"Eleven and Twelve", or When Not To Translate

“Is it absolutely necessary to translate?”, sighs the Italian tutor in Samuel Beckett’s short story, “Dante and the Lobster”. Such weary frustration with the task of finding in a new idiom the language to express what has been perfectly said in the original, may strike a chord with audiences to “Eleven and Twelve”. For those who saw and were moved by Peter Brook’s masterful “Tierno Bokar” (2004), its English-language version appears a poor substitute.

“Tierno Bokar” was the adaptation by Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne of Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s account of the life and teachings of his spiritual guide, Tierno Bokar (1875-1939), in a period in Malian history when colonial ambitions and religious doctrine clashed with devastating effects for believers. As the English title of Brook’s play underlines in red, the defining historical moment of Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar. Le sage de Bandiagara (Seuil, 1994) was the dispute between rival clans in the Sufi faith regarding the number of times a prayer should be recited. Taught to pray 12 times, Bokar is convinced through his search for spiritual truth to change sides, a decision that leads directly to his banishment and death. His life stood, for his pupil Hampâté Bâ, as it does for all readers of this illuminating autobiographical account, as an example of religious tolerance and the courage to uphold it in the face of ignorance and persecution.

Brook’s “Tierno Bokar” benefited enormously from the insight and energy of its West African cast, led by the great Burkinabe actor Sotigui Kouyaté who, as the descendent of Malian griots (oral historians), lent an aura of authenticity to the role of the sage Bokar, and the presence of three actresses as the formidable wives and mothers on whom African society rests. These crucial elements are lost in “Eleven and Twelve”, whose all-male, international cast fails to locate either the gravitas or the illumination of the original. “Tierno Bokar” was developed in French through workshops at Columbia University in New York City and exchanges with the African communities in Harlem. That cross-cultural dialogue which helped create the original would seem to be “translation” enough of Hampâté Bâ’s book and Bokar’s teachings. Why indeed was another, less satisfying exercise necessary?

“Eleven and Twelve”, to Dec. 19, Tues-Fri, 8:30 pm, Sat, 3:30/8:30 pm, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, 37 bis boulevard de la Chapelle, 10e, Mº La Chapelle, 10€-26€, tel: 01.46.07.34.50.

When Self is Other

Disappearing identities is the subject of an exciting work of new writing, and its representation on stage, in the “Trilogie Chto”, by Sonia Chiambretto, directed by Hubert Colas. The collision of text and direction is of primary interest here: the one is keenly aware of its form, experimenting with the visual and spatial potential of the printed page (crossed out text, symbols, fonts…) while the other imagines a visual setting that exploits contrasts and media and works on multiple levels and planes. Triptych would be a more accurate term for this series of three independent stories, published separately (as poetry, originally) and which Colas has developed individually into three distinct portraits, which can be seen separately or in any combination. Together, they attempt an intriguing dialogue, thanks to a common theme of displacement/exile and a uniformly frontal presentation.

The origins of the pieces are rooted in Chiambretto’s native Marseille and interviews conducted with three of its more atypical residents: an 18-year old Chechen refugee, a Slovakian nun who entered a French convent at the age of 8, and a German veteran of the French Foreign Legion. While their status as exiles in France most obviously unites them, the stories they tell expose more particular forces at work in their psyche than the broadly political or cultural. Only the young protagonist of “Chto interdit au moins de 15 ans” has the liberty, in her French courses and on-line chats, to reflect on the construction of identity through language and the ambiguities that can develop in the act of switching linguistic codes, but where the “nostalgie langue” will always resonate the deepest. In the other two portraits, “12 Soeurs slovaques” and “Mon kepi blanc”, institutions (religious and military) seek to be the exclusive mediators of identity, with lesser and greater results. If Soeur Rose casts a critical eye on the material and moral privations she has suffered over something like 50 years of cloistered communal life, the Legionnaire finds little fault with the military apparatus that sent him to Indochina and Algeria and taught him the camaraderie of men at arms, although the changes these experiences have worked upon him appear to be multiple.

How is identity created and preserved in situations of displacement, especially in the context of war? Must the exile sacrifice the individual to survive as an “other” in a strange and hostile world? Is memory a process or a condition, an ontology or an institution? And by what ruses real and imagined might the self yet defend itself against physical and psychological aggression? Such difficult questions may not have been the conscious concerns of Chiambretto in the act of writing but the plasticity of her form opens wide the door to interpretation. Colas steps through it to color in the missing pieces, lending depth to character in “Mon Képi blanc” and “Chto…”, but also narrowing interpretative possibility, even to risk cliché, in “12 Soeurs slovaques” (where Catholicism is the ready fall guy for institutionalized hypocrisy).

The trilogy ran for the first time this month at the Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, where "12 Soeurs slovaques" was created. "Mon Képi blanc" and "Chto..." tour in France through April: an opportunity, with the three texts now published together by Actes Sud, to consider how text is translated to the stage and how the different languages of Chiambretto and Colas explore that most modern question of the self, in the environment of conflict and migration which defined the last century and which is poised to challenge even further the societies and individuals of the 21st.

Photo Credits:
"Chto...", Nicholas Marie
"Mon Képi blanc", Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques

Garcia Strikes Back in "Versus"

A combative provocateur, director Rodrigo Garcia is ready for a fight in his latest show, “Versus”, a battle the cast and audience live in real time over two brutal hours. At last Saturday’s production at the Théâtre du Rond-Point, the actresses, who endure simulations of torture (suffocation and drowning) and beatings, were covered with very real and visible bruises, and the public nearly came to blows, some shouting out their disgust and fairly stampeding for the exits, while others laughed at their bourgeois sensibilities and jeered them on their way. There’s nothing like the theater for inciting impassioned reactions, and if this was in any way Garcia’s intention, he was entirely successful.

Invited by the Festival d’Automne, which first brought his Carnicería Teatro to Paris in 2002, the 45-year old Asturias-based Argentine is not growing old quietly, but rather turning up the volume on his anti-capitalist, anti-consumer message, one that takes no prisoners and soothes no egos. “Versus” is a violent punch back at those who (to paraphrase a monologue repeated twice in the show) would shower us with myriad blows to our individuality and integrity, in the form of invasive publicity, corporate messages and marketing strategies, all of which regard human life as consumer behavior to be manipulated and people as objects to be bought, used and sold.

The show uses several of Garcia’s symbols to underscore the point: food and its mindless consumption in the over-fed societies of the industrialized world; and rabbits, which seem to happily endure traps of all sorts (in this case, a microwave’s timed reheat program). The polar opposite to this gluttonous sado-masochism is represented by books, hundreds of which lie on the stage, and their metaphorical signifier: learning. Both are trampled, torn and urinated upon, while an epithet-spewing monkey very deliberately carries around Proust and Rousseau as a reminder how far this life-style has alienated us from the arts of the mind. Driving the message home are a live, hard-rock beat and the true story of abuse and addiction told by a fairly desperate looking man from Buenos Aires, who is dressed for his funeral in the final scene. Seen through the dozen or so, mostly shocking episodes which comprise the show, consumer society appears as an unstoppable, one-way ticket to man’s demise. In “Versus”, Garcia’s theater is no more digestible than the tons of spaghetti, pizza and steak tartare consumed on stage, although it can be searingly funny. It does seem however, that if the logos and tag-lines and promotions that fill daily existence in the 21st century are any indicator, and if the market indeed holds human self-actualization in a stranglehold, that the premise is vital and the means to communicating it justified, and even salutary.

Photo Credit: Christian Berthelot

Creole Theater, Contemporary Problems

Metropolitan French know the French West Indies, or Antilles, for their white sand beaches and limpid waters. French West Indians know their home is anything but a paradise. The festival of “Creole” theater now ending at the Parc de La Villette offers a compelling explanation for this disparity, painting a vision of life in Guadeloupe and Martinique that is far removed from tourist brochures and clichés. Two plays, both by Guadeloupean women writers, unflinchingly take on the searing issues facing Antillean society today: unemployment, delinquency, drug abuse and crime among young men and the ravages of these combined social ills on women of all ages.

These are not well-worn topics in Antillean theater. Whether in French or in Creole, French West Indian writers and directors have concentrated their attention over the last 50 years to fighting economic and political oppression by the former colonizer, turned “homeland” (patrie) in 1946. That “Trames”, by Gerty Dambury, and “Comme deux frères” by novelist Maryse Condé, turn to these pressing and very contemporary domestic issues is significant, and testament to their importance for female agency in Antillean society.

“Trames” is the story of a mother-son relationship poisoned by the latter’s inability to hold a job and his subsequent drug use and descent into crime. Although Christian’s mother is an accomplished and well-traveled researcher, with a specialty in women’s narratives (spouse abuse, prostitution, rape, etc.), Christian cannot manage to shake off the heritage of an absent father and take responsibility for himself. Claiming frustration with what he perceives as his mother’s privileging of her work over the problems of her progeny, he robs her of her dearest possessions, then murders her when she asserts her freedom, by telling him in no uncertain terms, “You are not my final destination.” Dambury places on the lips of her heroine a terribly bold statement for an Antillean mother to say to her child, yet it is the only one this women can make if she is to liberate herself from yet another man attempting to wield power over her. In that final act of rebellion, the playwright makes an equally telling statement about Guadeloupean society, where the new turf lords are adolescent males and the latest victims their mothers and grandmothers who tirelessly worry about them, feed them, clean them up and bail them out of trouble. Directed by Dambury, the production which just closed, starring Firmine Richard, was tight, controlled and excellently acted, with a fine supporting cast: Jalil Leclaire as the lost and angry Christophe and Martine Maximin, as a kind of women’s wisdom personified and who also makes an astonishing performance as a prostitute/interviewee.

“Comme deux frères” which runs this week, adopts a similar theme but, under the direction of José Exilis, does not pack nearly the same punch. The text, published in 2007, is a small revelation nevertheless: two friends awaiting trail for murder share the secrets of their pasts in a jailhouse confession that serves as a reminder of the same social problems, here on a grander scale: school, government, religion, the police and above all the family are remiss in their duty to raise a morally grounded younger generation; worse, these institutional actors are the perverse tools of a society gone to wreck and whose victims again include women: the teenage mothers and abused lovers these young men leave in the wake of their destruction. In a powerful, penultimate scene, the friends struggle with a Faustian pact: Jeff, who has always taken the blame for Greg’s failures, will agree to plead sole guilt for the murder if Greg will sleep with him, a deal the macho Greg cannot bear to accept, in part because of his surprise at the discovery of his friend’s parallel life. Maryse Condé has always been a writer of the tough realities of life in France’s tropical paradise. In this play, she develops a provocative metaphor: because Greg has screwed Jeff over these many long years he owes his friend a **ck for getting him out of an equally **cked up situation. In her indictment of contemporary Guadeloupean society, Condé shows that this impossible situation is shared by the community at large.

Unfortunately for Condé’s message, the production by Martinique’s Compagnie Siyaj is marred by a surprisingly blatant casting error: while the text treats clearly with young delinquents, Exilis has chosen to cast his longtime collaborator, 61-year old Gilbert Laumord, as Jeff. While Laumord is a talented actor and dancer, the choice creates an insurmountable problem of representation, added to by the soulful notes Jeff plays on the harmonica and his poetically tortured dance steps. The text, in its perverse pact and the dangerously insatiable will to live of Greg, demands the irresistible energy, uncompromising anger and pulsating music of youth. Exilis has created something more akin to a meditation on crime, where a fragmented dance interrupts the friends’ musings, on a bare stage that dispenses with the cramped promiscuity of the pair’s jail cell : necessary here to convey their descent into the existential pit from which they will never escape.

Dambury’s riveting production and Exilis’ failed opportunity can be taken as immediate evidence that contemporary Antillean theater may be both closer to current realities and farther yet from creating a viable esthetic than may have been supposed.

“Comme deux frères” to Oct. 10, Tues, Wed, Fri, Sat, 8:30 pm, Thurs, 7:30 pm, Grande Halle de la Villette, Parc de la Villette (19e), Mº Porte de Pantin, info: www.villette.com or tel: 01.40.03.75.75.

Photo credits: "Trames", Emir Srklovic; "Comme deux frères", Philippe Bourgade

Exterior Views: “I Went To The House But Did Not Enter”

The self is the defining notion of post-industrial society : the watershed of modern art, literature and psychology since Picasso, Joyce and Freud, the modus operandi of contemporary society and the yardstick of its tangential pop cultures. T. S. Eliot was one of the first to actively engage a multiple and fractured self in modern poetry, beginning with “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1911/17) and its inward-directed invitation to explore painful zones of feeling and emotion, while taking care, paradoxically, to eliminate these from his poetry. This he did through what he termed the “objective correlative”, or “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” The technique was demonstrated to disturbing effect in “Prufrock”’s etherized patient and insistent coffee spoons, filling in for numbness and frustration, but opened a new poetic field whereby the self could just infuse the objective world of the poem, and in so doing, allow the artist to access a state of necessary impersonality.

These concerns lie at the core of “I Went to the House But Did Not Enter” , an intriguing hybrid piece by German director/composer Heiner Goebbels. Constructed on four thematically intersecting texts spanning the last century, the show, a “staged concert” in the now signature style of its creator (after “Eraritjaritjaka”, 2004), explores the convergent concerns of its authors to challenge the tyranny of personality and the validity of language’s attempt to master human experience. Sung a cappella with virtuoso gravity and control by the Cambridge-based Hilliard Ensemble (2 tenors, 1 countertenor, 1 baritone), these texts offer immediate applications of Eliot’s literary theories. The series of three tableaux begins with “Prufrock”, here a study in grey where the bank clerk’s objectified insignificance in the eyes of his society is forcefully rendered by the Hilliards’ efficient packing and unpacking of a drawing room’s various objects in black and white. It continues to Maurice Blanchot’s short novel “La folie du jour”, first written in 1948, as a response to the losses and terrors of war (during which Blanchot narrowly escaped execution) and a testament to the writer’s ability to live tranquilly with constant suffering (the “madness of the day”) by removing himself from experience itself. This middle section is spoken primarily by the Hilliard Ensemble and comes the closest to resembling theater, but reintroduces the objective correlative in the looming form of an architecturally British looking house facade, with illuminated interiors of four rooms. It segues next to Franz Kafka’s very brief and characteristically humorous meditation on the individual’s isolation in society, “An Excursion into the Mountains” (1912), before finishing, where it must, with Samuel Beckett and his late monologue “Worstward Ho” (1983).

Goebbels has said his interest in “staged concerts” stems from a search for “alternatives to concepts of presence and intensity, the individual and absence” and the desire to explore these with “cinematic reality” in a way that avoids emotional subjectivity. In other words, using a kind of objective correlative to arrive at an intensity of feeling in the absence of an authorial self. In Goebbel’s visual language, this can translate into settings which appear to be of no relation to the words being spoken, such as in the “Worstward Ho” tableau, placed in a plush red upholstered hotel room interior. But Goebbels reserves an ingenious surprise in the form of a “slide show” whose frozen glimpses of human life fade into footage of a running river. The still-life of “Prufrock’s” arrested anxiety becomes an affirmation of life, in Beckett’s enigmatically hopeful mantra: ”Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”.

“I Went To The House But Did Not Enter”, in English with French subtitles, Sept. 23-27, 8:30 pm, Théâtre de la Ville, 2 place du Châtelet, 4e, Mº Châtelet, 15€/26€, tel: 01.42.74.22.77.

Photo Credit: www.heinergoebbels.com

France’s Invisible Africa

What does a thirtyish, white French intellectual know about Africa? The question is hardly the stuff of drama, yet playwright Ronan Chéneau and director David Bobee make of Chéneau’s struggle to answer it an intriguing performance. Chéneau and Bobee manage to satisfy a commission to write a text for dancers about the African presence in France, while essentially skirting it, Chéneau’s search leading him to the France of the banlieue riots of 2005 and of Nicolas Sarkozy’s Ministry of National Identity in 2008, and to his own position within that same society.

In Chéneau’s own account, he was living and writing in a medium-size French city, his major preoccupations art and love, when the commission arrived. If Africa was still only a dark continent on the edges of his imagination, a brief trip to Brazzaville, organized by the Centre Culturel Français there, helped him contextualize what he had only heretofore glimpsed via the media, as well as put him in touch with a Congolese choreographer, DeLaVallet Bidiefono. Read by Chéneau, this autobiographical narration serves as the mildly satirical preface to a performance that attempts through dance, video and acrobatics to poeticize a radically (for French theater) politicized discourse on the exclusive and draconian policies on integration and immigration of Sarkozy’s government, as well as a generalized racism and prevailing cultural chauvinism.

In the second, the health preoccupations and wide-eyed impressions of the French tourist thrown out of his Gallic fishbowl give over to self-loathing at being French and a wholesale rejection of France, at least such as Sarkozy has imagined it. “I hate France” is declaimed under a faded French flag; another point-blank statement, “I died the day I learned of the creation of the Ministry of National Identity”, is the prologue to a machine gun massacre of innocents to the tune of the Marseillaise.

Chéneau and Bobee never nuance their sentiments, and yet they fail to identify a focus of their resistance, hesitating between the related, yet different issues of social and economic integration of French citizens of immigrant descent, national immigration policy and race relations. While powerful, particularly in the acrobatic sequences and the revolutionary energy of the finale, the performances of the talented Franco-Congolese cast never entirely shake off a feeling of undirected displacement, mirrored by the airport boarding hall in which the piece is set, nor of self-conscious posturing, in the figure of Chéneau’s narrator and in the accumulation of politically-aimed punches.

But if the last word belongs to Chéneau, his conclusion to his struggle to find the “invisible” Africa in France, both provides hope and indicates with lucidity the road left to travel: “I dream of a day when Congolese and French will speak about the same world, with emotion, in peace and serenity. We will be Congolese and French; we will speak of the same world.” A world where, even in France, color and ethnicity will no longer mark division, but create community.

“Nos enfants nous font peur quand on les croise dans la rue”, to Feb. 14, Théâtre de Gennevilliers, 41 avenue des Grésillons, Gennevilliers (92), Mº Gabriel Péri, 5 euros-22 euros, tel: 01.41.32.26.26.
March 4-11, 8:30 pm, Maison des arts de Créteil, Place Salvador Allende, Créteil, Métro Créteil-Préfecture (shuttle bus return to Place de la Bastille following show), 4-20 euros, tel : 01 45 13 19 19 or www.maccreteil.com.

Photo credit: Tristan Jeanne-Valès