Shun-kin

It isn’t often that a writer achieves national honors by writing about sexual deviancy, but such was the destiny of Jun’ichirô Tanizaki. In the middle of his prolific career in 1933, the iconoclastic Japanese writer produced two works: “A Portrait of Shunkin”, a film script imagining a life-long sado-masochistic relationship between a blind woman and her servant, and “In Praise of Shadows”, an essay on contrasting aesthetics in the West and Japan. His preoccupation with eroticism, in all its manifestations, as well as his stylistic novelties left a lasting mark on Japanese literature and society.

British director Simon McBurney begins his new show, “Shun-kin” with a narrator who similarly recalls the strong sensations he felt reading the text as a boy. Not surprisingly: the enigmatic Shun-kin, disfigured in her childhood and put into the care of Sasuke, a young apprentice to her family’s pharmacy, provides a fascinating psychological study and a thoroughly unconventional love story. What to make of it is explored by McBurney’s choice to pair the tale with Tanizaki’s essay: a challenge to examine the figurative shadow zones of the human psyche and, even in its socially vilified perversions, to find beauty there.

The second project to bring together McBurney, his company known as Complicité and Tokyo’s Setagaya Public Theater, “Shun-kin” is a more complex showcase of the two troupes’ talents than the earlier “Elephant Vanishes” (2003). While Complicité’s flare for technological thrills and Tokyo’s neon brilliance disputed the spotlight in the older piece, based on three short stories by Muraki Hurakami, Tanizaki’s “Shun-kin” provides a meditative meeting of East and West, in its exploration of their dimly let intersections.

The show is an noteworthy demonstration of hybridity, both creative and intercultural. Complicité’s signature physical vocabulary and imaginative recuperating of everyday materials prove excellent companions to Japanese minimalism and traditional theater forms. The development of the title character Shun-kin from girl to womanhood is evoked with bunraku (the Japanese art of marionettes), but is achieved with such precision that it is easy to not notice when the doll changes places with an actress. The company also makes the most of the "sotoba", or offertory sticks placed on graves in Japan, with which the show begins: these are employed by the actors to evoke trees, steps, doors, rooms and musical instruments. Paper is similarly stretched to create kaleidoscopic projected images and nightingales taking flight, like origami birds. In a fitting touch, the story is narrated by Yoshi Oida, a longtime actor in Peter Brook’s theater laboratory in Paris, and his presence creates a living bridge between European and Japanese cultures.

Like the shadows Tanizaki praises for their closer approximation to the unknown, the fullness of the relationship between Shunkin and Sasuke remains a mystery, somewhere between passion, power, jealousy, self-hatred and even love. McBurney offers help again to unraveling it, imagining a contemporary framing device about an actress hired to read their story for Japanese radio and who decides, upon finishing her performance, to rekindle a relationship she had been ready to let go. By a multitude of nuances in the sepia-toned set, Judeo-Christian symbolism which equates light with beauty and goodness is challenged throughout by a Japanese connectedness with a spirituality and aesthetic manifested in silence and darkness.

McBurney and company(ies) have fashioned a rare piece of art, in the example of Shun-kin’s puppet: fragmented, multi-faceted and amazingly life-like, to shine a different quality of “light” on life itself.

To Nov. 23, Théâtre de la Ville, www.theatredelaville.com / www.festival-automne.com

Photo Credit: Tsukasa Aoka

Lulu: A Monstrous Tragedy

Frank Wedekind’s Lulu is a ravishing beauty who drives men mad. They just can’t help themselves from obsessing over their mistress, dancer, muse, high-class call girl and destitute prostitute. If she is certainly a temptress, Lulu was first a horribly mistreated young girl, at the hands of her father to begin with, creating ambiguous sympathies for audiences.

Symbol of feminist freedom, sexual liberation or the second sex’s victimization? The larger than life character – performance artist of her own life, in a world that wants her for its own pleasure and which she is often more than willing to oblige - has been recuperated in the 20th century by all three perspectives on women. Director Stéphan Braunschweig chooses to see her rather more as men’s prey than their dominatrix, in “Lulu: une tragédie-monstre”. Like most treatments of Wedekind’s anti-heroine, the production revisits two of his works, "Erdgeist" (Earth Spirit, 1895), and "Die Büsche der Pandora" (Pandora’s Box, 1904), which were recreated after the writer’s death as the opera “Lulu” in 1937.

In the lead role, the diminutive, gravelly voiced Chloé Réjon is a woman-child who may fail to always grasp the strength of her power over the male sex, yet is just as capable of using it for the darkest of intentions. The progressively sordid scenes of her life whirl by like a merry-go-round on a rotating set of interlocking rooms, hinting that the past is never far behind and that the future can never hold anything new. If Lulu walks literally in circles, the contemporary costumes (and much is to be made of Réjon’s numerous wardrobe changes, from a painter’s Pierrot to a Lido butterfly and a rock and roll vamp) beg interpretations for women’s unshakeable objectification some 150 years later.

Carnal love was nevertheless Wedekind’s overwhelming concern. The young German who had previously dabbled with careers in advertising and the circus made his European tour, not to visit monuments, but to rid himself of the values of his bourgeois milieu. Paris’ brothels proved helpful to his goals; “Lulu” was born. Wedekind may have celebrated eroticism as a counterbalance to and escape from the stultifying social and moral codes of his day, the erotic power that Lulu conjures leads inevitably to her demise. Male fantasy and women’s reality intersect, leaving no clear-cut conclusions and lending the work its own power to fascinate.

From frying pans to Ferraris, everything sells better with a pretty woman in the photo. We don’t need Wedekind to tell us that but it is interesting to remember, through a 19th century lens, that the far from innocuous relations between beauty, sex and economics have always been with us and are unlikely to soon fade.

Continuing the initiative begun last season by the Théâtre national de la Colline to provide English subtitles and program notes for one or more performances of selected shows, the performances of “Lulu” on Dec. 4 and 14 will be similarly subtitled for English-speaking audiences. Note that the early times for all shows reflect the performance length (4 hours).

To Dec. 23, Tues, Wed, Fri, Sat, 7:30 pm, Sun, 3:30 pm, Théâtre national de la Colline, 15 rue Malte-Brun, 20e, M° Gambetta, 13-27 euros, tel : 01.44.62.52.52.

Photo Credit: Elisabeth Carecchio

Le Tangible

One of the original founders of the Belgian theater collective tg STAN, Franck Vercruyssen is the group’s political conscience, behind shows like “One 2 Life”, treating capital punishment, “The Monkey Trial” from a transcription of the Scopes Trial, and “JDX – A Public Enemy”, an adaptation of Ibsen’s play about one man’s struggle to stand up to political and social hypocrisy. He is also drawn to dialogue between the spoken word and dance and has signed several pieces exploring their interfaces: “Nusch”, “Quartett” and now “L’intangible”. This equally ambitious and poetic piece builds on the choreography of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker to treat the Middle East conflict, with a text derived from writings by poets Etel Adnan (Lebanon), Mourid Barghouti, Mahmoud Darwich and Samih al-Qasim (Palestine), and the British novelist and essayist John Berger.

The principle story comes from Berger’s From A to X, in which A’ida writes to her lover, imprisoned for his political positions, of her struggle outside with military aggression, political injustice, loss and fear. To dramatize her story, Vercruyssen has chosen an empty stage onto which a series of photographic images unfolds, of buildings and streets in anonymous locales of apparently Middle Eastern origin (taken in Beyrouth and Palestine). Beneath their changing façade, three dancers echo and amplify A’ida’s struggle to hold on to hope, with a corporal language that gains in force with the evocation of her daily existence while embodying its unspeakable silences as well. The layers of spoken, visual and gestual narrative, not to mention written (in simultaneous Arabic and French translations), explore the range of A’ida’s emotional response as well as the mutism of her lover, who writes onto her letters but never sends any of his own. The show’s title comes from a line in Berger’s text where, commenting on the loss of physical property in the wake of a bombing, the narrator is led to consider the “amnesia of the tangible world”, where homes and possessions are unable to resist artillery to bear lasting witness to lifelong struggles to exist, a theme underscored tellingly by Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Yazan Al Khalili’s photography.

Vercruyssen has found a richly multiple language to explore a conflict not often the subject of contemporary theater and the resultant loss of cultural wealth and resources, among the debris of human lives. In a booklet accompanying the show, he relates in detail STAN’s efforts to create the show with actors from Naplouse and Damas, the courage and patience of these drama students caught between Belgian immigration policy and university regulations at home, and the ultimate, final-hour failure of the project. The planned cast is replaced in the show now running by Franco-Egyptian actress Eve-Chems de Brouwer and the Iraki actor Modhallad Rasem. Its own lived testament to the conflicts that mine and undermine past and present history in the Middle East, “Le Tangible” blends esthetic and political concerns in a surprising but highly intelligent and thoughtful approach to the question, an approach STAN, as always, does best.

To Nov. 13, Tues-Sat, 9 pm, matinees Nov. 13, 14, 5 pm, Théâtre de la Bastille, 76 rue de la Roquette, 11e, Mº Bastille, 13€-22€, tel: 01.43.57.42.14, Festival d’Automne, tel: 01.53.45.17.17.

Photo Credit: Lore Baeten

Interiors

After the dark, the silence. Scottish director Matthew Lenton has a gift for giving Maurice Maeterlinck’s works their literal due. “The Sightless” (1999), an adaptation in total darkness of “Les Aveugles” (1890) is followed by “Interiors”, a largely mute recreation of “Intérieur” (1894), liberally transforming the Belgian writer’s play about tragic destiny into a contemporary study of voyeurism and tensions between outward appearances and secret desires.

This "Interiors" is performed in an enclosed space behind a glass wall : a dining room seen from outside its large windows. An important evening is evidently in store, and characters fix their makeup and study the table settings before guests begin arriving, in winter parkas and carrying shotguns. The nature of the dinner and the relationships between these individuals, ranging from adolescence to late middle age –not to mention the reason for their attire and accoutrements - is unclear until a voice-over kicks in to connect the dots. The owner of the voice is later revealed to be a dead girl who now spies in upon scenes of the life to which she can never return and who underscores the beauty of their quintessentially human moment of shared food and laughter before concluding the play with dire predictions of their impending deaths.

Where silent films physically exaggerated the situational drama or humor of their plots, Lenton’s play looks merely like television with the sound turned off, whence the need for narrative assistance. The strength of “Interiors” lies in the quality of the performances given by the seven actors of Lenton’s Vanishing Point company, remarkable for the precision of their gestures and expressions which bring life and authenticity to this dinner viewed from the cold outside but in whose presence the dead girl’s elegiac commentary strikes the ear as superfluous, invasive even and unnecessarily didactic. The set combines naturalism and expressionism in the minutely furnished dining room and cold celestial heights of a projected night sky.

If the point of "Interiors" is to blend these two interpretative fields, to understand better what the assembled friends truly think to themselves about themselves and each other, and so to explore a deeper level of human relations than that which is more usually on display at the average dinner party, the general nature of the characters' reflections, revolving mostly around sex and food, surprises in its lack of inspiration. Although the project seeks otherwise, the “exterior” voice of “Interiors” leaves too little of the imaginative space that would have pushed the exercise to a more challenging engagement with its themes.

In English with French subtitles. Nov. 2-6, 8:30 pm (Sat. 3 pm/8:30 pm), Théâtre des Abbesses, 31 rue des Abbesses, 18e, M° Abbesses, 13€-24€, tel: 01.42.74.22.77.

Photo Credit: Tim Morozzo

Aftermath

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

Photo Credit: Joan Marcus

Forced Entertainment's Cheap Thrills

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

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

Photo Credit: Hugo Glendinnin

Cubist theater?

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

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

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

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

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

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


Photo Credit: Dieter Hartwig