Empire Seen by the Other : “Une étoile pour Noël, ou l’ignominie de la bonté”

In the vast literature of France’s former colonies, three characters are evoked repeatedly as persuasive figures of French influence and culture: the schoolteacher, the priest and a kind of benevolent French everyman. All three reappear in an autobiographical theater piece looking at immigrants’ integration in France : proof if necessary of the road French society still needs to travel to accept its citizens born of French colonial empire and its consequences.
Nasser Djemaï is a French actor born of Algerian parents. “Une étoile pour Noël” is a one-man show inspired by Djemaï’s own experiences growing up “other” in a largely homogenous society sharing an immutable collection of cultural references, from camembert to Catholicism to Corneille. The story he relates, with humor, irony and admirable energy, follows the education of Nabil, from primary school through to his baccalauréat, and the cast of characters who shaped him, the least of whom, apparently, is his hard-working though illiterate, father. Instead, Nabil looks to his teachers, who reduce him to the value of the grades he receives; a priest/scout leader offering a rousing republican religion of the masses touting teamwork over spirituality; and an upper-class grandmother, who takes quite literally upon her shoulders the “civilizing mission” of the French colonial power and who will convince him to dye his hair blonde, take the name of Noël and renounce his family.
The story of Djemaï/Nabil is not, however, one of happily-ever-afters: if Noël thinks he sees his name written in the stars, comfortably ensconced in his new life of Sunday afternoon’s at the Comédie Française and dinners with a good St-Emilion, his fall is all the more brutal, as the subtitle of Djemaï’s piece indicates. Teacher, priest and granny all conspire unconsciously to teach Nabil the lesson of charity’s great ignominy : that all the good intentions in the world, and no more so than those espoused by the French Republic, which attempts to erase differences, while failing to overcome latent racism and an ingrained cultural superiority, cannot make a bad situation better if those who are the object of such intentions are not involved consciously and actively in those changes and the decisions behind them. Nabil learns a lesson he won’t soon forget : as long as he is “Algerian” in others’ eyes, he can never by “French” even in his own.
Djemaï takes the path of least resistance to get his message across, using humor to render ridiculous the paradoxical narrow-mindedness of a society which aspires to all things fraternal and egalitarian. The recipe works, to judge from audience laughter and press reviews, emphasizing the comedy of Djemaï’s writing and acting (ably capturing the vocal resonances and discourses, in particular, of the various social “types” represented) rather than engaging his underlying, very critical message.
As a theater student in Birmingham and London, Djemaï would have experienced, and perhaps come to gain insight into the multicultural social fabric of Great Britain, where minorities are a visible and natural presence. In that light as well, "Une étoile pour Noël" presents an interesting reflection on the republican social model as instituted and practiced in France.
To Jan. 19, Tues-Sat, 9:30 pm, Sun, 3 pm, Lucérnaire, Centre national d’art et d’essai, 53 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, 6e, Mº Notre-Dame-des-Champs, 10€-30€, tel: 01.45.44.57.34.

The Mystifications of Wayn Traub

“N.Q.Z.C.” is the title of a piece of experimental theater now running at the Théâtre de la Ville, and, according to its creator, the Belgian artist known as Wayn Traub, also an abbreviation for the Inquisition. As the strange title of an equally unusual show, “N.Q.Z.C.” reveals little about what is performed on stage – a multilayered story about love, self-sacrifice and the inability of those human aspirations to overcome the survival instinct in us all - but offers new perspectives on the themes explored recently in this column.

At 35 years old, Wayn Traub is the author of a large and eclectic oeuvre that has succeeded not only in helping the former Geert Bové exorcise more than a person’s fair share of family demons, ranging from pedophilia to incest to schizophrenia, but in making known this self-described narcissist to the Belgian public, with shows proclaiming his existence to all willing to see, hear and even taste the fruits of his indisputably fertile imagination: from the nine-month long SMAK Campaign where Traub illegally exposed, for one hour a day, a personally devised coat of arms at Gent’s Museum of Contemporary Art, to the seven-part “Mises en Traub” series where the author used his personal life as immediate performance material (confronting former friends and lovers on stage, for example), and the “Wayn Cakes” performance-as-comestible project of surprise-inside gâteaux sold in local bakeries.

With a Jesuit boarding school education, training in classical dance, cinema and painting and a manifesto cum university thesis on “Animal Theater”, Traub comes well prepared to follow a personal and artistic quest for quasi spiritual redemption and metaphysical transformation. He does so through an intensive borrowing of popularized medieval and Christian iconography blended with artifacts of natural history and choreography no less evocative of 1950s dance halls than 21st century discos. This “priest of the arts” as he has been dubbed with Belgian humor seems to play his role with great seriousness. The proof is in his more developed works of theater, of which “N.Q.Z.C.” is yet a preliminary study.

Currently an Associate Artist at Antwerp’s Het Toneelhuis, Traub first broke through in the highly creative world of Flemish theater with “Maria-Dolores” (2002), where he defined a style of “opera-cinema”, interweaving genres (film and medieval mystery play), narrative (three stories of four interrelated women) and time periods in a baroque tale of universal resonance in its themes of conception, death and regeneration. The play was the first in a series, followed by “Jean-Baptiste” (2004) and “The Comeback of Jean-Baptiste” (2006), where the Biblical prophet is reborn as an internationally famous crooner. “N.Q.Z.C.” is the follow-up to these symbolically and culturally loaded pieces that are nevertheless first and foremost personal “rituals” for Bové/Traub, placing him at the center of these explorations of self-revelation through the forms of theater and the codes of performance.

Developed through a year-long experimental workshop termed “Arkiology”, “N.Q.Z.C.” is apparently the prototype for the final piece of what Traub terms the “Maria-Magdelena” trilogy, which continues, ostensibly, to find contemporary and personal applications for Biblical iconography. Judging from “N.Q.Z.C.”, it is to be wondered what that final piece will look like, as it marks a break from the “opera-cinema” style which brought Traub his success and which helped lift his personal journey out of hermetic symbolism and into a lived world of collective experience. Here, the multiple layers of narrative and time, uniting an age-old tale of lovers separated by death and a modern story of an astronaut frustrated in life and love, never break out of their labyrinthine confines to touch or excite, despite an original use of hand lights for illumination and the lighter moments of Ludmilla Klejniak’s “dance-therapy”. Termed a “futuristic ritual”, by sole dint, apparently, of its references to space exploration, “N.Q.Z.C.” fails to bring us into Traub’s personal quest or dynamize our own quests as human beings, as ritual theater is meant to do. If there is a certain mystification surrounding Traub’s work, it is well deserved here : more hoax than mystery.

Photo: Simonne Moesen in "N.Q.Z.C.". Credit: Koen Broos

Should We Be Afraid of Fall Theater?: 2

Lebanese performers Lina Saneh and Rabih Mroué present this week their final work in a three-show visit to the 2007 Festival d’Automne program. “Appendice” is a fitting last word on their explorations in theater and body politics as it elucidates several issues raised in earlier pieces presented and helps answer the question I posed at the beginning of this series of articles, “Should We Be Afraid of Theater?”

After “Qui a peur de la representation?” and “How Nancy Wished Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke”, both examining, against the backdrop of contemporary Lebanese history, the body as a powerful political, social and esthetic entity, “Appendice” develops those same themes in a much more intimate framework : the story of Saneh’s struggle to find a way to have her corpse cremated, despite Lebanese law, which forbids it in accordance with the precepts of Islam. The idea she hits on, we are told by Mroué, who reads her written text while Saneh sits motionless behind him in profile, is to have her organs and limbs individually excised and burned, since this, at least, is allowed. At first, the careful enumerating of each progressively more vital organ she will have removed, beginning with her appendix, and the inconveniences she will have to accept in the absence of, for example, a stomach, reads as a grotesque joke. Between the tongue-in-cheek tone of the text and proposed website to follow the project (kinkylinah.com) and Mroué’s deliberately prolonged looks at Saneh, it is not clear whether this couple united in both art and life are serious or not. Luckily for Saneh, however, medical ethics step in to thwart her plan, by forbidding life-threatening, non-essential surgery. So now what?

As a performance artist familiar with the extreme uses of the body in the name of art and practiced by performers from Marina Abramovic to Chris Burden (see October 1 entry below), Saneh finds a ready and much less painless answer: she will ask artists to sign individual parts of her body, then sell these signed pieces of “art” to collectors and galleries who, upon Saneh’s death, will recuperate their “property” and have it either mummified for display or incinerated. As radical as it sounds, Saneh’s “Body P-Arts Project” is underway, with a dozen or so artists having signed on (and signed parts ranging from Saneh’s mouth to the air in her hair) and a dedicated Internet site featuring artists’ statements and an example of the contract of sale (www.linasaneh-body-p-arts.com). It would be pedestrian of me to suggest Saneh simply will her body to science (assuming Lebanese law allows that); seen in the light of “Body P-Arts”, the issue at stake in “Appendice” is less a question of individual freedom versus civic and religious authority, than the potential social and esthetic uses of the body as a saleable commodity, in this case as an art object, with a value and protections as deemed by the art market.

As a work of theater, “Appendice” proves the least satisfying of the three projects brought by Saneh and Mroué to Paris this fall. The piece is intriguing from the sole aspect of its set and direction, placing Saneh, dressed elegantly in black and sitting on a chair of transparent plastic, on display against a luminous white backdrop: part art object up for auction and part corpse in funereal, immobile silence. On the other hand, Mroué’s imperfect delivery of Saneh’s text in French, a language of which he appears to possess only a rudimentary mastery, seriously undermines both the subject, which reveals itself to be quite serious indeed, and the duo’s characteristically irreverent treatment of their chosen themes. Mroué is consequently forced to stick to Saneh’s well-composed text, where he would otherwise ad lib (he attempts this briefly on several occasions). One imagines a text of much greater nuance and resonance delivered in Arabic.

As for the question of the potential of something represented on stage to unsettle our beliefs regarding the forms of art, the roles of the body in it (agent, object, danger, sacrifice) and the social, political and esthetic value of what it represented there, theater, by its collective and unpredictable nature, demonstrates again it is a terribly powerful vehicle for the dissemination of radical views and visions.

Photo Credit: Ghassan Halawani/Penguin Cube

Terrorism of the Image

Walid Raad is a media artist born in Lebanon in 1967 and an American citizen since 2006. He was detained by the police at Rochester International Airport in 2004 and questioned concerning the contents of his luggage. As a photographer exploring representations of violence, in particular how car bombings effect the way urban populations relate to space, he had a few suspicious elements in his bags, notably photos of federal buildings, bombings and explosions, in addition to a slew of receipts, airplane tickets, airplane security cards and the calling card of an FBI investigator. He was allowed to leave after about 2 hours.

As introduction to the performance Raad created in response to his experiences and those of other Americans and Canadians wrongly profiled as potential terrorists, he offers the following reflections:

“No matter where, it seems, a camera regularly happens to be there, when something happens to happen. So much so that it has become a cliché, a veritable commonplace, to say that today things don’t happen unless a camera is there. Of course, it takes not just a camera, but an entire network of editing, transmitting, distributing, and viewing technologies -- and agents -- that extend out from the camera, to make what McLuhan so famously and confusingly called a “global village.” But it begins with the camera and its operator, with the fact of their already having been there. […] The corollary, of course, of the cameraman’s being there is that, in some sense, we are too. The camera metaphorizes the becoming-public of the event, because we who watch and listen are also caught in the double intersection of the sniper’s and the cameraman’s viewfinders -- not as potential victims exactly, but in some other sense as targets of those vectors (borrowing the word in this sense from McKenzie Wark in Virtual Geography).”(1)

If the camera makes people and events real for the purposes of public discourse, Raad’s presence on stage in “I Feel a Great Desire to Meet the Masses Once Again”, at the Centre Pompidou for two nights last week, poses a number of questions. The technogically sophisticated and visually appealing Power Point presentation Raad spent two years researching and creating and spends one hour delivering is performance in the vein of the Chinese-Australian photographer William Yang, who delivers monological accompaniment to his slide shows of Aboriginal peoples and Sydney night life, and art in the style of the late Mark Lombardi, who drew elaborate pencil charts detailing the financial and judicial imbroglios surrounding major international banks and investment houses. The Village Voice has mused that Raad’s art « is like a detective report or a communiqué from a secret agent », with all the aesthetic and emotional feel of these. His stage presence is cool, though not impersonal; his delivery is measured, but not flawless. He is a presenter of facts compiled through his own investigations, and now that his conclusions regarding the collusion of the CIA and private aviation to transport suspected terrorists around the globe are no longer revelatory (the New York Times reported on this in 2005) - indeed, to the extent that nothing he tells us outside of the details of his detention is news, whether it be the circumstances surrounding the arrest and prosecution of fellow artist Steve Kurtz or the trial of the “Lackwanna Six” - his « show » is fatally dated in a world of 24/7 news, a conclusion Raad himself has already come to, as he tells the audience early on in the evening. So what is the significance of “I Feel a Great Desire…”? Why perform it anymore, or even at all?

To answer the above questions requires moving away from the first-degree tone of scandal and conspiracy that pervades the presentation, to examine underlying issues of identity and the uses of the image. As a reflection on the latter, “I Feel a Great Desire…” offers avenues of reflection, but on a more intimate level than the ones usually touched by the now well-documented “war on terror” and its reporting by the media. The visual uses he makes of his detention by airport police (with photos of each incriminating item) lead it to exist for us in a way it never could have otherwise, his story being only too banal amidst fear and ever stricter airport regulations. At the same time, he told me informally after the show, the image he created of that same experience – the performance - became too dangerous to circulate in the United States while his naturalization application was being reviewed, which is why he has never presented “I Feel a Great Desire…” in his new country.

As such, it seems that a much more interesting story is being told here, whether Raad is aware of it or not. The presentation begins and ends with Raad leaving Lebanon by boat under Israeli bombs: the first time in 1983, the second time in 2006. The images he records on his camera at a distance of 23 years deliberately compliment each other but the persons recording them are not the same. The first voyage is undertaken by a fearful adolescent leaving the security of home and country for the unknown (life in the United States with an older brother); the second not only has the feeling of déjà vu but is also framed by Raad’s new status as a US citizen, which allowed him to leave Lebanon on US military transport to return “home” to his wife and child in New York. Immigration Service stamps on his Lebanese and American passports testify to his travels and subsequent changed identity.

Of this evolution, its reasons and consequences, Raad remains silent, favoring collective history over individual stories, and even though the samples of work he had in his luggage that infamous day at Rochester Airport are unquestionably studies of identity. Similarly, as a widely exhibited artist and full-time professor at the Cooper Union, the implications of his performance and all the choices which informed it cannot pass unnoticed to him. Yet they are never explored here nor are they given time to germinate in the mind of the spectator, who must process a vast amount of factual information to merely follow the plot of his story.

Heeding McLuhan’s warning that “the price of eternal vigilance is indifference”, Raad repeated to me after the show that he felt very strongly he no longer wished to perform “I Feel a Great Desire…” and to move towards new themes and ways of exploring them. I noticed however that he took the calling card of a representative of the European Parliament who wished to invite Raad to preach to the masses in Strasbourg. The reign of the image of the “war on terror”, how the image presents a certain representation of this, and perhaps even inures us to its vastly destructive implications, will likely continue.

(1) Thomas Keenan, “Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television)”, PMLA 117.1 (Jan 02): 104-116 (cited in French in the program to “I Feel a Great Desire to Meet the Masses Once Again”).

Photo credit: Walid Raad

If War Was Only A Joke

The Lebanese Civil War lasted over 15 years, destroyed Beirut’s cultural and commercial life and drew neighboring regional powers into intense political and military conflict. The generation of Lebanese youth who grew up against the backdrop of the hostilities includes the 40 -year old director Rabih Mroué. Although he would only have been a young boy at the beginning of the war, in a caustically humorous examination of the conflict, recently presented in Paris, he and his contemporaries become “freedom fighters” of different and variable stripes, corpses enlisted incessantly into a seemingly endless battle. The show’s title, in English, “How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke”, provides a clue as to how Mroué’s generation approaches its shared and painful history and faces the specter of renewed violence since July 2006 : a kind of deliberate naïveté where one could just wish the troubles away, eyes closed and fingers crossed. The four characters who relate their involvement in the war and the circumstances of their numerous deaths never flinch however from the causes they defend, whether they join the ranks of Communist revolutionaries, Muslim brothers, the pro-Syrian Amal party or the Christian Free Patriotic Movement. Wedged uncomfortably into a single couch, moving only when their turn comes to speak, and dressed in the threads of modern Lebanese 40-somethings, the actors and their “testimonies” blend into a single story of the paradoxical unreality of a conflict that claimed thousands of lives for little if any political or social gain. The message is underscored by the brilliant iconographical work of Samar Maakaroun and Ziena Maasri, who recreate faithfully and cleverly the posters of the glorious deceased in the colors and symbolism of the parties who claim their acts of “heroism”. Judging from the knowing laughter among the Arab-speaking members of the audience, Mroué and company touch a nerve in a society yet vulnerable to a past that threatens to repeat itself, and in so doing, demonstrate for audiences less versed in the geopolitical complexities and nuances of the region how theater can serve as a vital and immediate forum for social reflection. Drawing on the idea of the virtual worlds of video games now familiar, and ever more real perhaps, to the next generation of Lebanese youth, Mroué succeeds in showing, with “How Nancy Wished…” what is at stake for he and his contemporaries : life itself. “We have the responsibility to think seriously about our history, because we cannot continue in the way we have,” he has said. “We don’t want to die again, one more time. We have had enough.”
Note: Mroué’s accomplice in “How Nancy Wished…”, Lina Saneh performs “Appendice” later this month (see previous post for more details).
“How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke”, to Oct. 21, Festival d'Automne/Théâtre de la Cité internationale, info/reservations: www.festival-automne.com or www.theatredelacite.com
Photo Credit: Rabih Mroué, "Martyr pour que vive le Liban", photo-montage by Samar Maakaroun

Should We Be Afraid of Fall Theater?

Who is afraid of the representation? The question, asked by Lebanese writer/director Rabih Mroué in a performance of the same title, shown in September at the Centre Pompidou, sets the tone of the fall theater season. To answer the question, the theories of Peter Brook are typically illuminating. Writing in "The Empty Space" (1968), Brook defines “representation” as that moment when the audience “assists” the actor in performance so that “what is present for one is present for the other”. Understood in the context of Mroué’s piece, the proposition is a dangerous one. The show juxtaposes “body art” (not to be mistaken for tattooing and piercing, as the term has come to mean in our century, but understood here as the extremely violent forms of performance art practiced by artists like Bob Flanagan, Marina Abramovic and Chris Burden in the 1970s) and the story of a shooting spree in Beirut where eight office employees were killed by their fraudulent co-worker. The performance artists whose works are described matter-of-factly in the show (including Abramovic’s notorious “Rhythm 0”, where an audience was given the opportunity to use on Abramovic's body any of a variety of displayed instruments, including a pistol and a bullet, and in which the artist nearly died; or Burden’s “Through the Night Softly” in which he rolled, naked, through broken glass under the feet of passersby on a Los Angeles Street) examine audience passivity in response to violence. By textually and visually layering the explorations of artists like these with the story of gunman Hassan Mamoun and the context of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), Mroué and his partner Lina Saneh recognize the public’s understandable desire not to participate in bloody “spectacles” such as these, while also seeming to argue for precisely greater participation in such conflicts and tragedies so as to see them prevented or at least their effects mitigated. However, the show’s dramatic framework is provided by a game in which Saneh must recite the litany of Flanagan and company’s myriad acts of self-mutilation in a given space of time, usually under 1 minute, with Mroué holding the stopwatch. In so doing, they engage in a provocative glorification of the body artist’s courage in enduring extreme pain. Needless to say, any parallel with Mamoun’s desperate act of revenge or the victims’ suffering (thereby elevated to art) would be abominable. The line is razor thin here, but deliberately so. In a world where pain is the preferred fodder of mass media, where human suffering is its preferred (because profitable) spectacle, the general public is indeed asked to participate in frequently gruesome representations of life and death, if not by suffering personally, but at least by feeling with those who do, at the risk of loosing all feeling altogether. What can wake us from our torpor? Who indeed is brave enough to participate in the “representation”? Such are the questions Mroué and Saneh are asking us, in the irreverent tone by which they are making their theater known abroad.

The program of this year’s Festival d’Automne offers a variety of opportunities to pursue the line of reflection, with an emphasis on artists from the Middle East who are using theater to communicate with society in this conflict-torn region. Mroué returns to the theme of political and social violence in “How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke” (in Arabic with French subtitles, Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, Oct. 8-14). In “Appendice”, Saneh introduces her own performance art project (tongue-in-cheek?) in which she plans to have her body parts individually removed and incinerated during her lifetime, so as to circumvent the outlawing of cremation in Lebanon (in French, Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, Oct. 22-28). Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad uses a multimedia palette to paint a vast tableau of acts of state-sponsored incarceration of supposed terrorists, following his own arrest at Rochester International Airport in 2004, in “I Feel a Great Desire to Meet the Masses Once Again” (in English, Centre Pompidou, October 12-13). And young playwright and director Amir Reza Koohestani offers his “Recent Experiences” of life in his native Iran (in Persian, with French subtitles, Théâtre de la Bastille, Nov. 8-18). From Belgium, but exploring the same question about the potential “dangers” of received performance, Tim Etchells has created a show blurring reality and representation in the style of the British collective Forced Entertainment, which Etchells directs, in “That Night Follows Day”, a searing commentary on parent-child relations, with repercussions for the artist-audience dynamic (in Dutch, with French subtitles, Centre Pompidou, Nov. 1-3). In a similar vein, Stéphane Olry relates in “Treize semaines de vertu” his reflections while attempting to follow Benjamin Franklin’s 13 virtues of temperance, silence, order and the like (in French, Archives Nationales, Oct. 24-Nov. 4) . Will his conclusion be “Don’t try this at home”? Information and reservations at www.festival-automne.com


Photo credits:
Photo 1: "Qui a peur de la représentation?": Houssan Mchaiemch
Photo 2: "Appendice": Rabih Mroué/Hatem Imam
Photo 3: "I Feel a Great Desire to Meet the Masses Again": Walid Raad
Photo 4: "That Night Follows Day": Phile Depraz

Avignon Over and Out

Avignon moves towards its final week with a handful of shows and artists still to discover, from festival habitués to unknown talents. After introducing Avignon to la murga, the outsider carnival of Buenos Aires, to write a new chapter in his virulent critique of consumer society, Argentine director Rodrigo Garcia proposes “Approche de l’idée de méfiance”, a pantomime of his now familiar dramatic language – a primitive dance of bodies covered in comestibles – accompanied by Garcia’s latest reflections on his chosen theme, offered as a silent text in projection. Co-founder with Avignon Associate Artist Frédéric Fisbach of the forthcoming Parisian artspace known as “104”, Robert Cantarella makes his fourth appearance here with “Hippolyte”, an alternative writing from the 16th century of the story told more famously by Racine’s “Phèdre”. And young French actor and director Gildas Milin wraps up his “Machine sans cible”, a not entirely tongue-in-cheek experiment examining the potential applications of artificial intelligence for understanding the phenomenon of love. Finally, two untested newcomers to Avignon bring up the rear of the month-long program. The Franco-Austrian collective known as Superamas concludes a trilogy of pieces incorporating video, dance and live music to irreverently explore the social confessional offered by Internet and reality shows, with “Big 3rd Episode. Happy/end”, where American voices are dubbed over the stage action. From Bulgaria via Brussels, Galin Stoev directs “Genèse nº2”, a rewriting of the Book of Genesis, “co-authored” by Ivan Viripaev, an up-and-coming playwright in his native Russia, and the fictional psychiatric patient Antonina Velikanova, who believes herself to be the wife of the Biblical figure Loth. From the conflicts of the 20th century to the origins of the world, Avignon comes full circle to finish a largely peaceful edition in 2007.

Photos: (left) “Machine sans cible”, (right) “Big 3rd Episode. Happy/end” ; Christophe Raynaud de Lage / Festival d'Avignon

Avignon/Paris/Warsaw

Two shows mark midpoint at Avignon 2007, and, by nature of their contrasts, point up a significant challenge to French theater today. On the one hand, there is “Feuillets d’Hypnos”, a much anticipated, site-specific (to the Cour d’Honneur) piece built around the writings of Resistance fighter and poet René Char, by one of the most promising directors of France’s 40-something generation, Avignon Associate Artist Frédéric Fisbach. On the other, Tony Kushner’s two-part, Reagan-era “Angels in America”, revisited in 2007 via Warsaw by one of the most promising directors of Poland’s 40-something generation, Krzysztof Warlikowski. Two adaptations of historically rooted, dense works, both drawing on the means, concerns and styles of the early 21st century, but with starkly different results. Confronted with the albeit poetic, but no less urgent reflections contained in the over 200 notes written by Char in the heat of the French underground struggle against the Nazi occupier, Fisbach imposes a smooth urban esthetic and a facile play to communicate the dark realities of Char the fighter and the irrepressible hope of Char the poet to a contemporary audience who, one feels in Fisbach’s choices, is deemed unable to similarly marry art and conviction. And so, when comparing Fisbach’s “Feuillets” and Warlikowski’s “Angels”, it appears again that the emotional and ethical core of European theater today lies beyond France’s borders. For where Fisbach errs incomprehensibly in favor of the tastes of a self-satisfied consumer society, Warlikowski returns to the attack of contemporary Polish society – Catholic, conservative, even reactionary or extremist in the director’s own words – with Kushner’s sweeping X-ray of the moral, religious and economic excesses of 1980s America at the height of the then-emerging AIDS epidemic. If Warlikowski has opted for a minimalist set where light and mirrors explore the dimensions of what is played within its walls, he better avoids the pitfalls of caricature and sensationalism in discussing gay life, especially in this detailed (5 hour long) examination of it from a now 20 year old perspective. And while Fisbach plays the Resistance cool and catty, Warlikowski goes straight to the fear and taboos surrounding AIDS and homosexuality in Polish society today, in the hope of opening an honest dialogue on these and related questions of sexuality and bigotry. The difference of approach and of intention is striking, between Fisbach and Warlikowski, between a view of theater developed in Paris or defended in Warsaw, both on view at Avignon.

Photos: (left) “Angels in America”, (right) “Feuillets d’Hypnos” ; Christophe Raynaud de Lage / Festival d'Avignon

Avignon via Afrique #2

Politically engaged theater proving to be a strong current of Avignon 2007, the presence of Faustin Linyekula at this edition is a natural choice. From his native Kisangani in the RDC, to Kinshasa, Nairobi, Paris and back to the northeastern reaches of the Congo River, the dancer and choreographer is driven, he says, by the desire to help the people of his hometown dream again, in a country ravaged by 5 years of a deadly civil war that has already claimed the lives of 3.5 million people. Linyekula’s background parallels the vicissitudes of African history in the 20th century: raised to respect the customs and rites of his elders while educated by Catholic missionaries, a football fanatic and a choirboy, a Zaïrois and/or a Congolese, depending on who runs the economically poorest and geologically richest country in the world, a habitué and beneficiary of the largesse of the network of French Cultural Centers in Africa, a reinventer of himself from day to day via the means at hand, from literature and theater to dance and video. These many facets of himself and his concerns are explored in the duo of pieces he presents at Avignon : a choreography for four dancers, “Dinozord”, and an exercise in pure storytelling, “Le Festival des mensonges”. In the first, a work prompted by the death from plague of the choreographer’s older brother Kabako, Linyekula and the young dancers he trained for this piece, movingly treat the challenges of African youth and the question of the future in an area of the world where uncertainty and fear are daily companions. In the second, also a tribute to Kabako, Linyekula spins stories such as generations of storytellers before him have done: at the heart of a community, with live music and refreshments part and parcel of a shared, all-night long performance. Even at its most fantastic, the African tale is always a reflection on reality, and the “lies” Linyekula fabricates tell the incredible story of the heart of “darkest” Africa. With these shows, part of the aptly named “Dialogue Series” of works developed through Linyekula’s nomadic ateliers known as Studios Kabako, the performer proves that his art is above all a state-of-mind, with the power to create, change and, most importantly, dream.
Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d'Avignon

"La jeune fille à la bombe"

Christophe Fiat is an intellectual à la française : this philosopher, poet and fiction writer crosses over with equal ease between academia, the arts and popular culture. His references range from Christopher Marlowe to William S. Burroughs via Nijinsky. His areas of interest include the Balkan conflict, the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, porn stars and mangas. His writing pays equal homage to Batman and Brecht. He jams on an electric guitar. His over a dozen performance pieces, attempting to lend a plastic construct to his writing, boast such didactic titles as “If Carrie White wasn’t the heroine of a Stephen King novel, she’d be a terrorist” and “Isidora Duncan is a crack-snorting dancer”. Tout un programme! And that is about all one can fairly say upon being liberated from Fiat’s most recent piece, “La jeune fille à la bombe”, though his stated objectives are reasonable enough: to alert audiences to the repression of individual freedoms in the new world of the declared war on terrorism. If the medium is the message, however, than what is to be inferred from what is offered on stage: two hours of a monotonal, collective reading of an ironic, karate-chopping, punk kidnapping story with locales in Afghanistan (a love affair with Massoud), Geneva (for a midnight DNA sample) and Fiat’s native Franche-Comté (radioactive vegetables and self-destructing cars)… with the performers’ backs turned to the audience nearly the entire time? Fiat claims the right to an imaginative life in a world, he says, that has “dynamited imagination itself,” to which menace he ripostes by his young woman with a bomb : a brave reclaiming of that freedom, according to Fiat, for whom King’s Carrie is the courageous heroine of anti-establishment liberties in our pop culture world.

Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d'Avignon

Avignon In The Streets

Getting the public away from the "In" and into the "Off" theaters is part of the game for companies in the alternative program, brandishing posters and tracts and offering street performances to advertise the 860 shows present at this year's edition.
Photos: paris-theater

Sentimental Bourreau/"Tendre Jeudi"

The collective known as “Sentimental Bourreau” is at the origin of a delightful production for the stage of “Sweet Thursday”, the short novel by John Steinbeck about a community of down-and-outs on Cannery Row in Monterey, California. Unlike many representations of American culture for the French stage, which fall into cliché out of ignorance of the realities of American society, company founder and director Mathieu Bauer had the laudable idea to travel to Monterey in search of Steinbeck’s California. If he discovered to his surprise that the shanty-towns of Monterey in the 1950s have been replaced by the million-dollar homes of the stars of Hollywood in 2007, Bauer went in search of Steinbeck’s marginals, which he found in a dilapidated neighborhood on the water’s edge in Oakland, filmed them and incorporated them into this multimedia production that is equal parts a testament to Steinbeck’s philosophy of life and a bold example of the best of the potential uses of video and live music on stage. At the center of the close-knit community formed by the bums Mack and Hazel, the prostitutes of Fauna’s whorehouse and the Latino (formerly Asian) grocery of Maria and Joseph, is the story of the marine biologist Doc and Suzy, the “stranger” to these parts. Both need someone, and both find each other, thanks to the well-meaning plotting of their fellow partners in misery. Bauer’s film is the moving backdrop to their tale, drawing in the trains, diners, ocean life and shacks familiar to Steinbeck’s community. A self-described cinephile greatly influenced by American film, Bauer frames the piece with segments from films by Preston Sturgis and Alfred Hitchcock, in particular the kiss between James Cagney and Kim Novak in “Vertigo”. Motivated by a desire, he said in a press conference, to “re-enchant the world”, he offers through his faithful adaptation of Steinbeck’s text a proposal dear to him: “to demand the right to work less in order to think more.” With “Tendre Jeudi”, the group’s first truly representational piece of theater, Sentimental Bourreau crowns 17 years of interdisciplinary collaboration, where music and video are integrated creative sources of performance and here prove themselves to be eloquent voices of expression for Steinbeck’s universal tale of the dignity of a human life and the importance of community to give that life its fullest dimension.

Photos: Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d'Avignon

Avignon via Afrique

Africa finds a place in the 61st Avignon Festival, incarnated by two performers: Dieudonné Niangouna of the Congo Republic, author and performer of “Attitude Clando”, and Faustin Linyekula, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who brings two shows, “Le Festival des Mensonges” and “Dinozord”. Their presence here is remarkable, opening what is traditionally a European-centered program to the daily realities and challenges to creation in contemporary Africa and giving the diverse public to Avignon an opportunity it might not otherwise have or choose to see African theater. If their first experience of African performance is “Attitude Clando”, however, they may be falsely impressed by an apparent poverty of means - a stark set of a smoldering bed of coals under a weakly lit spotlight - when what this tightly-written monologue surprisingly exposes is the author’s affective distance from the struggle of illegal immigrants in Europe. More social marginal than clandestine worker, the individual who growls to an unseen doctor the story of his angry resistance to the life of the man whose papers are in order and can freely circulate in society - “l’homme réglo” – rejects society itself, or in Niangouna’s own words, “refuses the qualities attributed to a human being and the very reason for being or for resisting the forms of social governance”. The “Clandestine Attitude” he espouses is, he has written, “not to be legal but to be free as the wind”. A nihilistic individualism is what motivates the shadowy figure between two points of light, and not a desire to make a better life for himself or his family, motivations more commonly associated with clandestine movement across borders. The piece consequently reads more as a statement on African realities – a cry for freedom from all forms of oppression – than on the ability of North and South to meet each other honestly. An exhibit at the Ecole d’Art of photos taken of Niangouna in Brazzaville evokes a similarly solitary and marginal existence.

Photo: "Attitude Clando", by Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d'Avignon

"L'Acte inconnu"

"To see the world in front of us transformed through the hormone of language" : such is the desire of Swiss playwright and director Valère Novarina. With "L'Acte inconnu", a witty and fast-paced series of reflections on his eternal amazement by the simple act of speech, Novarina offers an invigorating celebration of the creative act, in art and life. After being booed at Avignon in 1986 with "Le Drame de la Vie", Valère Novarina conquers the public in 2007 with this Rabelaisian feast of words.

Photos: Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d'Avignon

"Les Paravents"/Youkiza Marionnette Theater

The stars of Frédéric Fisbach's "Les Paravents" ("The Screens") are the finely manipulated string puppets of the Youkiza Marionnette Theater, one of the few companies in Japan to practice string "bunraku" (marionnettes), and that for the last 360-years. Incarnating the myriad characters of Genet's labyrinthine work, and principally the French colons in Algeria, the marionnettes underscore Genet's biting humor and critique of these "puppets" of French colonial power in North Africa.

Photos: Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d'Avignon

Avignon On

The 61st Avignon Theater Festival has clearly recovered from the professional strikes, audience dismay and artistic bickering that have plagued it in recent years. With 75% of seats sold by the first week of the month-long event, the public is back in force, lured by the program of Invited Artistic Director Fédéric Fisbach, which marks a return to the vision of Festival founding father Jean Vilar, to make theater accessible to all. Far from elitist, the program features a number of artists unknown to the public – Gildas Milin, Faustin Linyekula, Eléonore Weber – alongside longstanding Festival guests Valère Novarina, Romeo Castellucci and Rodrigo Garcia and established French directors Ariane Mnouchkine, Julie Brochen and Jean-Pierre Vincent. Fisbach sets the example with the choice of shows he brings : “Les Paravents”, Jean Genet’s reputedly un-playable and initially scandalous play about the Algerian War, created in 2002 with the Youkiza Marionnette Theater of Japan, and “Feuillets d’Hypnose”, created from extracts of the journal kept by French poet René Char about his activities with the French Résistance. Political engagement marries art in these shows meant to touch a wide audience either through puppetry, bringing to life the 96 characters of “Les Paravents”, or a 24/7 sit-in in the Cour d’Honneur, bringing the convictions of Char and Vilar home again to a festival that was roundly criticized in 2005, under the direction of Flemish choreographer Jan Fabre, as an incomprehensible exercise in artistic self-gratification. Avignon in 2007 seems to have put those troubles behind it by putting the text and the public at the fore.

Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d'Avignon

Countdown to Avignon

Avignon lives and breathes theater in July, when the 61st Festival d’Avignon takes over the city’s streets and stages. After Jan Fabre and Josef Nadj, whose programs made dance an equal partner in the annual festivities, this edition’s Guest Artist is French director Frédéric Fisbach, who puts the focus squarely back on the written text : René Char, Paul Claudel, Jean Genet, Tony Kusher, Valère Novarina… Follow what’s happening with news and photos, coming soon.

Photo: Le décor de "Pluie d'été à Hirohima", collaboration artistique M/M Paris, 2006
Fred Nauczyciel/see-you-tomorrow pour le Festival d'Avignon