Des Femmes (de Sophocle): Les Trachiniennes, Antigone, Électre
Wajdi Mouawad
[Carrière de Boulbon]
Friday, July 22, 2011
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Interruption and Explanation
Because I am fast approaching annihilation by my own weird tendency to stall, procrastinate, freak-out and obsess over what I have yet to record and all I have as-of-yet been unable to finish, careening therefore with impossible speed and extravagant duress into my now-familiar terminus of confused self-loathing, I have decided to rather speed this thing up, working backwards and forwards to get up-to-date, which as there seems to be about three readers attending to my harried reportage, poses no real danger as I'm sure my devoted and admirable trinity will forgive me.
For instance, today: I did relatively little, but I enjoyed myself. I walked around, I observed other tourists, their children and their shopping bags, I bought some cheesy-bread and afterwards I composed this apology: it was nice. I promise to post pictures.
For instance, today: I did relatively little, but I enjoyed myself. I walked around, I observed other tourists, their children and their shopping bags, I bought some cheesy-bread and afterwards I composed this apology: it was nice. I promise to post pictures.
July 17
Courts-Circuits
by François Verret
Courts-Circuits, François Verret's music and dance-theater piece performing at this year's Avignon theater festival is a comprehensive look at hysteria, whose obsessive portraiture is not only compelling to watch, but dramaturgically masterful in its composition and performance. Deploying a careful aesthetic, Verret is able to render this serial spectacle of debasement, without the help of traditional narrative-dramaturgy, without character development and without the interstitial distraction a subplot or even a coherent text might have provided him. Rather, the director chooses to indulge his subject, which for simplicity's sake, I'm going to call hysteria, in an episodic manner: choreographing, music, dance, video and speech as motivation for the plot's progressive motion. It's mordant and contemporary, and often referential in its behavior, and it's very cool to watch, but more importantly, it busies itself so near to the skin with such variety and skill that its endurance, its imagination and its fluidity is often as affecting as anything else. The result, best as I can tell, is tonal: vague, dystopic and even, cruelly, a bit bored by its own manner, it is presented with such lapidary care as to render a portrait of humiliation that is faithful to the emotion without challenging the audience's privilege to inspect it. For in giving the performer the audience she desires, we are simultaneously granting her an audience for her own humiliation. And so, each performance is embarrassed by its own desire to be seen.
by François Verret
Courts-Circuits, François Verret's music and dance-theater piece performing at this year's Avignon theater festival is a comprehensive look at hysteria, whose obsessive portraiture is not only compelling to watch, but dramaturgically masterful in its composition and performance. Deploying a careful aesthetic, Verret is able to render this serial spectacle of debasement, without the help of traditional narrative-dramaturgy, without character development and without the interstitial distraction a subplot or even a coherent text might have provided him. Rather, the director chooses to indulge his subject, which for simplicity's sake, I'm going to call hysteria, in an episodic manner: choreographing, music, dance, video and speech as motivation for the plot's progressive motion. It's mordant and contemporary, and often referential in its behavior, and it's very cool to watch, but more importantly, it busies itself so near to the skin with such variety and skill that its endurance, its imagination and its fluidity is often as affecting as anything else. The result, best as I can tell, is tonal: vague, dystopic and even, cruelly, a bit bored by its own manner, it is presented with such lapidary care as to render a portrait of humiliation that is faithful to the emotion without challenging the audience's privilege to inspect it. For in giving the performer the audience she desires, we are simultaneously granting her an audience for her own humiliation. And so, each performance is embarrassed by its own desire to be seen.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
July 14
Today is difficult for me. I've been blogging, walking, observing, encountering, practicing and engaging seemingly non-stop and my exhaustion is further frustrated at being radically behind schedule, which is both absurd and absolutely in-keeping with my custom of failing discipline and ecstatic retrieval. I am trying desperately to do everything at once, catch up on what I've missed and practice what I haven't yet got, meaning: French, writing and spectation. I wouldn't say it's working all that well and the portrait of my failure writ-large on-line is reassuring only in the most perverse sense.
***
Oncle Gourdin - Gymnase du lycé Mistral (11-12:30am)
by Sophie Perez & Xavier Boussiron
Essentially a Satyr play and parody whose subject is the Avignon festival itself, I was less-than-impressed overall. And what's disappointing, is the idea is a good one.
The play's troupe is composed of six players who are initially disguised as des lutins or imps, which the authors conceive of as creatures akin to both children and gods - the old, Platonic, only gods and monsters can live outside the walls of the city thing, the point of interest being that we are not outside the city walls (extramuros, as the avignonnaise call it,) but intra- and en-dessous, in other words, these lutins live just below our cobble-stoned streets. The set whimsically illustrates this with the help of two trees, whose exposed roots extend from the stage floor to about the height of a man and whose further upward extension of trunk and foliage reach up to the ceiling. The base of the trunk, about six-feet of the ground is in line with the base of a walled facade which half-circles the playing area and is clearly meant to represent the walls of Avignon. Below these walls hang brown tendrils of what I'm guessing are dirt, and so the space is set to suggest that we are underground, in the roots and soil of the city-center.
The lights come up and there is a soft blonde playing music while slightly-occluded characters toss various pieces of junk over the platform of wall surrounding the stage and through its series of over-arching breaches into the playing space of the stage. The stuffed animals, broken chairs and other indiscriminate pieces of detritus, we come to learn,
The banter begins light and friendly and somewhat comprehensible to a 5th grade french-speaker
***
Oncle Gourdin - Gymnase du lycé Mistral (11-12:30am)
by Sophie Perez & Xavier Boussiron
Essentially a Satyr play and parody whose subject is the Avignon festival itself, I was less-than-impressed overall. And what's disappointing, is the idea is a good one.
The play's troupe is composed of six players who are initially disguised as des lutins or imps, which the authors conceive of as creatures akin to both children and gods - the old, Platonic, only gods and monsters can live outside the walls of the city thing, the point of interest being that we are not outside the city walls (extramuros, as the avignonnaise call it,) but intra- and en-dessous, in other words, these lutins live just below our cobble-stoned streets. The set whimsically illustrates this with the help of two trees, whose exposed roots extend from the stage floor to about the height of a man and whose further upward extension of trunk and foliage reach up to the ceiling. The base of the trunk, about six-feet of the ground is in line with the base of a walled facade which half-circles the playing area and is clearly meant to represent the walls of Avignon. Below these walls hang brown tendrils of what I'm guessing are dirt, and so the space is set to suggest that we are underground, in the roots and soil of the city-center.
The lights come up and there is a soft blonde playing music while slightly-occluded characters toss various pieces of junk over the platform of wall surrounding the stage and through its series of over-arching breaches into the playing space of the stage. The stuffed animals, broken chairs and other indiscriminate pieces of detritus, we come to learn,
The banter begins light and friendly and somewhat comprehensible to a 5th grade french-speaker
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)