, but it had also been a while since I had a nice long walk to trek all the way from Porte Maillot to Ten Belles for a gooey, cozy croque monsieur and a noisette. Oh and also a pasteis de nata from the Portuguese bakery next door. Silver lining, everyone.

21 January 2018

113 – 118

Hectic week (and a bit of a stray cough from losing my voice from talking so much) means I’m a bit behind. Anyway, here’s a rundown of the past week, in no particular order with regards to dates.

452A0F26-1EFE-4D8B-B4BC-C5DA85943628 — Thought this was amusing

First off: I just want to bring everyone’s attention to the fact that Raviolis Chinois Nord-Est offers 10 dumplings for just 5euros. Aside from adding this to the ever-growing list of reasons as to why I love the neighborhood I live near (and will hopefully continue to live in next year), this is probably a good time to once again reiterate some difficulties I have whenever I get asked for restaurant recommendations by people visiting. It doesn’t really need to be specified that the kinds of restaurants usually sought-after are French ones (you know, kind of a priority when visiting France), but the thing is, when I go out to eat, I don’t usually go for French food. One: I can pretty much acquire all the cheese, charcuterie, breads and pastries I desire from my local market (and also, when it comes to classics like soups and stews, I can make those at home). Two: it’s not exactly the most affordable of dining options, with one or two exceptions. You know what is both affordable and delicious? 10 dumplings for 5 euros, that’s what (I highly recommend the pork, cabbage and mushroom ones).

To continue on the dumpling theme, this evening included a midnight snack of sorts with a friend of mine at Le Pacifique, another establishment not terribly far from my place, and which has the added bonus of offering continued service from 11h00 to 01h30…yeah as in AM. Prior to stopping there, we paid a visit to a couple bars in the area (namely Combat and Le Renard) for Paris cocktail week.

Anyway, back to Le Pacifique. I’m not sure how, but during the course of the evening, the conversation turned to dim sum (more specifically, whether or not any places that served dim sum cart-style existed in this city), which later developed into a craving for some late-night dumpling snacking. As it was around 23h30, Le Pacifique was really our only option, but as it had caught our eyes on the way to Le Renard from Combat anyway, the lack of other options wasn’t really that disappointing. We ordered two kinds of dumplings : pork sui mai, and one only labeled as ‘fried with five-spice’, along with a small Tsing Tao to share.

I’m not entirely sure if it was because of the late night, or the two cocktails from earlier in the evening, but those fried dumplings – or, to be more accurate, little football-shaped puffy, gluant, pillows of joy – were just about some of the most heavenly things I put in my mouth that evening. The fact that they were fried and filled with what we assumed to be pork – the menu didn’t specify – probably had something to do with it, but believe me when I say we sat rhapsodizing about them for a good half an hour after we were finished. For the sake of preserving the memory, I’m going to wait a bit before heading back there, but given their pretty decent dim sum offerings (cart or not), I have a feeling I’ll be back soon to make my way through the menu anyway.

Right, moving on.

This week I also happened to see two shows involving video projections. First, La Maladie de la Mort (an adaptation of the Marguerite Duras text of the same name) at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord (for all you theatre geeks, yes this is the theatre Peter Brooke used to work in).

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I want to preface this commentary by saying that although I’ve hinted at my let’s call it ‘suspicion’ at the almost default status of the frontal relationship in theatre/staging, I do think it is still possible to use the format in a critically successful way. Case in point: the stage here was set up not unlike a film set (complete with an ever-present camera and sound crew), meaning that there were points where a good part of the stage – or from my perspective sitting on the extreme right side of the mezzanine, most of the stage – was obstructed from the audience’s view. In light of this, a screen was set up above the stage onto which was projected both what was in the process of being filmed as well as some pre-recorded segments.

Given that the narrative – for those unfamiliar with Duras’s novella – revolves around a man paying a woman to come visit him nightly in a hotel room to teach him how to love, the use of the screen and video, in juxtaposition with the real-time staging and recording of the action, was, to me a logical way to explore the way in which we consume images/media, and that involving women’s bodies in particular. The connection to the pornography industry is, of course, evident, and put even more in the forefront by the fact that, periodically, the Man would open a laptop to watch a pornographic scene with relative indifference. Interestingly though, even though there were moments where I wished I could simultaneously watch what was happening on stage as well as on screen (especially during moments where one character was being filmed and the other was prepping for their next scene, or when a pre-recorded moment was playing while the actors themselves were readying for their next cue), thinking back, I feel that one of the results of this permanent denial of the gaze is how it enhances the flatness or lack of depth that comes with sitting in front of a screen to consume images/media. The background work, the bodies, the in-between cuts are missing all for the sake of constructing a singular narrative. Maintain the image over the body that brings it forth.

Coincidentally, the piece I saw last night was also an adaptation – this time of Strindberg’s Ghost Sonnata – that used simultaneous recording/projection as a central part of its staging.

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I was back at the Theatre des Amandiers in Nanterre for this one, only this time instead of the usual audience/stage set-up in the main theatre, a tri-frontal stage was set up on the stage itself. As we all filed in to take our seats around the playing space – on which were set up a couple of what looked like cardboard house-type structures as well as a crude paper mâché fountain in a baby pool – a large quadri-frontal video screen projected images of other audience members as they walked in, not unlike a video surveillance system in a shop. Coincidentally, this is also how I discovered my thesis advisor was in attendance. Amazing what this quasi-Big Brother-like gaze can do.

The play opened with director Markus Öhrn walking on stage, looking not unlike a more zombie-like Marilyn Manson, to welcome everyone, as well as to set the general vibe for the evening by inviting audience members to switch seats as they wished or, should nature call within the next 90 minutes, get up to use the restroom and then come back.

I always find it interesting how, especially in theatre settings, whenever audiences are told they have the option of movement, they rarely, if ever, take advantage of it.

In this case though, this may have had to do with the fact that we were more reliant on the projected images than I think I would have liked to take advantage of the fact that there were a few empty seats around that we could move to. Granted, I don’t think keeping much of what was happening enclosed in the cardboard structures helped matters, nor did the lack of places to sit anywhere except in one of the four banks of seats around the stage. If the goal is to break with spatial codes or the architectural imposition of theatrical spaces, a spatial design that not only, to an extent, reinforces a certain set of frontiers and boundaries between space reserved for playing and that for observing, but also functions on a system of surveillance both with the early video projection as well as the fact that it was very easy to train one’s gaze on the other audience members sitting on the other side of the room, does not necessarily invite divergence. If anything, this show that at first seems to want to move away from frontality actually ends up reverting back to it.

I also think I made the somewhat poor choice of sitting in a front row of seats, as I had to crane my neck up to watch the videos (the play was in Polish with surtitles in French and English, so reading along was almost necessary on a linguistic level as well). Towards the end of the show, however, I found that I was paying less attention to the videos, and more to the little moments that these Jack in the Box mascot-meets-a-flamethrower grotesque clown figures moved about the stage, peeking out of the cardboard box windows, playing a bit with our gaze on them. Perhaps if there were a bit more of that – actually, I think the production could have done away with the text almost entirely, aside from the little intro video played in the beginning to explain who each of the characters were – the frontal relationship could have been broken down further. Then again, one of the first major sequences involved a rather violent rager in a concert hall (which followed honestly one of the funniest sequences in which a character tries to find his seat at an opera house, all in the very frustrating but incredibly real style of a dream sequence in which you know the thing you seek is right in front of you, yet your mental state refuses to let you accept this), which was maybe a bit too reminiscent of the In Yer Face theatre of the 1990s in the sense of, “can this thing which has been done to the point of transforming into an almost codified aesthetic still be impactful”.

Anyway, enough of that. Here’s to hoping for more frequent postings next week.

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17 December 2017

98 – 101

6C4DC092-C0B8-4806-8EBA-6BBA9826F3B9 — From the William Forsythe installation at La Villette

Thursday was not terribly exciting (basically, another library day…of course), so here’s a quick rundown of the weekend:

Friday:

Managed to finish all my Christmas shopping in one go. I know, I’m surprised as well.
Went to a farewell dinner for a dear friend who is off to new adventures in Singapore. One of the troubles with being an expat among other expats is the fact that while some stay, others head off, either temporarily (like me) or permanently (like some others in my group of CitéU friends). On the other hand, the perk of this is being able to point to almost any place in the world and say I know someone who lives there. For her send off, we surprised her by meeting at Bouillon Chartier – a restaurant I had never been to, but that is pretty popular because of how inexpensive it is. Back in the day, large restaurants like this were the haunts of the Parisian working class, and this is reflected still in the food served there: straightforward, no-frills, what many would consider French ‘classics’. The quality can be slightly hit or miss, depending on what you get, but really with a group of good friends and one or two bottles of red wine, do you really need much else?

A8B2F145-CA90-4AF4-B609-E0295B37096B — A small fraction of the CitéU gang 🙂

Saturday:

I am so bummed that the William Forsythe + Ryoji Ikeda expo (pictured at the start of this post) is closing at the end of the month because I kind of want to run around in it again. Forsythe’s contribution, as the photo above suggests, entitled Nowhere and Everywhere at the same time (see why I just had to come see this thing) involved moving through a room of lightly swinging pendulums, with the one caveat being that one could not touch them. The racks to which the pendulums were attached would also shift in regular intervals, changing both the direction of the pundulums as well as, at times, the speed of the swinging. Walking amongst them, I almost lost all awareness of what others around me were doing, instead zeroing in on the swinging objects, trying to decipher or predict their movements, finding those moments where I could sweep through the gaps they created. From above, however, it was fun observing how others moved through the room, whether there were any general patterns of movement that were followed – conclusion: people really like diagonals – or any parts of the room that were, for one reason or another, avoided (the corners, oddly enough). I don’t have any photos of Ikeda’s installation – test pattern [nº13], a sound/light experience -, but the video published on La Villette’s website gives a pretty good idea of what the experience was like (also, for those who have seen the new Twin Peaks, very strong sound design for the Black Lodge in parts 2 + 3 vibes with this one).

After the expo, a walk through Pantin – a suburb just to the north of La Villette – to check out some street art before heading to the MC93 in Bobigny for what I can only describe as an anti-dance dance show. Jérôme Bel’s The Show Must Go On stirred up quite a bit of controversy apparently when it first premiered back in the early 2000s (and, granted, a show that in large part consists of either empty stages or not dancing does go against pretty much all expectations when it comes to what a dance show “should” be), but time has proven very friendly to it, as given the audience reaction (including mine), it was one of those light bits of fresh air that are very much needed these days. I mean, the first piece of fully choreographed dancing was the Macarena. A further plus: the many different kinds of bodies represented, which in itself further highlighted the marked absence of differently-abled bodies on stage.

Finally, the evening ended with a get-together at another friend’s house with other PhDs from various American Universities, where of course one of the first topics discussed was the frustration that comes with trying to exercise our basic right, as graduate employees, of forming a union in the face of at times hostile uni administrations.

Sunday:

I bought some books. I find this to be a very productive use of a Sunday.

Only a few days left before I head back to California for the holidays, and I still haven’t packed a thing. Procrastination is fun.

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14 December 2017

96 – 97

This is a map of UC Irvine.

For those unfamiliar with the campus, let me briefly break this down for you. Built in the mid-1960s (right around the time when student demonstrations on other UC campuses – notably Berkeley – were at their peak) UC Irvine is located in what was once a lot of open land. As such, the good people of the Irvine company had the freedom to construct not just the university but also its immediate surroundings in a way that, to a certain extent, responded to a growing need for a restoration of order on otherwise fraught college campuses.

Organized in a ring, the different departments and schools of UCI are notable for their detachment from each other. Indeed, rather than evoking an image of unity, the ‘rings’ of Irvine’s campus give more the impression of a panopticon than anything else. Although there is no looming tower in the center of this circle – as one would find in Foucault’s description of the panopticon in Discipline and Punish – the park at the center of campus presents its own set of conundrums. Although it is quite sizeable and provides plenty of space for picnicking and other outdoor activities, it is also very hilly. The walking paths shown in the picture kind of suggest this, but what this essentially leads to is a park with no ‘center’, that is, no point of convergence. I remember when I took my first tour of the campus before becoming a student back in 2008, our guide evoked the image of the campus layout resembling a bike wheel (a reference more to the fact that the school really, really wanted people to bike more, rather than to its having an actual cycling culture). Thing is, though, even the spokes on a bike wheel – what keeps its structural integrity intact – have a central point where they all cross.

The problem of the lack of centrality on this campus became very clear during the recession and the resulting exhorbitant rise in tuition fees. As with the other UCs, there was a mobilization effort on campus, but unfortunately, our efforts never took off to the extent of those in Berkeley or, memorably, UC Davis. This could be attributed to several factors, but here are a few I stand by:

1. The isolation of the different departments in distinct buildings, although common on many American campuses, created here a sense of ‘each department as its own island’, further emphasized by the fact that, given the circular structure of the campus, there was always a sentiment of someone watching.

2. Returning back to the park, the lack of centrality meant that there really was no natural ‘meeting point’ for students (and some faculty) to gather during demonstrations. Demonstrating on the steps of the admin building worked fine for a bit, but its location as a sort of offshoot of the greater ‘Ring Road’ made it a somewhat inconvenient place to get to for students in classes on the other side of campus.

3. What the Irvine company decided to build in the immediate surrounding area. Although we had a small shopping center just across one of the bridges leading to campus, the immediate area around UC Irvine was taken up by residential developments. Condos. Apartment complexes. Not occupied solely by students, but by private families as well. There were no student bars (the exception being the on-campus pub, but even they had to defer somewhat to campus rules regarding opening/closing times), coffee houses were pretty much various locations of impersonal Starbucks and Peet’s coffee, and in order to get anywhere of interest, one had to drive. In short, this was the anti-college-campus campus.

I bring this up because I could not help but think back to this last night after the show I saw (the title is actually a quote from architect Emile Aillaud and is rather long, so I’ll just let the photo speak for itself):

Much like the last show I saw at Le 104, this show centered around a group of three ‘researchers’, this time interested in the architecture of the grands-ensembles – also known as the ‘cities’ of the Paris suburbs (banlieu) built starting in the early/mid-1960s as a response to a need for more housing (because, surprise, when your government starts calling for people to make more and more babies, eventually, these babies and their families will need homes). Originally populated by working class families, including a large number from Southern Europe (Italians especially made up large portions of the construction crews) and designed to be close to whatever factory the men of these families worked in, the reputation of the grands-ensembles did not take long to deteriorate. Instead of being heralds of the future, the cities were cold, impersonal, lacking life, isolated from the hustle and bustle of the city. As the years passed, the conversation around the banlieues shifted to them being sites of urban tension, of violence, of upheaval (and yes, there is a racial element associated with this, in case you were wondering).

Anyway, back to the show. The first thing that was remarkable about this performance was that, for once, it was not frontal. Instead, it was a theatre in the round (well, 3/4 around) with the playing space in the center containing a set of white cubes (seen in the picture above). During the opening of the show, the cubes were organized in a way that four of them made a center ‘block’ and the rest were posted in sort of ‘tower’ formations in the four corners of the space. In other words, the space was centered, organized, we could easily create a relationship with it.

Then the actors start recreating, rebuilding, reconstructing, deconstructing, the various evolutions of one of Aillaud’s designs for the grands-ensembles. Suddenly, the center exploded. No longer stable, the blocks were set in serpentine positions, creating a sort of labyrinth on the stage that, to those of us in the audience, changed the way we related to the space in front of us. No longer part of a shared ‘laboratory’/research space as in the beginning, we were now almost god-like, looking down on this aesthetic achievement below us. Meanwhile, the actors themselves weaved around not only the blocks in the center of the room, but the spaces, the gaps between the banks of seats, the sound design at times making it difficult to pinpoint exactly where one of them was at any moment. And as they, with their literal and figurative acts of destruction and construction, traversed through time to try to puzzle over how or what to make of these constructions today, the absence of the voices, the bodies, of those living in the grands-ensembles became more and more evident. For once, I think the deliberate exclusion of certain bodies (not just voices, but physical, present bodies) worked very effectively here. Indeed, at the end of the play, we see the actors in the process of creating their own ‘micro city’, designating certain blocks as community centers, pharmacies, cultural centers, parks, etc., when one of them, in the closing lines, asks:

“And what about the residents?”

That, I think got to the crux of the matter. These cities were designed with aesthetics, rather than livability in mind. Is this not what happens, though, when urban spaces are designed entirely artificially instead of allowed to grow somewhat organically, when space overly tries to dictate what its inhabitants do and how? This search for an architectural utopia lead to the sacrifice of the human, the mortal, lived element. Despite what is implied in their name, these grands-ensembles were not designed for community, neighborly living (then again, when one thinks about when they were built and who they were originally built for – to say nothing of who is “relegated” to live there now – it is not hard to see why a more divided, sequestered population would be ideal).

This, really, is what brought me back to my days at Irvine, and I’m pretty sure I talked the ear off the friend I went to see the show with about that! Otherwise, I don’t know if I can say enough how positively refreshing it was to see a troupe propose a different interpretation of the playing space, not just in terms of simply not being frontal, but something that finds the gaps in the structure, that makes the space almost alien, strange, uncanny.

Tonight I saw another show, Tue, hais quelqu’un. It was fine. There was a point where they overlaid images of the actors over their bodies, which created a really cool painterly effect, further amplified when the actors began ‘manipulating’ their images through gesture.

Clearly, however, my mind is occupied by other things.

12 December 2017

A weekend in Montpellier (91 – 95)

F8ADD0C0-A4D5-4C18-AC28-4C14B22FC899 — Welcome to Montpellier

I know what you’re thinking.

‘What in the world is the Victory of Samothrace’ doing outside of the Louvre?’

Well, this is just one of the many rather endearing quirks about Montpellier, a city I don’t think I would have visited had I not known someone who lives there…which I do.

But before I get to that, a bit about the theatre piece I saw on Thursday night:

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I was intrigued by Melancholia Europa (Une enquête dramatique) primarily because of the title: really, talking about a melancholy Europe seems particularly timely to me…wonder why. The chance to finally have an excuse to go to the Cent Quatre – the former home of the city undertakers up until the end of WWII, then a garage until its refurbishing/reopening as an arts center in 2008 – only further added to its appeal.

And let me just say before I get into the rest of my thoughts on the show – which, spoiler, I was mixed on -, I really, really loved that space. I’m going to be heading back there again this week, so I will try and actually remember to take some photos of it. Suffice it to say that, as far as former warehouse/factory-turned-arts spaces go, this one seems to have a keen feel for its new identity. Not only are there several theatre spaces on the premises (there was at least one other show going on the same time as ours, I believe), the space also houses a café/resto/bar (though this is pretty standard), rehearsal spaces, galleries, and, of course, the ubiquitous organic food market. This last point merits its own discussion on the passage of the organic movement from fringe to part of the capitalist machine, but that’s for another time.

Anyway, the play.

The basic premise was that we were invited in to the offices of a group of journalists/researchers grappling with the question of fascism – its roots, how it manifests/spreads, how it has evolved…or not – through the lense of Hannah Arendt’s work on the banality of evil. Although the show referenced the emergence of neofascist movements both in France/Europe and elsewhere (especially the United States), the figures examined in detail were high-ranking Nazi officials, in particular Heinrich Himmler.

There is a word that describes what it is to catch yourself almost at the point of recognizing something that could resemble humanity in someone so absolutely evil. That word is “unsettling”.

Far from rehabilitating those like Himmler, however, the play presented little tidbits about their daily private lives in order to highlight the ordinariness – the banality, if you will – of these otherwise almost unthinkably evil people, the fact that what they did could happen again, easily, anywhere.

And although moments like this were thought-provoking and effective, I’m still a bit puzzled in terms of what, exactly, the show intends for its audience to do with them.

This might be because, given how incredibly Brechtian it was (and a bit of disclosure: I’m not exactly the biggest fan of Brechtian-style theatre…I think it lets its audiences off the hook far too easily), the play’s political bent, its call to motivate audience action was very apparent. At the same time, and I am going to sound like a broken record on this, I’m not sure that maintaining the frontal stage/audience relationship really worked for this. There were moments when I felt that I was more in a lecture hall than part of something that – from what I can gather – was meant to rouse up a desire to act. Maybe this is a personal bias, but as far as theatre – any theatre really, but political theatre especially – goes, I don’t want to feel safe or secure as an audience member. Maintaining a sense of spatial order, I think, allows for a certain distanciation on the part of the audience, which, although keeping very much with Brecht’s desired alienation effect, also allows for a certain sense of ‘Not I’isms to creep out. As in the ‘Yes I can observe the suffering of the working class, but I, a middle/upper class capitalist who has the means to buy a ticket for this show am not one of the contributors to the problem, seeing as I am here learning and observing. Then I will promptly return home to think about things. Whether anything comes out of this thinking remains to be seen’ kind of distanciation.

I’ll say this again probably, but, if working on Genet for so long has influenced me in any way it is in the fact that theatre should not make you feel secure in your position whether in the building/room itself or outside it. It is a balancing act, a threat of chaos. No one should be left unscathed from it.

But now on to more upbeat matters.

Montpellier:

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Unfortunately, given the very cold, very wet weather this weekend, there wasn’t much done in terms of outdoor exploring. Luckily, Montpellier is a small city, so I was able to see most of it – at least the older parts. The fact that there were Christmas decorations up made the whole city look like the coziest place ever, especially when those decorations involved strings of lights twinkling above narrow cobblestone streets.

Oh, and of course, the Christmas season also meant a visit to the local marché de Noël, where I finally got to try aligot – otherwise known as incredibly cheesy, buttery mashed potatoes – for the first time! I swear if it wasn’t so unbelievably unhealthy for you, I’d eat that almost every day to keep warm.

Come to think of it, I think I pretty much ate my weight in chocolate and butter this weekend, what with that Christmas market visit, plus breakfasts of crepes and Nutella, and stops for chocolat chaud and cake (the final café visit before my afternoon train back to Paris today):

Processed with VSCO with e1 preset — Coffee Club, Montpellier

Thankfully, the butter/chocolate overload was tempered by a dinner of roasted fish (dorade, for those wondering), roasted potatoes and chard on Sunday evening.

I’ll close out this post by mentioning what was, perhaps, one of my favorite quirks about Montpellier: the Place des Grandes Hommes. This is a sort of rotunda – adjacent to a mall – around which are displayed statues of great men (and one woman) who influenced history. Charles de Gaulle is there, of course, along with some others, like Lenin:

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A truly unrecognizable FDR:

2E47389C-CD11-411E-BE01-9E6F5D5C5126 — Not entirely sure about the proportion of the hips here…

And of course, Mao Zedong, who, irony of ironies, is standing directly in front of a giant supermarket megastore (Casino is a supermarket chain, not, you know, an actual casino):

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Silliness aside, though, Montpellier was really rather adorable, and it was nice to get away from the city for a bit, the cold weather notwithstanding. Now I’ve just got to think about working off all that butter and chocolate before I head back to California for the holidays…

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27 November 2017

Summary of a weekend (78 – 80)

Processed with VSCO with a4 preset — Last of the autumn leaves…

Fridays are for…

Friends coming over (with wine) to help you finally finish the rest of that pumpkin pie from earlier that week
Feasting on tacos from El Nopal together on the banks of the Canal, and reveling in the fact that – due to the sudden drop in temperature – there was only one other person in line when you got there (though it does also make you eat your tacos faster…wouldn’t want to catch a cold after all)

Saturdays are for…

Steaming, warming cups of thick chocolat chaud bringing the heat back into your hands during a stroll home. Pictured above is the first of what will be undoubtedly many this season, this particular one courtesy of Yann Couvreur Pâtisserie in the Marais.
Sazeracs at Lulu White, a New Orleans-style bar in SoPi, with another friend, and chance encounters with other art-makers during the course of an evening.

Processed with VSCO with e3 preset — Also this glass is kind of adorable.

And Sundays are, of course, for…

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Sensorial overloads in the form of a theatre experience that I enjoyed, but am still not entirely sure what to make of. There’s a sort of part 2 of this performance that I’m going to on Thursday. Maybe by then my thoughts on the experience as a whole will be more in order. If nothing else, I will say that it at least dared to be overloading, overbearing, just too much in general, which can’t be said for a lot of theatre these days. Oh, and a special shout-out goes to the fog machine which made…several…imposing appearances throughout the course of the evening.

Here’s to the week ahead.