Watch Me Fall

Hard to forget Evel Knievel. His hugely mediatized, death-defying stunts and Stars and Stripes costumes made him an icon of the American Seventies. According to Wikipedia, he attempted some 75 ramp-to-ramp motorcycle jumps between 1965 and 1980 and suffered 433 broken bones. His most memorable feat, as it nearly killed him, was his jump (or crash, rather) over the Caesar's Palace fountain in Las Vegas on New Year's Eve, 1967 (he spent a month in a coma). Stunt artist, entertainer, self-promoter and freak show of sorts, Knievel is the object of a different sort of publicity in "Watch Me Fall", by Bristol duo Action Hero, the final act of the program of British theater invited by the Théâtre de la Ville for the mini-festival known as Chantiers Europe.

A tongue-in-cheek dive into Knievel's motives, ambition and personal marketing machine, the 50-minute show uses pop culture's performance codes to question a social desire to indulge voyeuristically in extreme feats. In fact, as its title-cum-command indicates, "Watch Me Fall" places the public center stage, as much a focus of Action Hero's concerns as Knievel's indestructible rogue. Equipped with disposable cameras distributed at the door and standing around a downsized, home-made model of one of Knievel's jumps, the audience is constantly encouraged to clap, cheer, photograph and show its support for the legendary daredevil's feats of derring-do.

The show electrified in the UK with its interactive premise and its ironic take on larger-than-life personas, but fell far short of that response at the performance I saw, where, true to its own cultural codes, the public of Parisian twenty-somethings engaged mildly with the actors, at best. Interestingly however, their reaction proved Action Hero's premise right: if it is human nature to derive strange pleasure from seeing other people take risks and experience pain, the audience barreled into that cliche by, at one point, pelting Gemma Paintin with the plastic golf balls her character was collecting off the floor. When mores are pushed and barriers shaken, propriety too flies out the window.

As short and as elliptical as it was, the piece was far more engaging than the public would allow however, from James Stenhouse's boyish good looks to Paintin's silently suffering stuntman's showgirl, with a smart text that sends-up braggadocio and ABC Sports Specials as easily as it jumps a child's mock-up of the Caesar's Palace fountain (fashioned from an inflatable wading pool and two jumbo bottles of Diet Coke). "Watch Me Fall" is an invitation to see humanity at its most human: reaching for the moon but gravity bound.

June 14-16, 7 pm, Théâtre de la Ville, 2 place du Châtelet, 4e, Métro Châtelet, info: www.theatredelaville-paris.com

Photo Credit: Toby Farrow

ChantiersEurope: British Drama in the Spotlight

What do Antonin Artaud, Ophelia and Harold Lloyd have in common? The answer is at ChantiersEurope, a mini-festival of European theater at the Théâtre de la Ville, showcasing British, Italian and Portugese companies. The event is the first in over 10 years in Paris to train a spotlight on contemporary theater from the UK, and a recent visit turned up some interesting surprises...

The first comes from Katie Mitchell, who won the 12th Europe "New Theatrical Realities" prize in St. Petersburg, Russia in April (see April 20 post below). Known for her meticulous research, savvy use of video technology and keen study of Stanislavsky's acting method, Mitchell presents an installation commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that develops all three. In "Five Truths", alternatively known as "The Ophelia Project", Mitchell directs a single actress, Michelle Thierry, through five versions of the suicide of Hamlet's girlfriend, attempting in each scenario to explore a different approach to the theater act. Video runs simultaneously on 10 screens of Mitchell and Thierry's work to bring into focus Shakespeare's briefly glimpsed waif, in the styles of Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht and Constantin Stanislavsky. For neophytes and specialists both, the experiment proposes illuminating comparisons and contrasts of the ideas of these five giants of contemporary theater. An acerbic music hall number à la Brecht faces a mute Ophelia overcome with grief in the manner of Grotowski's exploration of performative elements of ritual, Brook's poetry stands out sharply against a mad Ophelia such as Artaud woud have envisioned her, while Stanislavkian method acting certainly appears the most familiar and "normal". Thierry's versatility and Mitchell's painstaking direction and filming lift this intellectual exercise from academicism to a fascinating moment of theater.

A more traditional piece, though only in the sense that it takes place live on a stage, comes from the Compagnie 1927 and a show half-way between silent film and contemporary animation. Its title, "The Animals and Children Took to the Streets", doesn't reflect much about the content of this story in which the children of a tenement block known as Bayou Mansions are kidnapped and force-fed drugged gum drops to keep them quiet and obedient. In fact, a simple plot description captures nothing of the color, sass and faux archness of this delightful piece created by the combined talents of animation artist Paul Barrett, actress Suzanne Andreade, soprano/pianist Lilian Henley and actress/costumer Esme Appleton. Andreade who conceived, wrote and directs the piece, plays a number of wicked ladies of the housing block on Red Herring Street with malicious airs, opposite Appleton as a wide-eyed Lilian Gish type crusading for justice and the return of her child. Barrett's animation paints a richly hued backdrop for the Bayou Mansion's residents, most of whom come to life through paper doll silhouettes, as fanciful complement to the live actors, and his multi-media compositions (of the paint and paper variety) add a graphic punch to this perfectly naughty tale of crime and corruption in the big city. Barrett's portrayal of the Bayou's caretaker, a sympathetic Harold Lloyd outcast with an Edward Scissorhands wig, adds a self-effacing counterpoint to the women's confident aplomb and deliciously exaggerated tongue-rolling. Compagnie 1927 had its first success in 2007 at the Edinburgh Festival (5 awards) and seems to find a confident ease in its artistically rich style with this latest work.

Both shows offer a tantalizing glimpse of contemporary British theater and are in no way overshadowed by the main event of ChantiersEurope: "I Am the Wind", created at the Young Vic Theatre of London under the direction of Patrice Chéreau. Tom Brooke and Jack Laskey form a compelling couple as two men, One and the Other, caught in a personal struggle between life and death. With the open sea as a dangerous metaphor for despair and fear, Chéreau finds a balance between situational context and Fosse's psychological tension by setting the characters intermittently afloat on a sideways monolith of a raft, which aptly underscores an undercurrent pulling between metaphysical weight and lightness. Fosse's rhythmic text is their life-buoy, an intermittently rising and falling dialogue on the reasons to live and an inexplicable pull to choose not to, until it knocks one of them off his feet. A spare and pure production carried by an exceptional duo: reason enough to give ChantiersEurope a look, with more shows next week.

Information: www.theatredelaville.com

Photo: Director Katie Mitchell directs Michelle Thierry in "Five Truths". Credit: Gareth Fry

"Pan + "Songe": Dreaming with Irina Brook

Neverland is J. M. Barrie's world of insouciant freedom from adult cares that only exists through a child's power to believe. In one fundamental way at least, Peter Pan's decision to never grow up is an obvious metaphor for theater, because like Neverland, it works only if the audience suspends its attachment to reality. Irina Brook has "carte blanche" in May and June at the Théâtre de Paris to create her fantastical worlds, in "Pan" and in "En attendant le songe".

In "Pan", Irina Brook builds instinctively on both themes, creating an explicit vehicle for the childhood wonderment that lies at the core of her vision, one which comes organically from her lifelong relationship with the theater. With a title that evokes the mythological origins of Barrie's character rather more than Disney's green-bonneted sprite, the production nevertheless is very much for children, even if Brook's characters many not be immediately recognizable to them (such is the power of Disney iconography). In "Pan", Captain Hook and his crew are better musicians than they are evil sailors, for example, with more pranks than villainous plots, while Peter and the Lost Boys are a comical band of circus acrobats and clowns. The changes set the tone for this production; fantasy, physical grace and plenty of laughter guide her ship, through crocodiles, pow-wows, battles, and Tinkerbell's jealous machinations. The set clearly sets up the contrast: on the one hand the Jolly Roger looms above the actors, on the other a carrousel is their playground. Fairies really fly and so do Wendy and John, all because they believe. In Brook's "Pan" that belief is infectious...

And it carries over into the second work she is presenting: "En attendant le songe". This is a revival of Brook's 2007 production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", where a merry band of companions, here the fictional Compagnie internationale d'Athens, provides again the narrative structure for a revisiting of Shakespeare's text. The all-male troop excels at cross-dressing and gags of all sorts in yet another Fairyland created here with a simple trunk of colorful scarves, proof again that Irina Brook is a magician of her own sort, able to transport us, whatever her chosen means, to the land of dreams.

"Pan", Tues-Sat, 8:30 pm, Sun, 3:30 pm, 17-42 euros, "En attendant le songe", Tues-Fri, 9 pm, Sat, 5 pm & 9 pm, Sun, 3 pm, 28-36 euros, Théâtre de Paris, 15 rue Blanche, 9e, Métro Trinité d’Estienne d’Orves / Blanche, tel: 01.48.74.25.37.

Photo Credit: Patrick Lazic

Semianyki: They're Back!

The cathartic power of laughter has never been lost on the Russian people, despite, or perhaps because of their momentous history. Through war and repression, clowns from Bim Bom and Karandesh to Yuri Nikulin and Oleg Popov have kept Russians laughing at their pains, while Russia's most famous contemporary clown, Slava Polunin (creator of the international hit "Slava's Snow Show") has built from the genre a dreamlike escape from darker realities. Stalin may have coopted the subversive potential of laughter by creating the Soviet Academy for Political Clowns in 1926, but it is the troupe and school of Polunin's Teatr Licedei which carries the flame of Russian clownery in the world today. Created in 1968 in Leningrad, the troupe forged its style - and aroused State suspicion - on a preference for Western music over Politburo-approved themes of glorious labors, but was allowed to travel and so spread its fame abroad. After an intercontinental "Peace Train" that foreshadowed the fall of the Berlin Wall and a spectacular funeral ceremony to lay the company to rest on its 20th anniversary, the Licedei was reborn in post-USSR society primarily as a clown school, housed today by the Drama Academy of the University of St. Petersburg.

But in this country of revolutions, a smaller kind of overthrow is taking place in the world of its clowns, led by the troupe known as Semianyki (The Family), former Licedei students. Their name comes from the show they created while still in school, a wacky family portrait that easily makes the Adams Family look like the Brady Bunch and which recently celebrated its 700th performance. Great acts are hard to follow but the six clowns of Semianyki (Alexander Gusarov, Olga Eliseeva, Marina Makhaeva, Yulia Sergeeva, Kasyan Ryvkin and Elena Sadkova) are giving it their best shot and enjoying the kind of success that creates more enemies than friends, prompting them to break out on their own, with a theater, the Chaplin Hall, just for them in St. Petersburg, and decorated to their kooky, kitschy taste.

The company's history interests me as I saw the show in one of its early performances and walked the streets of their stomping grounds in St. Petersburg this spring. But with Semianyki, the main thing is the fun - and so much of it - that takes place on stage. The Semianyki are six oddballs : deadbeat dad, mother hen-mambo queen and four incorrigibly mischievous children, right down to the baby. The parents get it on whenever the youngsters' backs are turned, but left to their own devices, the kids have a seemingly limitless repertoire of tortures and annoyances for their genitor. Before Dad knows it, on any given day, he might be clothes-pinned to his chair and speared with a ski pole to prevent him from engaging in his two favorite activities : walking out and drinking. Mom is a matron of popular legend and ethnic jokes, keeping her cherubs in line with withering looks, a sergeant's boot and a fountain of sloppy kisses. The offspring of their unabashedly passionate union are part mad scientist, part chainsaw murderer, and the trouble they can get into is as limitless as it is ingenious.

The Semianyki write a devilishly hysterical send-up of any parenting book ever written but the gags are really only a pretence: love and togetherness ultimately carry the day. That the message comes through loud and clear despite barely a word being spoken is proof of the ingeniousness and generosity of these unparalleled clowns who draw the audience immediately into their nutty world, not only with abundant opportunities for interaction but with powerfully evocative images and richly drawn characters. We are only too happy to stay under their spell, an ingenious left-handed homage to the joys, fears and crocodile tears of childhood. If you can't catch them now, look for their return, by popular demand, in November. Brilliant!

To July 2, Tues-Sat. 8:30 pm, Sun, 3 pm, Théâtre du Rond-Point, 2 bis, avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt,
8e, Métro Franklin D. Roosevelt ou Champs-Élysées Clemenceau,10 euros-34 euros, tel: 01 44 95 98 21.

Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights

"Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights" has the hand of its creator, Gerturde Stein, all over it. The title alone sums up her two obsessions: power and repetitive language. On the one hand there is the doctor who bargains dangerously with Mephisto, not, in Stein's retelling of the legend, for the love of Marguerite, but to master electric light. On the other is the kind of sing-songy word play that made the self-proclaimed mother of Modernism's reputation as a different sort of "illuminée".

Director Ludovic Lagarde confronts both features of her work in his version of Stein's opera libretto (1938) of the Faust legend. The terrain is well-traveled; even if Stein's work never found the audience she hoped for in her lifetime, her Faustus remake has tempted theater visionaries the Wooster Group, Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson. Where these others explored rather more her ontological theories regarding consciousness or their own theater aesthetic, Lagarde's production concentrates on her seemingly irrepressible repetition of ordinary words and phrases, what she called "insistencies", and shows that if Stein were alive today, she'd finally find fame as a pop music lyricist.

The show is indeed more concert than play, with a set that looks like it came from La Cigale down the road instead of the Bouffes du Nord: a raised backstage with keyboards and drums, center-front solo mike, neons, strobes... The lights come up on Faustus in a Mick Jagger pose and Mephisto excels at Keith Richards-style jumps and leaps across the stage. Stein challenged herself in her libretto to write a recognizable narrative but the audience is soon wondering who exactly are the strange pairs that join them through the smoke swirls and blue and yellow flashes. First, Boy and Dog, here a British schoolboy with a Nintendo-generated companion, followed by the always popular Marguerite Ida/Helena Annabel, who is herself the very embodiment of one of Stein's insistencies.

As always with Stein however, content takes a back seat to form, something Lagarde recognizes in his embracing of rock opera's cliches, which are like an open book in which Stein's phrases write their hypnotic and teasing musicality. Rodolph Burger's score throws rap and rock beats and pop's tonal angst at Stein's text, which embraces them all and loses 70 years of dust in the process. Playing further on the rock genre motifs, Lagarde's direction gives free reign to the sexual metaphors of Marguerite (etc.)'s predicament: stung (or bitten, the distinction is important) by a serpent between the legs.

Stein's theme of modern man's fear of progress is not obviously present among everything else happening on stage, except for the lonely figure of Dr. Faust and the glowing electric candles that form the stage's backdrop. Lagarde's attention falls more on the love story between Marguerite (etc.) and her Mr. Overseas Man. They are backed up by an eclectic cast of many contrasts and doublings, from the diminutive Annabelle Garcia as the sweet-faced Boy with troublingly confusing gender attributes, Stéfany Ganachaud's controlled and enigmatic Dog, whose canine features are made possible by a kind of futuristic Roller Ball costume, and Joan Cocho's monkey-like Mephisto in black t-shirt and jeans. Samuel Réhault's anomic Faust is the least interesting in his leather trenchcoat weighed down by Faust's arrogance.

As Marguerite Ida/Helena Annabel sang her name for the hundredth time at the performance I attended, audience members started to mildly panic, clutching at programs and watches: proof that, taken as literature, Stein's circular experiments can still challenge Cartesian order. Lagarde's production has the merit of hinting very strongly however that Stein's concerns are not so different than those of many a Grammy winner or MTV star: it's the music that matters.

To May 22, Tues-Sat, 9 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, 37 bis, boulevard de la Chapelle, 10e, Métro La Chapelle, 14 euros-28 euros, tel: 01.46.07.34.50.

Photo Credit: Guillaume Gellert

Krystian Lupa's "Fin de partida"

The work of Samuel Beckett is a famous teaser. That the author of the theatrical conundrum of the 20th century, "Waiting for Godot", insisted that there are in his work "no symbols where none intended" (to paraphrase his novel "Watt"), has never much eased the public's anxiety of meaning when faced with his plays and fiction. If the Irish playwright's estate has worked tirelessly to reign in any and all over-zealous interpretations of his work, it still remains as difficult to refrain from dissecting Beckett as it is to resist gawking at an accident. "Endgame" which followed "Godot" by eight years, revisits many of the themes and situations of that defining play, such as dependency, suffering, inevitability, stasis - and no redemption from any of these - with a foursome of characters, here all physically impaired. "More inhuman than Godot" according to its creator, "Endgame" asks again how it is possible to live if there is no meaning to be found in what is commonly called life.

Regarded as one of the most important artists of contemporary European theater, Polish director Krystian Lupa comes to "Endgame" at the height of his work and influence, and his "interpretation" begs us consequently to sit up and take notice. Beckett's text imagines the blind and infirm Hamm, his servant Clov, and Hamm's maimed parents, Nell and Nagg, in unspecified grey and desolate surroundings on the edge of a sea. Some liberties Lupa takes include casting Clov as a woman (who asserts her femininity at the play's end) and replacing the trashcans Nell and Nagg are relegated to in the original, with glass-sided rolling boxes that are equal parts gerbil cage and casket. Hamm's house becomes an abandoned cement bunker, empty of furnishings save his wheelchair and a jarringly ornamental chandelier. The sea that Hamm and Clov listen to from the tiny windows has also pressed itself inside, in the form of a sand dune that partly obscures the doorway Clov enters and exits from, prompting him to swing in and out like a monkey (Clov has also been interpreted to mean "clown"). In addition, natural light reaches to the hard corners and dusty floors of their concrete shelter and does indeed bathe Hamm's face at the play's end. Could "hope" be far behind?

Certainly not, because, despite these deliberate choices, Lupa's production, with the Teatro de La Abadía of Madrid, excels at doing what Beckett claimed his work must: resist meaning. Enclosed within the faded green walls and menaced by the encroaching, inhospitable environment, the characters of this "Fin de Partida" exude a kind of absurdity that belies more typical representations of Beckett's existentialism as wholly pessimistic while never denying that their existence is no more than a farce. Susi Sanchez's Clov is a malicious teenager who throws biscuits at Nagg and laughs loudly at their daily frustrations, José Luis Gomez is a dryly cynical Hamm, a playground king in his dilapidated chair, black beret and glasses, while Nell and Nagg (Lola Cardón and Ramón Pons), all in white, farily radiate purity, one would dare say human attachment, into the mix. That is to say that, relieved of some of its darkest suggestions by Lupa's direction and set, Beckett's text gains in complexity. If death is obviously intimated by Nell and Nagg's coffin-like boxes, which slide into the wall as in a mausoleum, these also have an air of the glass caskets used in Catholic churches to enclose holy relics, while the whole set could be a gas chamber. Lupa opens the door to a variety of extrapolations. Similarly, Clov's final feminine elegance starkly contradicts the character's previously slouchy, juvenile delinquent air. "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness", says Nell. That mystery sums up Lupa's vision.

Contrasts may abound within Lupa's production but all the sunlight in the world can never change the blunt power of Beckett's language, even in translation. Since the opportunity presents itself currently, some interesting comparisons stand to be drawn with Alain Françon's "Fin de partie" featuring an all-star cast led by Jean-Quentin Châtelain and Serge Merlin, at the Théâtre de la Madeleine, until July 17.

"Fin de partida", in Spanish with French subtitles. May 13-18, Tues-Sat, 8:30 pm, Sun, 3:30 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 7 avenue Pablo Picasso, Nanterre (92), RER A Nanterre-Préfecture, 12-25 euros, tel: 01.46.14.70.00. "Fin de partie", to July 17, Théâtre de la Madeleine, tel: 01.42.65.07.09, www.theatremadeleine.com.


Photo Credit: Teatro Abadía/Ros Ribas

Sounds of Silence

A number of reprises are in Paris in May and I'll be revisiting them here.

One of these, "The Sound of Silence", at the Théâtre de Chaillot for just three performances (previously at the MAC-Créteil in 2008), I first saw at the 2007 Europe Theater Prize in Thessaloniki, Greece. It was a creation by Alvis Hermanis, from Riga, Latvia, and a co-winner of the "New Realitites" Prize that year. In interviews at that festival, he revealed himself to be the odd child of Communist propaganda and Sixties idealism. Artistic Director of the New Riga Theater, he first spent 10 years focusing on classical productions, but these led him to make a self-described "radical shift", from adapting texts to creating a "theater of emotion" that explores private space and "real life".

The work that brought him international attention, "Long Life" (2003) is a case in point. The play delves into the everyday minutiae of five individuals sharing a post-Soviet-era communal apartment. Audiences, limited to a relative handful, entered the theater via the set, and were supplied opera glasses to dwell at leisure on the extraordinary jumble of objects, furniture, detritus and general miscellanea that the set contained, over the course of a three-hour, wordless performance.

The prequel to "Long Life" is "The Sound of Silence", which jumps back 40 years to a brief moment of Sixties-era bohemia, symbolized for Hermanis by Simon and Garfunkel's 1964 song of the almost same name, or at least insofar as it trickled into Soviet-controlled Latvia. Written in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy's assassination and pin-pointing a collective anomie, the folk hit came at the beginning of the Sixties political, cultural and sexual upheavals. These represented an even bigger danger in the Soviet bloc countries than they did on American college campuses, and Hermanis considers what life might have been like for his parents' generation, before the intensified Cold War hostilities of the early Eighties and the exacerbated economic and cultural stagnation that resulted across the USSR. Experimenting again with silent theater, in a 3hr15min attempt through music and gestures but no dialogue, to take the pulse of that fleeting moment, Hermanis seeks to tap into the era's utopianism to deliver a more "human dimension" to the theater act and our experience of it.

Hermanis is gaining increasing attention throughout Europe. A recent collaboration with theaters in Naples and Bologna under the auspices of the European Union's Prospero Project led to an Italian adaptation of Polish writer Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz's short story "The Wilko Girls" (1933), created in Modena in January 2010 and touring to European project member cities.

May 4-6, "The Sound of Silence", 8 pm, Théâtre national de Chaillot, 1 place du Trocadéro, 11-32 euros, tel: 01.53.65.30.00.

Persona.Marilyn

Many a man has fantasized about Marilyn Monroe, but when Kyrstian Lupa does, he is magnetized less by her blonde bombshell physique than by the icon she became, and why. "Persona. Marilyn" is the second work in the Polish director's trilogy exploring larger-than-life 20th century personalities. Between Andy Warhol ("Factory2", at Théâtre de la Colline earlier this season) and Simone de Beauvoir ("Le Corps de Simone"), Lupa's Marilyn is the heir of the former's embracing of market culture and the antithesis of the latter's intellectual asceticism.

A pin-up more than a flesh-and-blood woman, yet inherently carnal in all her representations, the former Norma Jean Baker never seemed in her lifetime to have much control over the forces that created her, marketed her, married her and buried her. Two highly public marriages and divorces, a messy emotional tailspin, and the never elucidated circumstances of her premature death were more than enough, after her sex-symbol superstardom, to secure her legend. Lupa picks up the threads of Monroe's story in the final days of her life, long after her raw talent had been confused by drugs, alcohol and, in Lupa's piece, the nefarious influences and competing interests of her acting coach, Paula Strasberg (wife of Lee Strasberg), and her analyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson.

If the real Marilyn lived life at full speed for a brief moment, Lupa slows the action down to a near standstill, placing his character in an abandoned film studio: a much needed retreat from the public eye but where she is also visited, one might even say preyed upon, by her various handlers and lovers. At the same time, he uses the contemporary tools of iconography, video and photography, to make clear that any revelations are precisely calculated: if she didn't control the machine that created her, she certainly assumed the image it projected of her . Actress Sandra Korzeniak is riveting as Marilyn, making love instinctively to the cameras with the star's particular combination of emotional fragility and overt sexuality. Hardly a moment Korzeniak spends on stage is not recorded or observed, and her Marilyn both needs and teases the public's gaze. Lupa's preoccupations and references turn on the nature of performance - his actors' and Marilyn's, on screen and in real life - more so than on any biographical artifacts or setting details (the characters drink from plastic water bottles and carry computer bags, circa 1962). He explores the theme from a variety of angles, including a play-within-a-play, as Marilyn rehearses again and again a scene from The Brothers Karamazov in which she tellingly plays the beautiful temptress Grushenka.

Lupa was winner of the Europe Theater Prize in 2009, in recognition of his intense direction of actors and painstaking construction of characters, both clearly on view in this show. He offers with "Persona. Marilyn" a slowly hypnotic reflection on la fabrique de l'image and the cult of the pop star, two features of contemporary society that may have begun with Marilyn but that have far surpassed anything she ever knew and which we are not likely to rid ourselves of any time soon.

In Polish with French subtitles. To May 7, 8:30 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, RER A Nanterre-Préfecture + navette, tel: 01.44.14.70.00.

Photo credit: D.R.

Some Traces of Katie Mitchell: Europe Theater Prize (III)

Director Katie Mitchell was awarded the 12th Europe "New Theatrical Realities" prize in St. Petersburg, Russia, last week (see previous posts regarding the event, below).

At 46 years old, Mitchell has lengthy directing credentials, first at Paine's Plow and the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she was an assistant director, and more recently as associate director at the Royal Court and currently at the National Theater. Mitchell trained extensively in Russia and Eastern Europe, in particular with Russian pedagogues Lev Dodin, of St. Petersburg's Maly Theater, and Anatoli Vassiliev of Moscow's Gitis school. In Britain, where she has been called one of the country's "most polarizing" directors, she is known for her almost obsessive background research, her strict application of Stanislavsky's system and a growing, complex body of multi-media work, as well as operas. An intimate collaborator of Britain's most famous contemporary playwright, Martin Crimp, she has directed two of his works, "Attempts on Her Life" and "The City", as well as his versions of others, such as "The Maids" and "The Seagull". That production earned her enormous criticism for her reworking of Chekov, but the experience has not prevented her from yet more ambitious adaptations, of Virginia Woolf's The Waves and Dostoevsky's The Idiot ("Some Trace of Her"). A children's show, from Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat, is scheduled to come to Paris next December.

Extremely controlled and precise in her answers during a public interview at the conference, she provided, in the absence of an actual production, some insight into her concerns and methods. Extracts.


"I came here 22 years ago and looked at the work in this city with Lev Dodin and then in Moscow with Anatoli Vassiliev and in Georgia and Lithuania, in actually December '89 just after the Wall had fallen, and it was the most informative part of my... everything actually. It shaped everything that I did and do. I studied Lev Dodin's work and watched him train directors for three weeks in this city, so I was shaped by that visit and those international practitioners much more than I was shaped by anything in my own country."

"I suppose in the UK there is a preoccupation with language and speaking words, but there isn't such a preoccupation with constructing behavior and psychology, of which language is a small component. So in this country [Russia], at least, the legacy of the investigations of Stanislavsky, which were very rigorous investigations into how to represent life-like behavior on stage, that legacy created an amazingly sophisticated and complex methodology of acting and directing, with the emphasis on behavior and not on language. I think that was the thing I learned: the way that someone like Dodin or Vassiliev would scan every inch of the actor's body for the data, so that wherever the audience would look on the body they would get very thorough, precise data. And I've never really forgotten certain productions by Dodin or Vassiliev. They set the bar in my head for everything I make. And Pina Bausch, obviously."

"It's very strange to constantly have your influences a long way from you so you have to really work hard to hold them in your head. I think that's been the hard thing. Obviously, to fully understand Stanislavsky's late work, which is my interest and speciality, and to communicate it to actors in the rehearsal room, and then through the actors to the audience, has been 20 years of work. That's all I've been doing, really."

"I'm often sort of taking ideas about how to play an actor's intention or ideas about esthetics, color, the use of light, through several shows over several years. I think that to direct work is such a complex art because you have so many components: the writing, the acting, the lighting, the sound, the colors, the design. There are so many things that it's probably not possible to practice getting all of the strands of work without practicing over several shows. [...] If each production is life or death I get so frightened that I get paralyzed. But if a production is a production as well as a covert investigation of something, then I'm less paralyzed because I'm intellectually somehow free. [...] I don't think in individual productions. I think in arcs of work all the time."

"[As a director interpreting a play], I suppose you've got the surface dialogue of the text and you've got to analyze that, moment to moment: what every character is playing. That's one level. And then you take a mine shaft down deeper and you discover the ideas that consciously or unconsciously preoccupied the writer when they were writing the play, and these determine all the surface action. With all of Chekov's plays, one of the key ideas would be death or illness or family. Those were the ideas that were in his head, maybe not formulated as simplistically as that, but they were there. So those are things that I spend a lot of time trying to find: what are the key ideas that are driving the writer or driving the play at the same time as analyzing the surface, textual exchanges that are going on. That's why we're making theater, isn't it? We're making theater to communicate ideas. I don't think there is any other point to the act. The ideas have to seep through everything: the sound, the lighting, the acting. Everything. The reason that Chekov is so powerful is because the idea structure is so terrifying. Or Euripides: absolutely terrifying ideas. Every inch of the action that the audience sees has to be somehow in relationship to those ideas. And that's really hard. Its very easy to do the story of a play; that's really, really simple. But to do the story [of the] ideas is much harder; it requires a different form of articulation. But ideas aren't very popular, just like politics aren't very popular and morality isn't very popular and metaphysics aren't very popular and philosophy isn't very popular. There's a lot of interest in diversions and entertainment and escape and romanticizing behavior and making beautiful people. [...] My aim is only to honor the material. I'm incredibly rigorous and incredibly serious about what I do."

Photo credit: Luciano Rossetti © Phocus Agency

In Photos: 14th Europe Theater Prize (II)

A glimpse of the winners in the "New Realities" category of the 14th Europe Theater Prize held from April 12-17 in St. Petersburg, Russia (see article in previous post). Photo credits: Luciano Rossetti © Phocus Agency

Finnish director Kristian Smeds at a conference on his work



"Happiness" by Russian director Andrey Moguchiy at the Alexandrinsky Theater



Vesturport Theater's "Faust" and "Metamorphosis"




Teatro Meridional performing "Contos em Viagem - Cabo Verde" at the Komissarzhevskaya Theater



"The Theater" by Viliam Docolomansky's Farm in the Cave company

Diverse Realities: 14th Europe Theater Prize (I)

Built on flood-prone marshland and steely political will, St Petersburg was meant to be Russia's "window on Europe", at the Western-most edge of Peter the Great's empire. The organizers of the 14th Europe Theater Prize, awarded last week in the city equally famous for the October Revolution and the beginning of Communism, not improbably had in mind Peter's visionary project when they chose this former imperial capital to host the event. Their intentions would have been well placed: like no other edition, the 2011 Prize opened its own window on an eclectic spectrum of artists, most hailing from the confines of modern Europe and whose work the Prize legitimized in ways they never could have hoped for at home.

Created in 1986 under the auspices of the then European Community to recognize theater artists who are "promoting understanding and the exchange of knowledge between peoples", the Prize focused originally on superstar directors like Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Brook, Georgio Strehler and Robert Wilson, before opening its boundaries to rising talents, in a section bis entitled "New Theatrical Realities". As Europe has grown and EU directives kept apace, the latter category is today bestowed on no less than five artists, so that, with the Grand Prize winner, at least six member states can be recognized every year. In addition to the hugely influential German director Peter Stein, whose decades of creation and innovation at Berlin’s Schaubühne made him a natural laureat of the Grand Prize, the New Realities section this year recognized directors Viliam Dočolomanský (Slovakia/Czech Republic), Katie Mitchell (UK), Andrey Moguchiy (Russia) and Kristian Smeds (Finland), as well as companies Teatro Meridional (Portugal) and Vesturport Theater (Iceland): an impressive cross-spectrum of "European realities", to be sure.

As a glimpse at how theater is dreamed, constructed and played out across the continent, this year's Prize event proved illuminating. Between the wordless anthropological studies led by the Teatro Meridional and the coolly high-tech narratives of Katie Mitchell, or between Andrey Moguchiy's animated cartoon characters and Kristian Smed's anarchic fury, or again between Vesturport's high-flying acrobatics and Dočolomanský's anti-globalization choreography, the possibilities are widely disparate and not likely to shrink any time soon. But if the quantity and imagination of these propositions seem limitless, their quality was invariably irregular, or in the case of Katie Mitchell, whose work was not shown at the festival, impossible to judge. A general if not always unwelcome sense of confusion reigned over the Prize's six days of conferences and performances.

What unites these artists, if coherence was on the agenda, is the physicality of their different approaches to story-telling and performance. Watching their work, it seemed already a truism to say that a shared belief that human beings are inherently theatrical as well as a consequent desire to translate human experience through the body rather than words, are probably the defining characteristics of new European theater. In any case, the Jury's choices made for an unusual showcase of generally unknown artists and their unfettered attempts at finding appropriate forms for their texts and ideas.

Of the work on offer among the New Realities, the most likely to book passage to France in a not too distant future comes from Mitchell and Vesturport. While the former was only briefly present in St. Petersburg, a meeting with her past and present collaborators, including the British playwright Martin Crimp, along with a public interview, provided a skeleton of Mitchell’s interests and methods, inspired from research and training in Russian and Eastern European traditions and Stanislavsky's system for actors. Firmly established on the British arts scene, as associate director of the National Theatre and a close collaborator of Crimp, Mitchell might have offered the most serious and evolved work of the New Realities laureates if she and the Prize organizers had found a way of showing any of her plays here.

So it had to be the Vesturport theater from Reykjavik who captured the most attention in St. Petersburg, with its casual hipster charm, good looks, team spirt and circus tumbling. The company presented two very different works, both adaptations of novels: Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and Goethe's "Faust". The former was as controlled as the latter was wild, but both pieces manifested clear interpretative choices. "Metamorphosis" showed off actor/director Gisli Örn Gardarsson's gymnast training, in the role of Gregor Samsa's anti-heroic cockroach, but focused on family mores over existential crisis. Their “Faust” shrugged off Goethe’s philosophical and metaphysical considerations entirely, in favor of a love story between an aging actor and his young nurse, made contemporary by a rock opera esthetic and an original Nick Cave score. Physical theater and theater of ideas are frequent strangers but it might be hoped that Vesturport may develop stronger content to match its already massively appealing signature forms.

As the main reason for the Prize, Peter Stein was also strangely absent from the event, offering limited time with the public and, for the awards ceremony, a solo, one hour reading of "Faust" that showed off his frustration with the venue rather more than the doctor's dilemma or Marguerite's crimes. Stein's other work presented during the conference, an early 19th century comedy by Heinrich von Kleist, "The Broken Jug", performed under his direction by the Berliner Ensemble, was a perfect, even too clean example of Stein's work, better known for its uncompromising political vision. Along with Russian director Lev Dodin (winner of the 8th European Theater Prize), whose reprise of "The Three Sisters" at the Maly Theater was a reminder of the excellence of his company and the mastery of his art, at the forefront of contemporary Russian theater, Stein's presence at this year's edition starkly contrasted with the urgency of the New Realities' winners, even if they have much to learn from his vision of theater as essentially text-based.

The face of European theater is perhaps only harder to define after the 11th Europe Theater Prize but like the view through Peter the Great's "window", this edition showed a vast continent of artists waiting to be discovered.

Photo: Prize Ceremony at the A.S. Pushkin Russian State Academic Drama Theater, April 17, 2011. Credit: Luciano Rossetti © Phocus Agency

Ma chambre froide

Estelle is a model employee. For her coworkers, she covers their shifts, takes their blame, cleans up, stays late, opens early, asks for advances on her salary to loan them money and even lets the boss take advantage of her. In "Ma chambre froide", Joël Pommerat adds a new anti-héroine to his world of workers pitted against implacable market forces and each other, except that this time, Estelle is perhaps not the simple sum of the hours she works and the company balance sheet.

"Ma chambre froide" is also not the obvious sequel to Pommerat's trilogy on the same themes. After "Au monde" (2004) "D'une seule main" (2005) and "Les Marchands" (2006) [see this blog and parisvoice.com for reviews], which explored the pressure exerted on family and society by an unethical work "ethic" and economic crisis, "Ma chambre froide" considers what happens when colleagues and work supplant family and private life altogether, with a previously unsuspected comic vein. Common to all however is Pommerat's brutal vision of human nature in its 21st century struggles with globalization, downsizing, unemployment and their related ills, in a particularly French interpretation of the social contract.

The play imagines a certain Blocq, self-made entrepreneur and CEO of four successful businesses, whose crass and dismissive attitude towards all earns him the hatred and scorn of his staff, with the notable exception of Estelle. When he learns he has weeks to live, he leaves ownership of all his holdings to his eight "store" employees on the condition that they remember him once a year in a public display of their thanks. When Estelle has the idea to write a play about his life, her colleagues start to doubt her sincerity and even her sanity, especially when she starts imposing late-night rehearsals and animal costumes at the same time profits take a downturn and the whole staff is called upon to make enormous personal and moral sacrifices in the so-called collective good. That Estelle inadvertently refers to the store's cold chamber (chambre froid) as her own room suggests the extent to which the characters have been overtaken by the same pressures that consumed Blocq.


Like last season's "Cercles/Fictions", "Ma chambre froid" tells an episodic story that builds in suspense with each succeeding installment. But unlike that work, it does so with both feet more or less in a recognizable reality and a biting sense of humor. Less fantastical and figurative than his earlier plays, this latest piece has all the intrigue, suspense and surprises of a criminal investigation, while the exasperated insults with which the characters take each other down and Estelle's comic attempts to direct her colleagues create some very funny moments. What interests Pommerat though are the mysterious zones that theater provides to question human experience and explore alternative possibilities to what can be known and lived in real time and space. Who is Estelle in fact? What was Blocq's intention?

The actors of his Compagnie Louis Brouillard prove yet again to be invaluable guides through Pommerat's rich and strange worlds, creating with their characteristic cool precision equally familiar and monstrous characters within the close confines of the arena-like, 360-degree space, in contrasting tones of bleak neon or total darkness. They are masters of the transformative powers that Pommerat's work presupposes. His writing and direction, so exact from the timing of the scene changes to the irony of the sound track, here deserve the best of their talents,

If Estelle is right that it is always possible to change a bad situation, in "Ma chambre froide" liberation comes with a price that only the best, or the worst, are willing to pay.

To March 27, Tues-Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 3 pm, Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe/Ateliers Berthier, corner of rue Suarès and bd Berthier, 17e, Métro Porte de Clichy, 6-28 euros, tel: 01.44.85.40.40.

Photo Credit: Alain Fonteray

Please Kill Me

If you remember that Robert Hell was the father of the Mohawk as a hair statement and safety-pins as a fashion accessory, then “Please Kill Me” is right up your alley. The latest show from Mathieu Bauer and Sentimental Bourreau takes its material and its name from the collection of interviews compiled by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain with everyone who was anyone in the punk music scene that started in New York in the early Seventies: Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Joey and Dee-Dee Ramone, Johnny Thunders, Blondie, Malcolm McLaren… Subtitled “The Uncensored Oral History of Punk”, the book holds no punches but shoots off more than a few, recounting overdoses, animal defenestrations, groupies, the pogo and the sweating steamy clubs where it all went down.

From that dense and not always fascinating body of anecdotes, Bauer has assembled an intelligent show that translates the style, the sound and the stunts of CBGB’s circa 1975, without ever attempting to recreate them. Actors Kate Strong and Matthias Girbig channel more than mimic the furious energy and nihilistic personas that shot to notorious fame in New York and then London, shouting, whispering and growling with the shadow of a Sid Viscious scowl or the sinuous muscularity of an Iggy pose. Of different generations and genders, they embody the scene from blast off to burn out, its major and minor players, its crossing of sexual codes. Bauer, on percussion, aided by Sylvain Cartigny on guitars and Lazare Boghossian on synthesizer do “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “Blank Generation,” not like the Stooges and the Voidoids did but rather how adolescent memory and forty-something experience have moved them, as talented musicians in their own right and certainly far more musically sophisticated than the Sex Pistols ever were. Bauer makes use of a mostly blank set and a huge back screen to subtitle the VO text, delivered with deadpan humor by Strong, and to create context and atmosphere, using original album artwork and live and prerecorded video montages.

Long before the music business became an industry, the stories retold and alluded to, as outrageous as they were, seem strangely from a more innocent time. The show doesn’t quite keep the pace of a Ramones’ song, and an unnecessary and overlong coda weights the finish, but “Please Kill Me” gets the message of the t-shirt Hell wore proclaiming that same statement: attitude is everything, just don’t take it too seriously.

To March 22, in English and French, Mon-Sat, 7:30 pm, Sun, 3:30 pm, Théâtre de la Bastille, 76 rue de la Roquette, Mº Bastille, 13-22 euros, tel: 01.43.57.42.14.

Photo Credit: Romain Etienne

Une Saison chez Césaire

Living legends are rare but Aimé Césaire was one. In his lifetime (1913-2008), his name was synonymous with Black consciousness for French colonial subjects, or Négritude. One of France’s first and only colored députés, he delivered a blistering attack on French colonialism and racism in 1950, and was also the face of modern Martinican politics, as both the mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to 2001 and the author of Martinique’s request to become a French Overseas Department. First and foremost however, Césaire was a poet who developed a personal esthetic of surrealism - astonishing even to André Breton - to evoke the unique mal-de-vivre of French West Indians caught between a calculatingly generous “motherland” and aspirations for self-actualization. He was also the author of an equally acute theatrical body of work that is unforgiving of history and the political and economic machine that dictated it in his part of the world. “Nègre fondamental” and “éveilleur de conscience”, Césaire provided the foundation and the vision for African and West Indian literatures and identities.

The play “Une Saison chez Césaire”, conceived by his daughter Michèle and Haitian director Ruddy Sylaire is an invitation to rediscover Césaire's poetico-militant preoccupations in this year of celebrations of France’s overseas territories (“2011 Année des Outre-mer”). Splicing scenes from his four plays, the piece explores his principal concern, that of “le Nègre en lutte pour des lendemains meilleurs”. From the fugitive slave who aspires to be the Inventor of oppressed desires (“Et les chiens se taisaient”) to Christophe, the liberator/dictator of Haitian history (“La tragédie du roi Christophe”); from Lumumba, visionary of African unity (“Une Saison au Congo”) to Caliban, symbol of the brutalization of African-American identity ("Une Tempête"), Césaire challenges official lip-service to human rights and France’s own cherished motto of liberty, equality and fraternity for all.

If Césaire’s metaphorical language and Sylaire’s direction feel limited by the narrow confines of the Déchargeurs, the four actors give generously to their performances as a host of idealists trapped by history and crushed by unstoppable forces. The production is a simple and direct tribute to Césaire’s writing, as minimal in its dramatic language as it is symbolic in its few concessions to set (two poteau-mitan and a hanging sculpture evoking the lianes of the Martinican rain forest, both charged with rich symbolic implications for his work). Césaire’s voice rings loud and clear in this too brief “season” of his yet too pertinent discontent.

To April 9, Tues-Sat, 9:45 pm, 2 pm Sat, Théatre les Déchargeurs, 3 rue des Déchargeurs, 1e, Mº Châtelet, tel: 0892. 70.12.28.

Timon d'Athènes

The critic Harold Bloom is said to have credited poetry slams with the death of literature, but an adaptation of “Timon of Athens” with three stars of the underground rap scene demonstrates that slam and Shakespeare have plenty in common. Fundamentally popular arts, both relish in bringing the spoken word to the people by pushing language to heights of musicality and imagery. They’re also blisteringly human and a lot of fun to watch. Those qualities are only part of the success of the “Timon d’Athenes” directed by Razerka Ben Sadia-Lavant, who has astutely seen in Shakespeare’s last play, a work made for the slam stage.

That is to say that the play has a checkered history. Unfinished, rarely produced and with an ambiguous story allowing little comfort or a clear moral, Timon lurks in the curtains as Hamlet and Lear steal the spotlight again and again. That marginal position lies easily with the show’s performers who represent the underclass of a politically and socially engaged form of rap that is far from the genteel melodies and lyrics of MC Solaar or the marketing machine of Diam’s. French rappers of West Indian origins, Casey and D’de Kabal are joined in the project by former Nuyorican Poetry Slam (NYC) laureate Mike Ladd, along with actors Denis Lavant and Marie Payen. They form an intimidating team to tell the story of Timon, a wildly generous but equally naive idealist who goes to his grave hating mankind when wealth then friends recede into the horizon. Asking the questions of friendship’s “price” and the power of moolah to create obsequious flatterers, the play’s themes are similarly in keeping with the rap scene’s penchant for bankrolls and bling.

These connections lead to a truly inventive adaptation of Shakespeare, but one that retains a sense of measure while offering a piercing reading of the text: a quality which lifts the struts and swaggers, the gold gloves and the omnipresent mikes from mere vehicle to interpretative insight. Lavant plays Lavant, a live wire if ever there was one, and his mere presence adds a dangerous unpredictability to Timon, who literally collapses under the weight of his rage. D’de Kabal lends his impressive stature and vocal register to Alcibiades, the rebellious general, and Marie Payen fills in the supporting roles from the artist and merchant classes, as well as Flavius, Timon’s faithful servant; her casting brings the sole hint of sex to Timon’s Athens, obsessed with money at the expense of human relations. As Apemantus, the cynical philosopher who scorns Timon’s hangers-on, Casey gives the most astonishing performance. This female rapper from Seine-Saint-Denis via Fort-de-France has built on an androgynous appearance to enter the macho world of hip-hop, but her softer physicality sets Apemantus off from Alcibiades and makes for a a fascinating, insult-hurling show-down with Lavant’s tiny Timon in the play’s final act.

Those verbal jousts of which Shakespeare was a master, 400 years before Grandmaster Flash, are, in Timon, particularly well served by rap’s pulsing braggadocio. Besides commissioning a translation that has its ear to the language of the streets (by Sophie Couronne), Ben Sadia-Lavant had the excellent idea to invite American spoken word master Mike Ladd to deliver Timon’s significant monologues in a sizzling half-sung, half-rapped VO: some of the most exciting moments of the show. The production does away entirely with set and movement, leaving only the text in a poetry slam atmosphere, the performers delivering their lines from five microphone stations. The sole concession to the dramatic genre is their repeated costume changes, to signal character shifts and to mark Timon’s demise from wealthy benefactor to destitute misanthrope. Even with prodigious Doctor L. on percussion, guitar and synthesizer, the show clocks in at a mere 75 minutes. Purists be damned: it’s a slam all right, but one that does Shakespeare proud.

To March 12, Tues-Sat, 8 pm, Sat, 7 pm, Maison des Métallos, 94 rue Jean-Piere Timabud, 11e, Mº Couronnes, 10-14 euros, tel: 01.48.05.88.27.

Le Musée de la Mer

Author Marie Darrieussecq broke onto France's literary scene in 1996 with a Kafkaesque story about a woman who finds herself turning into a sow. Surprising transformations and ambiguous relations are not unusual to the dozen novels that followed. For her first play, « Le Musée de la mer », she dives into the murky waters of crisis and conflict to fish out dystopian anxiety along with some strange marine life.

Director Arthur Nauzyciel is drawn to intercultural collaboration as well as to Darrieussecq's themes and writing. He has directed two Koltès plays for the Emory Theater in Atlanta and a "Julius Caesar" with the American Repertory Theater of Boston. In 2009, he got Darrieussecq on board to adapt "Ordet" (1925), by the Danish writer and Lutheran minister Kaj Munk.

This background seems important in trying to understand what we see on stage at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers. Never dotting too many of her « i »’s in her unsettling fictional worlds, Darrieussecq writes for the program notes that she has relied on Nauzyciel to fill in much of the detail of “Musée”. Where the text stops and Nauzyciel's vision takes over cannot be known, but it is a wonder who of this otherwise talented duo will take responsibility for the undefinable creature from the deep
which occupies center stage for most of the performance.

"Belle" is described as possibly a lamantin (sea cow), in the program notes. She is, from what is to be gathered from the text, all that remains of the museum's marine life, decimated by the consequences (largely famine) of an ambiguously defined war which encroaches on this windswept corner of an equally unspecified country. "Her" uncensored suffering, which is communicated by unnerving moaning and even singing, is undoubtedly meant to illustrate the unstated feelings of the largely stoic characters: two couples and the two children of one of these. Dancer Damien Jalet goes to admirably painful lengths to give life to Belle, but, as insensitive to her metaphorical importance as the comment may be, the formless thing never looks like more than a lumpy orange bag with a man inside.

Another curiosity is the plastic-draped set, dominated by an enormous bubble. Characters enter it at times, ostensibly extending the narrative space, while their presence there is alternately dream-like and grotesque. There is also the matter of a kind of basin, or even a trap leading into the open sea, where the last (rubber) fish are caught. We're not sure where we are, but it certainly isn't real, with consequences for the intended message regarding wartime, concessions and survival.

The children who arrive at the museum's door, and their siamesesque contortions, provide the most interest here. If their presence is meant to underscore the characters' uncomfortable need for each other under stress, that is perhaps the most powerful message of the play.

"Musée" was created with Iceland's National Theater and a multicultural artistic team. The Icelandic connection lends a hint of wild spaces and dramatic contrasts to Darrieussecq's oblique text, but "Le Musée de la mer" remains as slippery as a fish or as taciturn as a fisherman, its intended effet never quite clear.

Seen at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers, Feb. 3, 2011.

Photo Credit: Frédéric Nauzyciel

Your Brother. Remember?

Zachary Oberzan is finding fame with some of the most weirdly adventurous performances in miniature one might ever see. He was the star of Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s “Rambo Solo”, a retelling of the novel First Blood and its film remake, "Rambo", performed on film by Oberzan in his studio apartment and simultaneously live. The experience led to a full-length feature film redux, “Flooding with Love for the Kid”, where he plays all 26 roles, again in his 225 sq. ft flat. In addition to being an accomplished musical autodidact and sought-out actor, performing last year with New York experimental theater the Wooster Group, Oberzan is also, to judge from his latest piece, an action movie addict since his earliest years. In fact, “Your Brother. Remember?” answers the questions audiences to his previous projects might have pondered while watching him crash painfully around his apartment, such as: “Why does he do this??” If the story of “Brother” is any indication, it's because, as the child of a broken marriage in Maine in the ‘70s, he and his brother Gator bonded by watching Jean Claude Van Damme in “Kickboxer” (1989) as well as other inanities only teenage boys could get into.

The show finds Oberzan once again reproducing, gesture for gesture, video sequences that play behind him, trading John Rambo for Kurt Sloan, Van Damme’s character sporting a full-body pancake-makeup tan throughout. In these, clips of favorite scenes from the movie are interspersed with home video of the brothers precisely enacting the same segments, first as teenagers twenty years ago in their living room, and as adults today: more accomplished in Zachary’s case but rather worse for wear in his brother’s. Whatever artistic or conceptual motives may underlie Oberzan’s intersecting interests in video and performance (American society’s penchant for home video “bloopers” and Candid Camera gags, to hypothesize a couple), “Brother” doesn’t rise much above a homage to lost boyhood and above all Gator, now 100 lbs heavier and a methadone addict with a prison record. Extended footage of him and sister Jenny talking about the fun they had filming the project or retelling scatological prison tales may be meant to evoke those "Making Of" extras now common on movie DVDs , but a sudden glimpse of Gator coming down from meth makes for a suddenly startling reality show.

Oberzan’s considerable talents may owe much to those early film-making experiences, and he proves here again to be the highly versatile actor of his preceding projects. His fascination with acting is ultimately what lends needed weight to the show’s stunts. A scene where Oberzan meticulously acts out Van Damme monologuing about his start and struggles in the profession is the most interesting moment of the piece, engaging, in the pop culture terms of Oberzan’s language, with theories of acting, from what Diderot had to say about the “paradox of the actor”, who must only appear to feel the emotions he portrays, to Lee Stasberg's Method Acting.

Oberzan’s DIY approach to film and limitless physical exploits and costume gags have opened doors across the Continent. Next stops: Sweden, Norway, Italy, Austria, Germany, Portugal, and Belgium. What foreign audiences will make of this thoroughly made-in-America project is anyone's guess.

Seen at MC93 Créteil, Jan. 25, 2011

La Niaque

“Niaque” is slang for a fighting instinct. It’s what helped Chad Chenouga survive an extended stay in collective foster care to go on to a career as a filmmaker. In the autobiographical monologue he directs and performs, la niaque is also the irrepressible energy that gives hope to the story of his protagonist Nassim and the other “enfants de la DASS” (child-wards of the Département des Affaires sanitaires et sociales) with whom he lives in a foyer in Fontenay-aux-Roses. Among these “cas sociaux” (social cases) as such children might be more pejoratively referred to, Nassim stands apart, however: a good student, curious, easy-going, he looks with the same equanimity at mates La Savate, Liesse, Malek and Prosper, Africans and Rebeus (backslang for beurs, or French-born North Africans) like himself, as he does at the “éducs” (éducateurs / social workers) who try to strike a balance between their reputations as “distributeurs de baffes” (a little too ready to use their fists in a conflict) and their role as foster parents. A year in their company exposes Nassim to much of what he already knows, as the orphan of a broken marriage, preferring the street to a too-volatile home, but also offers his first experiences with love and a chance to start over.

In his simple, forthright piece, Chenouga captures the best and the worst of a system endowed with considerable means for raising at-risk children (a highlight in the show is when Nassim and pals are taken to receive their monthly stipend of 300 euros, which they promptly blow on counterfeit D&G jeans and Ray-Bans at the Puces de Clignancourt), yet handcuffed by lingering racism and the French state’s weak promise of an ascenseur social to equal rights and opportunities for all. Like the suspicious fire in the director’s office that destroys all their files, these adolescents burn with an incandescent desire to be acknowledged and to have their say, a feeling translated on stage by two hip-hop/Krump dancers who punctuate Nassim’s narration with their repetitive, staccato gestures that hover between collapse and control like a spinning top in the moment it starts to wobble. Nassim’s struggle is not so much with his mother’s addiction, his father’s disappearance or the suicides and murders that punctuate his year at the foyer, but rather with the feeling of relief he discovers to be free of an unbearable personal history and to be at ease with himself in the new life that the foyer and a change of lycée provide.

Chenouga tells his story in the slang of the streets, the language of his characters, who nevertheless grapple, like Nassim, with the codes and forms of standard French. The dual registers speak in plain terms the distance that separates mainstream French society from its disenfranchised youth, whether they live in foyers or HLMs. Nassim’s “niaque” or desire to shake off that status creates a vibrant piece of theater that is never self-pitying but rather genially combative. Chenouga and dancers Wrecker and Romuald Brizolier/Migue Ortega (in alternating performances) use impressive restraint to tell a story that more usually leads to a police record, with salutary laughter and an exemplary will to live.

To February 12, Tues-Sat, 9 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 7 avenue Pablo Picasso, RER A Nanterre-Préfecture + navette, 12-25 euros, tel: 01.46.14.70.00.

Photo Credit: Pascal Victor

Interview with Dan Jemmett

It has been 12 years since a little known director from London’s experimental fringe created Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu roi” with three actors, some kitchen utensils and a bunch of tomatoes, at the Théâtre de la Cité internationale. Dan Jemmett’s approach to theater – playful, visual, rooted in formative experiences as a child of actor-parents, later as a street puppeteer while at Goldsmith’s Art College in London - has served him well in that time; he now holds a long list of productions in France (nearly two a year) and a reputation for being a director who can wring magic from even the poorest text. His work includes creative retakes of Elizabethan classics, along the lines of “Shake” (a revisited “Twelfth Night”), “Dog Face” (Thomas Middleton’s “The Changeling”) and “Presque Hamlet”; a few contemporary risks like “William Burroughs surpris en possession du Chant du vieux marin de Samuel Taylor Coleridge” by Johny Brown, “Le Musée du désir’ by John Berger, and a version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl”, with English band The Tiger Lilies; as well as five operas and two acclaimed productions now in the repertory of the Comédie Française: “Les Précieuses ridicules” and “La Grande Magie”. Success rarely taking a straight road, however, Jemmett has navigated some challenging turns: flops, to be blunt, such as at the Théâtre de Marigny last season with the critically excoriated “Le Donneur de bain”. His newest play, “La Comédie des erreurs”, finds Jemmett returning to familiar ground, with cross-overs in theme, set design and cast from his first big success in France (“Shake”, Prix de la revelation théâtrale (New Talent Award), awarded by French theater critics, 2002). The production provided the opportunity for some frank conversation on the day before the show opened at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord.

Molly Grogan : What motivated your choice of “The Comedy of Errors,” and how did you decide to use just two actors to play the two sets of twins [the brothers Antipholus and their servents Dromio]?

Dan Jemmett: I always liked the play. It's performed a lot in England, very badly, I think, mostly because it’s kept at a certain face value: it’s a farce, its accessible to children and its sort of a beginner’s Shakespeare piece. But I was struck, even as a child being in it, by a sort of grace that was present. And of course the asides that the two Antipholuses have to the audience; in general, in an Elizabethan text, the asides interest me because they immediately break down the conventions. And then the desire to reduce it to, not a Commedia piece, but a tréteau [traveling stage] with as few actors as possible: that’s appealing because it means you have to think differently; can the attempt at representation, whether its scenic or the actors’ characterization, really be sketched? It’s a form that maybe has stayed with me since working with puppets. It allows perhaps for a space to open, a space between the performance and what is being said, somehow; it allows us to breathe. It’s sort of a way of commenting together on the kind of theater we’d like to show, without it ever being ironic. I’d like to think it calls up an intelligence that is there in the audience to play with the form of theater.

Shakespeare wrote “The Comedy of Errors”, I imagine, thinking that different actors would play the twins, which is impossible because you spend your whole time, in productions I’ve seen, trying to make the two twins look as much the same as possible, when you know they’re different actors. At the end, you have the dévoilement, where two actors have to look at each other pretending that they’re twins, when they’re not. It’s horrible. We spent our time erroneously, to start with in rehearsals, wondering how we could make the difference between the two, and then I thought, “That’s ridiculous. They should be the same because that’s the whole point.” [To show which Dromio or Antipholus is which] we use vaudeville techniques, glasses, hats, it doesn’t really matter. It’s a sort of a poor attempt to differentiate between the two. Then, the action sort of stops, and the text in the last scene of the dénouement, when everything is sorted out, happens in a more abstract way, meaning the actors lose the attempt at characterization and become the actors giving the text. I’m not quite sure what it means but it seems in the moment to allow us who are watching it to take what we want out of the questions of identity that have been set up, about finding not just a twin brother but finding oneself somehow. I don’t know if it feels slightly hermetic, but I can’t quite take it beyond a certain point. I can set the thing up and ask the questions by doing it with two actors like that, but then the resolution is something that is left.

MG: What’s keeping you interested in theater?

DJ: Well, I feel its sort of changing now. I went through a phase of accepting work that I hadn’t chosen, to do commandes, opera, the Marigny, the two pieces at the Comédie Française; they weren’t me. For as long as I can remember I’ve been doing quite a lot of that, and now with this work, I wanted to try and say “Stop” to that and make a smaller piece, a chamber piece, with a text that I wanted to do. On the back of that now, I’ve still got a few more commandes coming up, but I’m starting my own company in Paris with a producer, and in the autumn I’m going to do again one of Jarry’s ‘Ubu” pieces: “Ubu enchaînée” (*). I’m going to start with the same idea [as with “Ubu roi]” and see what happens if I spin off of that. I think there is maybe a stage in the careers of young-ish directors where you do some work, and people think that’s interesting, and then you think, “I need a career”, and you’re not sure in fact how it works. You’re taken by imposing individuals and producers, and it’s difficult to find any sense of autonomy in the middle of all that, but you’re seduced by it as well. I feel anyway, personally, that it’s time to take stock a little bit of what I have done and what I want to do and also to realize there are some things I just can’t do, certain ways of making theater that I’m not suited to make: the choice of material and the size of the theater, the architecture, the audience, all things that are very important. I was very gung ho, but sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t.

MG: It worked more often than not; the Comédie Française pieces were very well received.

DJ: That worked very well but the Marigny was a horrible experience and the Opéra Comique [“Beatrice et Bénédicte”, 2010] went very well but it could have gone very badly. I suppose one gets a sort of reputation for “Oh, he’ll do it because he can do crazy things…” A lot of this stuff is quite bad. The Berlioz score I was given was impossible. I managed to make something work, but if they asked, “What would you like to do?”, well, I’d be very happy directing “The Marriage of Figaro”, for example; that’s something I feel I could do. You say, yes I’ll do that. Why? Because it’s an interesting experience and it’s the opera but […] it’s such a personal thing to do and yet you find yourself in a position where your whole reason why you wanted to make theater and the whole personal relationship you have with it completely means nothing because it’s a vast machine. I think there are a lot of directors who get burned. I have been, variously, and I want a change.

MG: It’s unusual for a director to go back, truly, to where he began, as you are…

DJ: “Ubu enchaîné” is the sort of logical conclusion to “Ubu roi”. I suppose I wanted to go back and do that as the first thing in the company because it is a pretext for making the kind of theater that I’m interested in. It’s going to be working with objects again and three actors. Jarry is a universe that appeals to me for several reasons. There is a very impertinent voice there. I like the way in which somebody [Jarry] came to the theater having already made these puppets. On the first night of “Ubu”, he made a speech and said, “I would have liked to string the actors up like puppets but we couldn’t”… I thought that was an interesting belief that he, a little bit like Edward Gordon Craig, didn’t quite believe in the actor, and I don’t think I do. It sounds terrible to say that. [laughs[ I’m aware of the necessity of the actor and I like actors who don’t quite take themselves too seriously and who are aware of the limitations of it, so then you can do something else. The idea that I had originally of taking the three actors interests me, it becomes like a Guignol; there is some strange freak show. I like to go back to the Punch and Judy. And I think that politically there’s something interesting [in “Ubu”], and if one can find a way of making an “Ubu” feel something today, not just a museum piece… You look around and you see people like Sarkozy and Berluscuni and Bush and you think there is something to say there, surely…

MG: What makes you want to continue to work in France?

DJ: I think England is sort of finished now. I went back about six years ago and just the conditions of work there and the way in which the work is made are now kind of alien to me. In any case, when I was working in England with this experimental company, Primitive Science [formed at Goldsmith’s], we hated theater. We wanted to do it in our own way. It was a way of making up our own rules. It was very underground. I miss that, the kind of political voice that that had at the time, after the Thatcher years. Even though we didn’t really know it, we were doing it because [the situation] was so awful. There was no provision for making experimental work; it was all very mainstream. So the simple gesture of making that work was political in a sense. In France, it becomes quite quickly, not mainstream, but the culture, accepts and values those ideas, so you’ve got no opposition. I suppose I sort of miss that, or I kept that, but there’s no reason; I have nothing to be in opposition against, really. But that sort of iconoclastic, punk voice is something that is left over from being born in England when I was, I think.

I’ve been here for 12 years and I’m still feeling I’m an outsider in many ways. An outsider in the sense that… I have no problem feeling being part of French culture, but there is just a recognition that however long one lives in France, one never really understands the French. They are the way they are. It’s true that in France the seriousness, intellectually, is possible in a way that in England it just isn’t, or in the States. So I am where the work is, where I can make the work.

MG: Where is home then: more an idea than a place?

DJ: Even Paris I find sometimes very conservative, not much fun. And yet you think well, there is another space, that is a kind of freedom here, which is an intellectual space, which isn’t pretentious either; its just a French quality, and that allows for the work in a way that couldn’t happen anywhere else.

* Starring Eric Cantona, scheduled at the Théâtre de l’Atelier

See review of "La Comédie des Erreurs" at www.parisvoice.com

Photo Credit: Mario del Curto

Damas Crosses the Line

Leon-Gontran Damas was the least known of the three founders of Negritude, the poetry movement created by French colonial subjects in Paris in the 1930s, but his poems gave the impetus to a politically engaged literary uprising among French-speaking Africans and West Indians. While his friends, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, went on to pursue high-visibility political careers and authored expansive and critically acclaimed oeuvres, the contributions of the quieter and more personally reflective Damas never found the same fame or public in his lifetime. His poetry exudes, however, the raw energy and urgency that lie at the core of Negritude’s declaration of Black identity.

Those poems and that search for self are the subject of an excellent short piece of theater: « Leon-Gontran Dams a franchi la ligne », directed by Frédérique Liebaut and interpreted by Mylène Wagram. Poupées noires, faux cols, banjos and Canadian Club… Damas’ evocation of the everyday with a surreal quality of imagery and brutally elegant language are dramatized over 90 powerful minutes through Wagram’s inspired performance, incarnating with equal sensitivity the poet’s disapproving mother or Damas’ own tortured figure in his Parisian exile.

The son of middle-class mulatto French Guineans, Damas struggled to render the foundational existential question for West Indians over the course of their 400 year history, spanning the extermination of indigenous peoples, the slave trade, race-obsessed creole society and the colonies’ relation to la Mère-patrie: what does it mean to be black in France ? The question has lost little of its pertinence nearly a century later, and Liebaut and Wagram find in Damas’ verse much to reflect on today, weaving a narrative through « Black Label », « Hoquet », « Limbe » and other works with a precise physical language and a handful of props and costumes. The intensity and intelligence of Wagram’s readings of Damas’ language and vision, even exploiting the rap tonalities and rhythms of these poems written long before Blacks had any kind of voice, make a gripping performance of these too long unheard poems.

To Feb. 27, Tues-Sat, 7 pm, Théâtre Lucernaire/Centre national d’art et d’essai, 53 rue Notre Dame des Champs, 6e, Mº Notre-Dame-des-Champs, 15-25 euros, tel: 01.42.22.26.50.

Identité

A white rug, a beige raincoat, a few bottles of wine and one couple. Gérard Watkins, who won the Grand prix de literature dramatique (new writing prize) in 2010 with “Identité” (published by Voix navigables), places some very large preoccupations in a very small world (and a very familiar theater trope). How may an individual define himself/be defined? Getting there has many access roads, passing through culture, family, profession, nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, gender… most of which originate in realms far beyond our control.

Impatient with an immediate notion of identity (child + parents) for characters André and Marion Klein, the play opens a Petri dish of germinating ideas on identity as history (Vél d’hiv’), as politics (immigration policy) and as economics in the consumer societies of the European Union. But just as the question of who one is cannot be summed up on a census form, the larger issues Watkins tries to tackle are not easily contained in the miniature frame he uses, in the example of the Klein’s participation in an identity contest of sorts which finds them either exhuming corpses to win hypothetical prize money or engaging in a hunger fast in reaction to a general malaise. The action takes on a vaguely Orwellian atmosphere, in the play’s evident subscription to the existence of nebulous forces which inexorably manipulate us all.

Writing in reaction to the "Mariani Amendment" which proposed requiring DNA tests for immigrants to France requesting visas for their family members. Watkins seeks to transpose the Amendment's violence to society at large, as André and Marion must scour their parents' homes and even tombs for DNA residu. The question of their genetic tree is not what interests Watkins, however; André and Marion's discussions on genocide and involvement (both direct and indirect) in such mass crimes, make clear that is rather the dangerously insidious allegiances made by individuals in their daily lives that risk defining them. The work's merit lies in this extension of the debate, along with the cadences and images of Watkin's language which can, in the brutality of the context, approach the surreal. Billed as a tragedy, vaguely facetious, deliberately abstract, and with a tone vacillating between hysterical laughter and brute pessimism (from actors Anne-Lise Heimburger and Fabien Orcier, respectively), "Identité" is much less about a perception of self and much more about a society at pains to embrace the Other in its midst.

To Feb. 11, Tues-Sat, 7:30 pm, Sun, 3:30 pm, Théâtre de la Bastille, 76 rue de la Roquette, 11e, Mº Bastille, tel: 01.43.57.42.14.

Photo Credit: Hervé Bellamy