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