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