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.