Aftermath

As US troops withdraw from Irak, the play “Aftermath” is a timely reminder of the long-lasting consequences of American intervention there. Based on testimony provided by Iraqi refugees interviewed in Jordan, the piece intertwines the experiences of eight individuals, but their nightmare is collective and speaks for the horrors and privations endured by the population at large. Bombings, mercenaries, death threats, incarcerations, interrogations and the inevitable road to exile and refugee status: from Fallujah to Abu Ghraib the story is one of American arrogance and might and Iraki fear and mourning. A cross-section of citizens - housewives, translators, imams, doctors, artists, pharmacists, cooks - put a face on Iraqi losses that have nothing to do with military strategy or political maneuvering but rather with wrecked homes, families and dreams. After a critically acclaimed play devised from conversations with pardoned death row inmates, “The Exonerated” (2002), Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen have created a simple and moving piece of theater - sober, restrained with humor and honesty – that gives voice to the stories that CNN doesn’t cover and which risk being forgotten once the US presence is gone completely. Seen October 8 at the Maison des Arts de Créteil.

Photo Credit: Joan Marcus

Forced Entertainment's Cheap Thrills

The latest show by the British collective Forced Entertainment is a particularly clear example of the company’s explorations of the performance act. That is to say that “forced entertainment” is what the nine actors deliver in sequined go-go dresses and lounge-act attire, awkwardly throwing themselves across the set of plastic palm trees and red carpets. “The Thrill of It All”, as the show is named, is an ironic enterprise on all counts, so wide is the gap between the excitement promised in the title and frequently referred to by the cast, and the deliberately trite spectacle given. The company takes down indiscriminately the familiar codes of performed representations of human experience: there is the declaration of love, the fisticuffs, the emotional breakdown, the holiday gathering around the hearth, the agonized death rattle (also the subject of “Spectacular” in 2008)… The artificiality of these displays is reinforced by the distorting miking of the actors’ voices, while their ubiquity in TV and cinema is emphasized by the cast’s homogenizing get-ups: gents in red dress shirts, black pants, cream jackets and stringy black wigs; ladies in white dresses, red boots and long platinum hair. A reflection on popular entertainment, which still seems to believe that a buxom blonde in a short skirt is worth any intelligent discussion? A send-up of performance codes, as a challenge to the public’s indulgence of these? Forced Entertainment founder Tim Etchells leaves the door open to interpretation while eluding richer discussion of the meaning and effects for society of its performed selves.

“The Thrill of It All”, October 6-9, Wed-Sat, 8:30 pm, Centre Pompidou, Place Georges Pompidou, 4e, Mº Les Halles/Rambuteau, 10/14 euros, tel: 01.44.78.12.33 / Festival d’Automne, tel: 01.53.45.17.17.

Photo Credit: Hugo Glendinnin

Cubist theater?

After cubist painting (Picasso and Braque) and cubist writing (Gertrude Stein), does a thirty-something Japanese playwright and director hold the key to cubist theater? Toshiki Okada does not claim to be under the influence of any artistic revolutionaries, but his deliberate separation of the spoken word and body language opens up new ways of imagining theater’s representational possibilities.

If Stein believed that cubism was more real than reality, Okada agrees that the repetitious, disarticulated movements his actors make are a heightened form of naturalism. This is particularly true in his trilogy of short plays, “Hot Pepper”, “Air Conditioner” and “The Farewell Speech”, which finishes a brief run at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers as part of the Festival d’Automne. While engaging in utterly banal and codified conversations about the workplace (a theme familiar from Okada’s “Freetime” in 2008), the trilogy’s characters inexplicably engage in unexpected, socially “inappropriate” gestures that find them shaking their legs at uncomfortable angles, jumping stiffly, holding fans on their heads and wiping their mouths with their ties, among many other surprises.

That their actions bear no relationship to their words is visibly jarring, and the most recognizable feature of the work of Okada and his company known as “chelfitsch” (“selfish” pronounced with a Japanese accent). Repeated over time, however, their gestures and words are imbued with new meaning, in the same way a cubist portrait proposes nearly indistinguishable cubes of color that demand careful attention to perceive the subject, or much like Stein’s prose experimentations create “insistencies” that require closer reading at every encounter. Emotions and impressions, however fleeting or imperceptible, are given liberty to express themselves in these awkward stretches, steps and struts, and a more complete understanding of the speaker is arrived at as he or she comes to inhabit a larger space and time than that of the discourse required in the environment of an office break-room or reception area.

Okada’s preoccupations also involve the use of a Japanese slang spoken in Tokyo, an argot he attempts to de-ghettoize by bringing it into the theater. While this aspect of his work is regrettably lost in translation, to the extent that his physical work is an extension of these concerns, the vitality of this slang seems to take on tangible, visible strength. In the even more abstract second play Okada presents this month, “We Are the Undamaged Others”, he explores how to break with the “nearly irresistible representative power of language” and the “meaningful processes” it shares with gesture.

Stein argued in favor of art that existed free from the business of living and representations of these, a vision that Okada seems to further, with the style and concerns of contemporary Japan.

“We Are the Undamaged Others”, Oct. 7-10, Théâtre de Gennevilliers, 41 avenue des Grésillons, Mº Gabriel Péri, 11-22 euros, tel: 01.41.32.26.26, or Festival d'Automne: 01.53.45.17.17.


Photo Credit: Dieter Hartwig