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.

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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