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

Meeting Nature Theater of Oklahoma

While in Paris for the French premiere of “Life & Times” (see parisvoice.com review; also review of “No Dice” on this blog, March 29, 2010), Nature Theater of Oklahoma co-directors Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska spoke with me for a very interesting hour of conversation on topics ranging from their influences (Duchamp, Warhol, Rivette, Malevich) to their specific interests in the theater art form. The company was informally founded after Copper and Liska met at Dartmouth University, but took its name, which comes from Franz Kafka’s novel Amerika, in 2004. Since then, and with six shows and an Obie to its credit, the company has been hailed as “the most buzzed-about new troupe on the New York avant-garde scene” (New York Times) and “one of the top alternative companies in New York” (Village Voice). Nature Theater of Oklahoma is becoming a regular visitor to Europe, with frequent invitations to Belgium and Austria (where Copper and Liska won the Young Directors Award at the Salzburg Festspiele in 2008) and multiple appearances in the Paris area over the last two years, from Aubervilliers and Bobigny, to Gennevilliers and now the Théâtre de la Ville. The following transcription presents only the highlights of what they told me…

Molly Grogan: Can you describe what you do or yourselves as a company?

Pavol Liska: Every show is a different challenge. I would say in the past 4-5 years, we have been exploring the mundane, but it’s not the only thing that we’re interested in. We’re always interested in subverting the expectations, even from ourselves: whatever we feel is expected of us or what we expect from ourselves. We do what we don’t know how to do. Of course, there are similarities in vision or in picture-making between “No Dice” and “Life & Times,” even though we said ”Oh, that’s a new challenge.” But it’s still part of our world, it has our sense of humor, so, as much as we may not like that, there is a style, there is a limitation to what we can do and what we do. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get away from that as we keep going and that the last show we make will be completely different from the first show we made, but you can’t really escape yourself radically all the time. I probably don’t want to make a traditional Molière. It’s probably not going to look like that, in 2 years. Maybe in 5. Maybe in 10 years, we’ll be working at the Comédie Française!

Kelly Copper: We always try to throw ourselves off with every show. The first show we made together [“Poetics: A Ballet Brut”] had no language in it at all, and the next show was “No Dice”, which was 4 hours of non-stop talking.

PL: “People who booked “No Dice” […] came because they saw a one-hour long show with no talking, and they’re like “Ah! Those are the people who don’t talk and we’re just going to have fun,” and then we talked for 4 hours.

KC [laughing]: It’s not actually the best business sense to do something completely different.

PL: And then we used a lot of video [“Rambo Solo”], and we’d never used video before. Then we dealt with “Romeo and Juliet” because people thought, “Oh, these guys just deal with trash subjects.”’ So, lets take on hard culture. It’s always like that. We’ve written descriptions about what we do for grant applications, but we don’t necessarily subscribe to them.

MG: In “Life & Times,” then, what are you working on? You added music, you say, as a challenge, and then there is a very codified series of gestures, and, of course, there is the American language. Are you particularly interested in the American idiom, the way people talk, or are these conversations more of a tool to build a show around?

PL: In many ways, it’s a tool. It’s a way to keep time, and it’s a way to keep attention from the audience and then how we can sneak in other interests we have, like abstraction or the function of abstraction in life and how abstraction can open up reality, and that’s contained inside that language. It’s also for me, the archeology of the brain and how, I can, by a simple question, like, “Tell me your life story,” conspire or trigger human creativity inside the brain to produce language and how you create a history. What we’re doing is not biography, we’re not interested in biography or even storytelling, I’m purely interested in what the brain does when it’s asked a question and how the mouth makes language, makes words. So I asked something that someone knows. It’s almost in some ways a psychoanalytical project. I’m more interested in the Lacanian idea of truth being revealed in the breakdowns of language, not necessarily in the fluent sections. When language breaks down, that’s where I’m most interested. The rest of it is for the audience: “Oh! We’re being told a story. Ok, I’m safe. It’s ok.” I’m much more interested in the crashes and the accidents.

MG: That’s where all that sort of filler comes in, the “likes” and the “ohs” and the “ums”. Which is what for me at least, because I don’t hear that kind of American English so much, really hits me, the number of times that those expressions are used.

KC: Yeah, and you should have seen some of the email back and forth about the translations [for the subtitles]: “What is the difference between ‘um’ and ‘uh’? Must there be a difference? We can spell it differently in the French language, but we don’t have an ‘uh’ and an ‘um’.”

[laughter]

Me: And how did they translate them? I wasn’t watching the subtitles.

KC: It was “euh” or “heu”. But I’ve never been asked [that]; that’s not something you spend a lot of time thinking about, even as an American English speaker: what is the difference between “um” and “uh”? But, there is some kind of… you know…I guess …

[laughter from everyone]

KC: Those kinds of obscure questions!

PL: Even subconsciously, that caused the biggest - not problem - but that was the discourse around it.

KC: That that can be an issue.

MC: Was it a bigger issue for your French translator that your German translator?

PL: Yeah, German translators never brought it up.

MG: You mentioned abstraction. Can you talk more about that? I’m just guessing, and you’ll tell me I’m wrong maybe, that there is a relationship between that idea and what the gestures are doing and the use of the rings and the squares [as intermittent props in “Life & Times”].

PL: It’s related to the way we live. For me, as we keep going, I realize more and more that really all our behavior is abstract. We don’t see it as abstract only because of habit, because we’ve done it for so long. We sit down on these objects that are like this [indicating a chair] but they could have another shape and we could get used to that, over centuries. And so, when you grow up - and it kind of fits with the project because you have childhood, from birth to age 8 - in Kindergarten, you deal with geometrical shapes that are abstract. You start with the very clear triangles, circles, squares, and you’re dealing with these very basic shapes that are abstract, and the child has no problem with that. And all of a sudden, as we keep moving, we don’t deal with those shapes anymore. You still deal with them in geometry in high school, but then you move away. For me, life has become abstract; everything is abstract to me. And abstraction is very real at the same time. It’s just finding a way to creating alternatives. Episode 2 does not have those; it has a much more baroque movement vocabulary, not such a basic one [as Episode 1]. And Episode 3 will keep evolving, in the same way that James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man starts with a very basic, child-like language and ends in a much more complicated language in his journal, and then leads into Ulysses and then leads into Finnegan’s Wake. I think that’ll probably be the journey that the whole project will take: moving from very strict, basic geometry into something that’s much more intricate.

MG: The abstract language is a reinforcement of the world of the narrator, the child’s world, what she sees, how she perceives her world?

PL: Yeah… It’s also a development of our aesthetics. The red square [the actors wear like a badge on their costumes] comes from Malevich, Suprematism [art movement founded in Russia by Kazimir Malevich, 1915-1916], and the red square represents revolution in the arts. So we’re trying to start there. Episode 2 has a black square. Each episode will probably have its own color square. For us, we always want to reinvent ourselves.

KC: Also the blank white backdrop means…

PL: The blank page.

KC: … blank page, clean slate. Same thing with the geometric shapes for us… We’re really into Malevich and the Suprematist art which was the kind of last utopian push, all these artists getting together at the beginning of Communism to make an art that’s more a part of everyday life. They designed textiles, they designed plates and napkins, and they were interested in making art a useful thing. And so we have that connection to it, but also it can mean basic geometric shapes of childhood, basic colors of childhood or the tabula rasa of childhood. As you go, you find reasons for including this stuff, but maybe you start with a more personal reason. You’re talking about a lot of abstract gesture and graphics, but I think it’s also been an outgrowth of how, anytime you deal with this kind of language [the show is based on a recorded monologue of a company member remembering her life] recorded closely enough, you realize how abstract it is. When you look at it on a page, it looks more like Gertrude Stein.

MG: I was going to ask you!

KC: Yeah, and you realize we only appear to make sense. We translate really for each other. You listen to me, but you don’t hear every single word, and how much it doesn’t link together and how much I don’t finish my sentences, because you translate me into something that makes sense. And I think that as experimental artists, we are always asked by the audiences in talk-backs, “What’s the story?” Or, “Why don’t you guys just have a narrative?” [laughter] And so part of our obsession with storytelling and narrative was just trying to get at why that was so important and why people needed it. And when you start getting back to this basic language and basic storytelling, you realize there’s nothing basic about it. When you record this kind of speech, it actually doesn’t make sense. It’s actually way more abstract than we think it is.

MG: Yes, it’s very cubist or very Steinian. You get the story but there is no linear flow. [laughter] It’s about memory too; you were talking about your interest in how the brain reacts to a question. Stein was very interested in memory and the idea that what we know is how we remember we came to know it. You see that in the show. The story begins with a baby picture. But that’s only one way of starting the story. I would have started my story somewhere else. And for me there were big holes in the story. [The narrator] talked about certain things, about friends and their houses, whereas her family and house were not clear to me, and then she seemed to talk more about her aunts and uncles than her siblings, for example. It’s very cubist in that sense: we get a picture of the whole from a selection of its parts, some of which are insisted upon more than others.

KC: When you get down to transcribing all that material and looking at it very closely, what’s funny to me is how much it actually mirrors the Freudian stages of development. In the early childhood, it really is all me-centered, peoples’ relationships to me. Strangely, whenever she describes her family, its all about the legs, the mom’s legs; it’s all at a child’s level. And then it gradually branches out, so that at the end of Act I, she sees her mom resting and to realize somehow that the parents are separate and they have separate needs and that it might be good to give them some alone time in their bathroom, Mom might need some private time to die her hair. Even though she is telling it as an adult person, it does go back to that early childhood way of seeing the world. That’s all there.

MG: I read somewhere that you wanted to find the least common denominator of theater. Have you answered that question?

PL: Yeah, a mask of comedy and tragedy makes theater. [laughter] Or an accent makes theater. Or makeup or… What are the framing devices? We always feel the need to situate the audience in a context that they feel familiar with before we can change it. And if we don’t, like with “Rambo Solo”, which does not look like a theater when you come into it, then we put the actor in front when the audience is coming in to greet them and to set the context. What are they coming into? They’re coming into somebody’s social context.

MG: Was it performed in someone’s house?

PL: No, but the video takes place in his house, so the audience gets to know his house very intimately. We shot all of it in his apartment. But there is always a reduction. We always ask what is absolutely necessary for theater to exist or be called theater. And those things could be very absurd things. It's like when [in “Life & Times”], the actor comes on in a rabbit costume. It’s not because we are trying to illustrate Easter, but it’s because, around this time in a performance, something like this would happen. [laughter] Same with “No Dice”: around this time, a new character would be introduced in the traditional dramaturgy. Even though we’re using non-dramatic text and it does not subscribe to that shape, we feel like we want to give that so that the audience has these touch points where they can stay with us, where it doesn’t veer off into something... Maybe it's because we are American show-business people, we do feel the obligation, because we have invited these people to our “house”, to somehow tend to that, and the work is never just about the work. Whatever happens on stage is almost always secondary to what the overall event is about.

KC: I was thinking that it’s a little bit like disguising a pill in a piece of meat for a dog... I remember when we first started dealing with the music [for “Life & Times”, which is sung and accompanied by live music throughout], looking at what do people do when they sing on stage: they bounce, they sway, sometimes they go like this [she raises her arms]. Just taking the shapes of all of those things, almost to say to the audience, “This is exactly like what you’ve seen before.”

MG: But it isn’t! [laughter]

KC: What little trick can you play in order to get them to go along with it just long enough to have it become something else.

MG: Those little tricks are necessary?

PL: We do think about the audience. We quit theater before and we didn’t make any theater for five years, and the reason we came back is because we were interested in the audience, not because we were interested in the art form. We could do a film, a video, and we still do, and photography, but the main thing that interested us in coming back was the social context and the social situation.

KC: And how do you get the audience not to hold it out at arm’s length? How do you get them to put their defenses down? That “this is not some strange piece of avant-garde art that I’m supposed to watch, this is not a painting that I’m looking at, but it involves me. Somehow I’m necessary for this event and it’s not ok for me to just watch it as an aesthetic object. I’m not here to look at anyone being a virtuoso. I’m not here to observe, I’m not here to pass judgment; I’m here to engage with it.”

PL: Which is nothing new: Molière and Shakespeare had prologues. There was always a welcoming. We may do that when we do longer presentations of “Life & Times.” That’s what I like about “No Dice,” when Kelly and I come out and thank people for coming; just that act of acknowledging, a little kind of stand-up comedy routine. I just hate the feeling of: “Its 8 o’clock; let’s all quiet down.” I want people to talk; no need to be so serious about this yet. The expectations: we like to break them up in the beginning. We don’t do it enough in “Life & Times” yet, but it’s an evolving project that’s going to have ten episodes so we’re learning as we go and learning slowly, and it’s going to take years to really find the right context and the right shape for the total revolution in the arts.

[laughter]

MG: That’s what you’re promising us?

PL: Yeah!

MG: One last question. Your company name comes from Kafka’s Amerika, the theater company that purports to offer a utopia in the final chapter of the novel, and then you mentioned the utopian vision of the Suprematist artists. Is finding a utopia in what you do a preoccupation for you?

PL: Yeah!

KC: I want to find a way… the way that art is useful and somehow a part of everyday life. I guess that’s the utopia. That it’s not somehow something that’s so separate. And I think all of these current projects were made out of a desire to always be in the arms of art or always be making art as a part of everyday life.

PL: It used to be more about ready-mades, about “let's find this” and then leave it. For me, right now, it’s much more about making as much as possible, creating something to add more art to the world, more and more and more: an overabundance to balance out the stasis. So, I’m losing interest in the mundane. As the project goes on, “Life & Times”, the language will stay the same but gradually I’ll probably forget about the language, just let it sit there as a way for it to keep that interest for the audience, as an excuse. Once I get the audience in the house, I can do whatever I want with them. But it’s just about getting them there, making them feel like they know what they’re going to see. So, in “Life & Times”, people are going to want to see the next installment. You know: “Oh, I wonder what happened to Cheryl or Mr. Winters!” We’ve set that up, that’s fine; that machinery is in process, and the audience can do whatever they want with that story. I’m not going to worry about it. I’m going to keep working on other things. That’s the utopia: how do you make something useful and how do you make it appreciated in a way that’s useful to people, not just other artists, but that somehow people who would never think of possibly appreciating abstraction to actually like or be woken up by it. My hope is that, after 7 hours [of “Life & Times”, scheduled to run 24 hours in its full 10 episodes], they’ll be like, “F*** it! Ok, what else is going on?”

Cabaret New Burlesque

As bare-breasted, high-kicking musical entertainment, burlesque owes its origins to Paris cabarets, but “New Burlesque” performers like Dirty Martini, Kitten on the Keys and Mimi Le Meaux are the stars of a renewed interest in the art form that comes straight from the clubs of New York and San Francisco. These ladies are XXL, in cup-size and attitude, and play on American culture iconography from cowboys to ‘50s starlets, with cascades of platinum ringlets, and cleavage stuffed with greenbacks, Kentucky Fried Chicken and fistfuls of glitter.

Striptease and tassel-twirling seem as natural to the performers of the Cabaret New Burlesque as pulling clothes ON seem to the rest of us. Comprised of the above mentioned three, joined by Julie Atlas Muz, Evie Lovelle and, the one male, Roky Roulette, the company has strutted its voluptuous forms across stages in France since 2004, but it is the success of Mathieu Almaric’s film “Tournée” (Prix de la mise en scène at Cannes last year), a fictionalized road movie capturing them on tour across France’s west coast, that explains their breakthrough to a larger public in Paris since late December. The crowd at the Théâtre de la Cité International, where the Cabaret is currently playing to sold out crowds before moving briefly to the CentQuatre, knows what it is in for, eager to see the larger than life stars of Almaric’s film in the flesh (the more the better).

The assembled company certainly obliges. Led by emcee Kitten on the Keys, who sports a mind-boggling array of boas, stilettos, head-dresses, and gowns, each ensemble more outlandish than the next, while lending some titillating humoristic and musical interludes, the rest of the troupe takes it off, again and again, with his or her own style, whether grotesque/fantastical (Julie Atlas Muz), Rita Hayworth elegant (Evie Lovelle), rockabilly (Roky Roulette) or overtly political (Dirty Martini’s “Patriot Act” number). But it is far less any indirect eroticism of the acts (the thrills are knowingly tongue-in-cheek) than their performance quality that is the measure of New Burlesque, and this show measures up very well in the genre : dazzling in sequins, lamé and satin but not too polished, a whisper of mystery but a good dose of self-deprecating humor, physiques corresponding to perceived notions of physical beauty and others rather more, well, full-formed, plenty of atmosphere and audience interaction, a bit raunchy in its jokes but poised in its striptease sequences. Gender wars and feminist theory take a back seat for an hour of unadulterated entertainment.

To Jan. 15, Théâtre de la Cité international Mon, Tues, Thurs-Sat, 8:30 pm, 17 bd Jourdan, 14e, RER B Cité universitaire, tel: 01.43.13.50.50, Jan. 21-13, CentQuatre, Fri-Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 5 pm, 104 rue d’Aubervilliers / 5 rue Curial, 19e, Mº Stalingrad, http://www.104.fr

Photo Credit: Eve Saint-Ramon

Éonnagata

As unusual lives go, the Chevalier d’Éon had one: the famously hermaphrodite fencing master and spy in the service of Louis XV used his sexual ambiguity to his advantage to sail through court intrigue, diplomatic imbroglios and military contests before socially entrenched gender views and the political machine got the better of his bravache. More than his career, his androgyny is what interests Quebecois director Robert Lepage in “Éonnagata”, a show devised with the former French ballet star Sylvie Guillem and the British dancer Russell Maliphant. A clever telescoping of the Chevalier’s name and that of the Kabuki art of transvestment, or Onnagata, the show explores hybridity, performance, and invented selves in a rewarding cross-disciplinary collaboration featuring Lepage’s fine-tuned storytelling skills, Guillem’s technical perfection and Maliphant’s suspenseful choreography.

The show offers multiple surprises, the most prominent being Lepage’s own performance, which proves him to be not just a skilled actor and endlessly inventive director, but a remarkably fluent dancer as well. The 53-year old Lepage is able to hold his own with Guillem and Maliphant in scenes of kenjutusu, or Japanese sword fighting, fencing, table dancing and a kind of musical chairs-duo with Guillem. The set’s sustained sleight-of-hand (allowing actors and characters to switch identities, appear and disappear in the blink of an eye) wears the stamp of Lepage’s creative vision and scenographic language. Guillem is, as always, the focus of attention, her combined physical grace and muscular frame embodying a fascinating Chevalier fighting to continue to wear his/her military uniform before being forced permanently into women’s clothes. Her duos with Maliphant, who plays the Chevalier at the height of his career in the Russian and English courts, explore the duality of this chameleonesque figure, who spent nearly 50 years of his life as a man and roughly 30 as a woman. Yet of the three, Lepage is arguably the most interesting to watch, both mastermind and performer.

The parallel created between the Chevalier d’Éon’s ambiguous gender and Onnagata allows for some poetic reflections on dual states, and lifts the show out of mere historical fact (the latter nevertheless necessitating some clunky narrative overlay). The Kabuki references look at first out of place in a show that seems to promise medieval knights and ladies from its opening tableau but in time come to support the story’s development. By his given name, Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d'Éon de Beaumont was predestined to wear both breeches and petticoats but was revealed at his death to be a fully sexed man. In focusing on his ability to exploit, with no little machiavellian skill and ease, his apparent androgyny, Lepage and company offer a tale that is a keen study of performance where gender is only one means, albeit a powerful and volatile one, to achieving a goal.

To January 9, Wed-Sun, 5 pm, 8 pm, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, 15 avenue Montaigne, Mº Alma-Marceau, www.theatrechampselysees.fr

Photo Credit: Érik Labbé