Cercles/Fictions

Inspired by storytelling traditions from Africa to India, Peter Brook has used for many years an arc-shaped performance space that extends into the audience at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. Joël Pommerat rounds off that arc in the newest production by his Compagnie Louis Brouillard, which enters the final year of a 36-month residency here; in “Cercles/Fictions”, Pommerat takes another step in his exploration of how power relations in contemporary society can blur the boundaries between truths and their distortion, and uses the ceremonial resonances of the circle to invite us into a world where the tectonic plates of norms and fantasy silently run into each other, with consequences as enormous as they are underestimated by these characters.

The play is composed in fact of concentric circles: seven serial stories whose overlapping episodes unfold like onion peels, with each new layer slightly closer to a common center. These tales revolve around: the waiting staff of an aristocratic home and their masters, two couples lost in a forest, a young executive who finds himself the object of the attentions of a sibylline bag lady, a knight, a mind-reader, a door-to-door salesman of his own self-help book, an entrepreneur and the homeless and unemployed he instrumentalizes. Pommerat writes in the program notes that all the stories told here are true, even personal, with one exception. Yet none of the scenarios is ordinary. If truth is stranger than fiction, we are certainly left guessing.

Several threads run throughout: the purported desire of some to improve the lot of the less fortunate, the hidden motivations of these alleged altruists, and the effects of their actions on those they would help. The means that these power-brokers have are many although three are the most common: wealth, confidence and supposed supernatural powers. The question of happiness is central, however, and seems to raise the following questions: to what extent can well-being be defined by money, comfort, success? Does self-fulfillment have any place in relationships founded on market values? And has consumer society fundamentally altered how and where happiness can be found (indeed, is it possible at all)?

“Cercles/Fictions” builds on similar preoccupations in previous shows “Les Marchands” and “Au monde”, which examined the inevitable tensions driving the relationship between the ruling classes and the working classes, and where the question of happiness was measured in terms of productivity. Here, Pommerat digs deeper at the motivations of both groups while introducing a new problematic: if you could change your life and finally achieve equality, happiness, freedom… , would you? If you had everything you could want, would that make you happy? He is joined as always by the formidable Compagnie Louis Brouillard, which performs another tour-de-force here, attaining a precision of tone, gesture, voice and rhythm that proves them masters of their art in France. With little more than a table and chairs to work with, they are assisted by Eric Soyer's magisterial lighting which displaces the action between interiors and exteriors, all equally atmospheric, from parking garages, and drawing rooms to dance halls and primeval forests

As a magical space of exchange, movement and transcendence since time immemorial, the circle(s) Pommerat develops here are indeed sites of liminality, where characters teeter on the edges of transformative changes. In so doing, he stirs up the dionysian (in the Nietzschian sense) powers of this configuration, tapping its creative and intuitive potential in the face of critical and rational forces. And while the imaginary, even the paranormal, has accompanied his earlier work, in “Cercles/Fictions”, it lies at the center of these chimerical stories.

To March 6, Tues-Sat, 8:30 pm, matinees (3:30 pm), Feb. 6 & 20 and March 6, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, 37 bis boulevard de la Chapelle, 10e, M° La Chapelle, 18/26 euros, tel: 01.46.07.34.50.

Photo Credit: Elisabeth Carecchio

« Paroles/pas de rôles…vaudeville »

Its far from a fairytale and yet this story bears a few resemblances to “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. That most prestigious of French cultural institutions, the Comédie-Française, has invited the avant-garde of Flemish/Dutch theater, in the persons of Damiaan De Schrijver, Peter Van den Eede and Matthias de Koning, to teach their craft to its noble players, or, to work the metaphor, to dress up a centuries old majesty in the latest and coolest threads. The result is “Paroles/pas de roles… vaudeville”, a piece conceived around the notion of repertoire and the preservation of theatrical history (the primary mission of the Théâtre-Français), on the one hand, and the anti-theatrical preoccupations of the project’s guest artists, on the other.

It should be said that the companies from which this trio hail, tg STAN (Antwerp), De Koe (Antwerp) and Discordia (Amsterdam), have come to occupy the vanguard of contemporary European theater in Paris, sharing a similar interest in laying bare all theatrical conceit to explore the motivations and role of the actor in the dramatic moment, while displaying formidable acting skills themselves, finely tuned textual readings and a post-modern look at it all. While STAN is the best known in Paris, enjoying regular invitations from the Festival d’Automne and long-standing support from the Théâtre de la Bastille, members of all three, which operate as collectives, collaborate freely with each other. One such project, by the same De Schrijver/Van den Eede/de Koning threesome, was a condensation of the companies’ commonly held preoccupations and a revelation of the 2003 Festival d’Automne: “Du serment de l’écrivain du roi et de Diderot” (“vandeneedevandeschrijvervandekoninganddiderot”, in Dutch), based on Denis Diderot’s essay, “The Paradox of Acting,” took to heart the French philosopher’s much debated thesis that to move the audience to engage emotionally with the action of the play, the actor must himself remain emotionally neutral.

Suffice it to say that Diderot’s ideas on the subject of acting have not been much implemented at the Comédie-Française. The decision by the theater’s current administrator, Muriel Mayette, to expose its sociétaires and pensionnaires (the two grades of troupe members) to the zero-actor approach of their colleagues in the Low Countries falls under the Théâtre-Français’ more recently assumed objective to venture beyond the classic repertoire produced at its Salle Richelieu venue, by interacting with modern texts and contemporary European directors. Increasingly imitated in France (the company known as “Les Possédés” are obvious admirers), as yet never duplicated, the particular theater equation arrived at by STAN, De Koe and Discordia nevertheless remains, after two months of exchanges and rehearsals, a conundrum for the cast of "Paroles..."

The problem was clearly foreseen, however, by the three directors. As they wrote presciently in the production notes, “With so little time to prepare the actors, the risk is that they will latch onto an appearance of what they want to express, that they show us the form while failing to anchor the project’s subject in their own experience.” (“En si peu de temps de preparation pour les comédiens, le piège serait de s’accrocher à l’extériorité de ce qu’il veulent exprimer, qu’ils montrent la forme sans que le propos vienne de l’intérieur.”). This is precisely the point at which the quintet of actors arrived, but could not surpass, on the opening night.

On a bare space strewn with backstage debris (props, ladders, coats…) and tied up in literal knots by wires and ropes operating curtains and sets, the three actresses and two actors play an ever-repeating, familiar scenario of characters assembling for an anticipated event, and parting when it is over. While the situation they attempt to enact is made deliberately difficult by stage lights that abruptly extinguish, props that are maddeningly missing and direction to talk over each other (so to better destabilize the normative jeu d’acteur in which they were trained), the obviously energized and invested troupe never seemed to find sufficient motivation in the exercise. It may be unfair to hold their efforts up to a standard achieved from decades of reflection, experimentation and improvisation, but a recent STAN performance such as “Le chemin solitaire” (in December), demonstrated to what extent understanding and meaning issue organically in performances by the Dutch and Flemish companies, despite and indeed because of such obstacles to role playing. The temptation to act generally got the better of good intentions in "Paroles...", although Laurent Natrella and Léonie Simaga just as often achieved a necessary humility and distance from character.

As the Emperor found to his dismay, the gorgeous attire he thought he was putting on only exposed his true nature. This latest initiative by the Comédie-Française will be truly splendid if it can shake some of the dust off an art in need of renewal and inject new practices into a venerable institution, to help it do better the repertoire it does best.

To February 28, Tues, 7 pm, Wed-Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, 21 rue du Vieux-Colombier, 6e, M° St. Sulpice, 8 euros-28 euros, tel: 01.44.39.87.00.

Photo credit: Christophe Raynaud de Lage

"Je t'appelle de Paris"

City of lights, city of dreams: Paris ever fascinates its 45 million annual visitors who probably remember those first sights, sounds, and of course, tastes of the French capital, even many years later. Café and croissants at a bustling zinc, the Eiffel Tower shimmering against the evening sky, the winding streets and precipitous staircases of Montmartre….: Paris is a feast for the senses as well as the imagination, as Hemingway was neither the first nor the last to note. For visitors coming from far away, in both geography and references, the novelty can begin before even touching Paris soil, in the plane or airport for example, where scales of technology, architecture and services characteristic of a world metropolis can mystify, long before getting to the Mona Lisa. Such was the experience of Moussa Sanou, a Burkinabé playwright/actor who came to France in 2002. Eight years and many Ouagadougou-Paris flights later, Sanou relates those indelibly engraved, first impressions in “Je t’appelle de Paris” (emphasis on the last word): more proof, if needed, that the city continues to exercise its charm, though the effects on visitors hailing from a former French colony can be mixed...

Developed from improvisations around Sanou’s encounters and discoveries, this engaging and lively two-hander, performed with Sanou’s fellow countryman Mamadou Koussé, works safe “fish out of water” comic ground while raising the familiar specter of the Banania Negro (whose “Y’a bon” becomes “Il n’y a pas de problème”) to scratch more sensitive zones of French colonial history and its residue. Sanou and the other members of his company Traces Théâtre, invited by director Jean-Louis Martinelli to create and perform “Voyage en Afrique” at Nanterre-Amandiers in 2002, deal with suspicious neighbors and condescending pedestrians with unflappable aplomb and perfect manners, not to mention exquisite consideration (walking barefoot the five flights to their apartment so as not to disturb the elderly couple next door), but do so always with a wry interior smile. In its sources of both wonder (the Métro…) and bemusement (concerns with propriety and appearances…), and its treatment of both, “Je t’appelle de Paris” is certainly indebted to a classic of African literature, Bernard Dadié’s Un Nègre à Paris (1959), where a young Ivorian author and journalist undertakes a reverse anthropological study of the “Parisians” and the city they built. As Sanou says, taking in everything he sees, “Dieu est bon mais le Blanc est grand!”

Have times changed? Much of West Africa celebrates this year the 50th anniversary of decolonization. Globalization and fifty more years of French coopération obliging, French and Africans are no longer the almost total strangers they were when Dadié gazed upon the Arc de Triomphe. As Moussa Sanou shows, however, more differences remain than there are bridges over the Seine, though most of these are what generally translates into “local color”: surprising, hair-tearing even, but harmless, on the whole. Of course, some opposing views will take more time to reconcile: whereas Sanou and his companions, in sketches that take place back in Burkina Faso, feel a sense of community and take time to appreciate the people they meet, their French guests see only crushing poverty and rudimentary hygiene. It is with these reflections that Sanou offers food for thought: Why must aid be a one-way street? Can Africans contribute nothing to their fellow world citizens? If another canicule strikes France, Sanou has a few ideas he’d like to share with us…

“Je t’appelle de Paris”, to February 14, Tues-Sat, 9 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 7 avenue Pablo Picasso, Nanterre (92), RER A Nanterre-Préfecture + shuttle, 12 euros-25 euros, tel: 01.46.14.70.00.

Photo credit: Pascal Béjean

"Deux Voix"

In June 2009, Royal Dutch Shell agreed to pay over $15 million to the families of the nine Ogoni activists, including Ken Saro-Wiwa, who were executed by the Nigerian government in 1995, with the oil company’s alleged consent. Although neither Shell nor the Ogoni are mentioned in “Deux Voix”, their 40-year conflict looms in the shadows of this one-man tour-de-force by the Dutch company ZT Hollandia, created from statements by Shell’s former Chairman Cor Herkströter, and texts by the Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Created in 1997, the play has its own long history that includes extensive international touring and numerous prizes. After a French premier at the 2004 Festival d’Avignon, the piece arrives in Paris less than a year after the Shell-Ogoni settlement, a landmark that may herald the end of an era of impunity for multinationals who fail to respect human rights and the environment. It certainly opposes a hopeful coda to a work that scours the gloss off the smooth operators of the political and business establishments.

Around a dinner table littered with the dregs of wine carafes, champagne bottles and whisky glasses, an almost interchangeable foursome of government officials, captains of industry and their cohorts peel back the layers of their toxic involvement in each other’s affairs, in a muscular and cruelly comic exposition of how political, business, intellectual and religious institutions and actors feed on and corrupt one another, with the help (this is Pasolini’s Italy, after all) of organized crime and the media. The quartet’s crude posturing and violent outbursts are abruptly deflated, however, by the coolly objective and ostensibly reasoned arguments offered by a fifth dinner guest, for whom business is business/has no business having a moral conscience. Taken from published articles and statements by Herkströter defending Shell’s operations in Nigeria (which included gas flaring and the de facto support of Nigeria’s military rulers), this monologue marks an immediate shift in tone and a chilling end to the play.

In its use of Herkströter’s arguments, its theme of political and industrial bed partners and its partial source in the activities of oil multinationals in Africa, “Deux Voix” (which was created in Dutch, as “Twee Stemmen”) is a forbearer of a similarly preoccupied French play, “ELF, la pompe Afrique”, based on the verbatim testimony of the defendants in the massive ELF-Aquitaine corruption trial (2003) that exposed decades of influence abuse by the French government in its former African colonies. “Deux Voix” issues, however, from ZT Hollandia’s long-standing interest in power relations within society, from its most marginal members to its supposed “movers and shakers”. The show is also the third by the Eindhoven-based company derived from the work and theories of Pasolini, who, diametrically opposed to ideas such as those espoused by Herkstroter, believed that economics pose the greatest threat to human development. By juxtaposing Herkströter’s frank attitude and emotionless language with Pasolini’s dissembling, hyperbolic characters and the bombast of their discourse, “Deux Voix” underscores both the differing opinions of the board chariman and the writer as well as the different approaches (resulting in similar results) by those in power to the mechanisms and structures at their disposal.

Playing all five roles, Jeroen Willems offers a fascinating performance, sliding in and out of the skin of these slippery characters with the same ease a chameleon changes colors, while underscoring a certain uniformity in their activities and views. The play gives much reason to question the nature of the institutions which directly govern and inadvertently rule us and to demand of them, as the Ogoni have done with Shell, that they begin to put human beings back where they belong.

To February 10, Tues-Wed, Fri-Sat, 8:30 pm, Sun, 3:30 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 7 avenue Pablo Picasso, Nanterre (92), RER A Nanterre-Préfecture + shuttle, 12 euros-25 euros, tel: 01.46.14.70.00.

Photo credit: Ben van Duin