Festival d'Automne à Paris
Autumn Performance Festival December 2022
Each fall Paris comes alive with a series of theatre, music, and dance performances simply called Festival d’Automne (The Autumn Festival). A variety of international companies and directors take part, along with French groups, circus acts, and the highlights from the summer’s festivals in Avignon and elsewhere. Festival d’Automne à Paris is one of the best ways to catch up on what’s happening in the performing arts in Europe and around the world.
This autumn we scheduled our own mini festival d’automne during the first two weeks of November. We attended eight performances or exhibitions (several of them part of the official Festival) and one Akron-based Zoom rehearsal.
La Cerisaie (The Cherry Orchard)
What better way to embark on a performance journey than with the arrivals and departures that are so much a part of any play by Chekhov? And especially to see it in the House of Molière, the Comédie Française, a beautiful and historic building. This production of La Cerisaie, which ran two hours, no intermission (now that’s some fast Chekhov!), was classically and conventionally staged. The actors seemed intent to make the play “realistic,” however, and tried to outdo each other with their best Marlon Brando impersonations. Only the old servant, Firs, filled the venerable space with his voice and presence.
The cherry orchard itself, of course, is only referred to in the text and the question of how or if to represent the trees on stage is a major part of any production concept for the play. Here, the director has set the entire action of the play in the children’s old playroom with a large (rather tacky) oil painting of the cherry orchard hanging on the upstage wall. How interesting would it have been to see on the playroom’s backwall drawings, paintings, artistic depictions of each character’s vision of the cherry orchard over the years instead of a generic, furniture store painting? I’ve always felt that Chekhov has more magical realism in his work than is ever discussed. In the two full productions I directed, The Seagull and The Three Sisters, I tried to imbue the actors and the space with this sense of magic and mystery and idiosyncracy. Maybe I was trying to create what Disney eventually found in the house of the family Madrigal in Encanto? A Colombian Chekhov? I wonder where I could have gotten that idea? Somehow, though, I wasn’t able to get those two productions down to two hours
“Evidence,” an exhibition by Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith
When I first saw Patti Smith on stage in 1978, at the State Theatre in downtown Minneapolis, shortly after the release of her album, Easter, I thought she was incredibly sexy. Her androgyny thrilled my youthful imagination along with the power of her words and music. I was a convert. I have great respect for the trajectory of her life/career, her unflinching loyalty to those she loves, her poetic and intimate memoirs. I understand that some people have cancelled Patti Smith because of the title and lyrics of a song she wrote that appears on Easter. Her defense of the song and its sentiments hasn’t helped to endear her to the younger generations. The song has since been removed from all music streaming services. I can’t fault her for a creative expression that occurred 45 years ago. She remains, for me, a unique and fascinating artist.
Patti Smith’s current exhibition, “Evidence,” at Centre Beaubourg is an invitation to journey along with three mystic artists: Rimbaud, Artaud, and Daumal. Her collaborator, Stephan Crasneanscki, retraced the steps of these three historic travelers and recorded sounds of the mystic places they had visited: Rimbaud’s trip to Abyssinia, Artaud’s journey to Mexico, and Daumal’s sojourn in the Himalayas. Some of the collected sounds had already inspired several musical releases including the albums Peradam and Mummer Love. In Paris, Smith and her collaborators have gathered artifacts and artistic scribbles into an installation accompanied by Crasneanscki’s global soundscapes and Smith’s oral renderings of the three artist’s poetry or journals. The result is a moving and mysterious foray into the creative process of the three mystics and Smith herself.
The exhibit, however, brings up a lot of questions also. Why do we continue to privilege the work of artists such as these three men who are so obviously products of a patriarchal, colonialist system? And, especially in the case of Artaud, how can we experience a person’s mental illness without dehumanizing the patient or taking advantage of his fragility? I wonder about the journeys of other artists and why these three men are so attractive to creators like Smith? I admit that I have spent my fair share of time researching and reacting to the work and lives of these three men, especially Artaud. NWPL’s The Book of Saints and Martyrs explores the theatre visionary’s life and work as a series of hallucinogenic scenes taking place in the seven seconds before he dies at the foot of his bed in Paris, with one shoe on and one shoe off. In NWPL’s production, the female character, Ysé, is essential to understanding Artaud’s experience. As created by actor Lisa Black, Ysé is a pastiche of several women, including Anaïs Nin, Alexandra David Neel, and the character, Ysé, from Paul Claudel’s play, Break of Noon. Terence Cranendonk’s Artaud is an extraordinary rendering of the howl of mental illness and creative insecurity. Wandering through the exhibit at Beaubourg made me realize how close we were to touching something extremely rare with our production about Artaud.
International Artists
As we made our way via métro across Paris to the Odeon’s second space in the 17th arrondissement on a rainy Sunday afternoon, my twisted ankle injury began to manifest itself in a different part of the body—my lower back. We were going to see a preview of a new play by Iranian director/playwright, Amir Reza Koohestani. The director works often in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. En Transit is based on several sources, the novel, Transit, by Anna Seghers and the director’s personal experience of being stuck in the no man’s land between countries without a valid entry visa. The international cast of four women performed in French, English, and Farsi, with surtitles in English and French. The play, staged in an anonymous spartan space, with projections and minimal decoration, consists of a series of meetings, often one on one, between the authorities and someone trying desperately to get somewhere. The scenes were intimate and well-structured, but the result was cold and dry, without the warm, wet truth of fear and loss inherent in these situations. Even in the antiseptic setting of an airport immigration waiting room, human messiness cannot remain hidden for long.
On the other hand, Argentine choreographer, Marina Otero’s work, Fuck Me, was extremely wet and messy. I had the desire to see some contemporary choreography. Perhaps as an antidote to our night at Le Moulin Rouge? In any case, Otero’s work proved the perfect choice: five naked men and one woman on stage. The woman is the choreographer herself and she’s telling the story of her life as a dancer. The naked men take on the tasks that she can no longer accomplish due to injuries and surgeries. The men incarnate the female creator, allowing her to use their bodies. Through projections, recordings, and highly physical movement, the choreographer (present on stage throughout) tells us about no longer being able to dance. In the end, the frail woman that had been sitting downstage right throws off her robe and begins to run with the five men in a circle around the stage. Each naked man peels off and only the no-longer invalid choreographer is left running on stage, naked, alone, and refusing to stop—even as the stagehands enter to changeover the space and the spectators file out of the auditorium. What has just happened? In her program notes, Marina Otero claims that there is no “truth pact” between artist and audience. Really? I felt bad after this performance. Like I had been had. What is the artist’s obligation in relation to truth? I always have believed that an artist seeks to reveal the truth. The artist can play with the audience, keep them guessing, but to lie deliberately? I’m not sure that such lies or deceptions are part of the pact with the audience. I believe that if we are to be supported, artists must seek to reveal the truth.
Odin Teatret
On the day we planned to see the Odin Teatret’s farewell performance, Paris was paralyzed by a national transit strike and my back pain, which had been escalating all week, had started to rage uncontrollably. When we arrived to the Cartoucherie, in the Bois de Vincennes, Eugenio Barba greeted us warmly. He was surprised to learn that we had relocated to Paris and seemed highly skeptical that we could really take a hiatus from doing theatre. He wondered aloud what Grotowski might think of our retirement and laughed that my back acting up was probably a sign that I needed to return to work. Eugenio is like our older brother. He worked with Grotowski in the early days of Theatre of Productions in Poland and always maintained a close relationship with the master. Attending Odin Teatret’s Thebes at the Time of Yellow Fever was a bit like coming home. After all of the other performances we had seen, the Odin’s, created during the dark days of the pandemic, startled me with its familiarity, its warmth, its depth. The actors spoke and sang in ancient Greek. There were only a few lines of text in French. Yet everything was understood. The space transformed constantly, through the actors’ actions, and the actors danced and moved with expert ease through battlefields and mythic landscapes, telling familiar stories with new juxtapositions and in new contexts. They worked with commitment and belief in what they were doing. Seeing the work of a company like this, who had worked together for so many years, was a completely different experience than the other kinds of performances we had attended. There is no substitute for the work of a company. I am grateful to Eugenio and to the Odin actors for reminding me of the roots of theatre and the depth of the actor’s craft.
Back to Akron
It has been a good many years since my back has given me any real problems. In Akron, I had things under control with a combination of chiropractry and acupuncture. Thursday night, after returning home from the Odin performance, I was in misery. The pain was excruciating and kept me awake all night. I went to see the doctor in the morning and she gave me some pain medication and a prescription to see a kinéthérapiste (physical therapist). The pain medication did nothing except screw with my digestion. The kiné gave me some exercises and set up a regimen of meetings, but couldn’t really do anything to relieve the pain. It’s a nerve problem, not muscular. I eventually saw a Traditional Chinese Medicine specialist (for acupuncture and herbs), visited my osteopathe, and ingested countless little homeopathic sugar pills (at the urging of Jairo’s sister). Nothing, however, was helping. I returned to the doctor for some different pain meds and to get an order for x-rays. After more than two weeks, I am finally getting some relief. But the nights are still touch and go. Healing is a long process.
In the middle of all of this, we were able to see a rehearsal, via Zoom, of Akron-based actor Neema Bal’s solo piece, Three Countries/One Mother, before he left for the Nepal International Theatre Festival in Kathmandu. Neema was a student in theatre at UA and was participating in the creation of NWPL’s ensemble piece that was cut short by the pandemic. He is also a member of the leadership team that assumed responsibility for CATAC when Jairo and I left Akron. His performance is still very raw, but shows a lot of possibility and gives Neema a good vehicle for working on his craft and developing his art in a profound, meaningful way. I was touched by Neema’s work and it felt good to reconnect with this young, masterful actor. Akron is lucky to have such a brave and talented artist in its midst.
Other things
During our mini-festival, we also heard some good jazz at a bar down the street and Jairo went to the Proust exhibit at the Bibliothèque National. Paris marked the anniversary of the November 2015 terrorist attacks, which occurred several blocks from our apartment. The mid-term elections in the US did not result in the apocalypse that was feared, a controversial World Cup commenced in Qatar, prices continue to inflate, energy is at a premium, and the senseless, brutal war in Ukraine wages on. As we move into the holiday season, I am extremely grateful for the life I have, for my many friends and family around the world, and for the possibility to reflect and write. Thank you all for your attention.