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Avignon, France
If you come here in July for the Festival d'Avignon, there are two
things you can't escape.
Crowds are one of them,
jammed together in the walled center of the city, baking in the Provence sun -- inevitable
crowds, since Avignon, inhabited normally by just 87,000 souls, attracts enough visitors
in July to sell half a million tickets to the festival events, and to the 500 unofficial
spectacles that happily surround the festival. These advertise themselves with street
theater -- slow-moving cars with eager costumed actors perched on them, or African
performers dancing on the already crowded pavement
And the second thing you
can't escape, once you read the festival's official literature, is what I'll call
"festival-speak," the impenetrable, lofty language in which each attraction is
described. Playwright and director Valère Novarina, we read (in the festival's own
English translation of its French brochure), "has chosen the popular Imaginary
Operetta form [a form never seen before on land or sea, so how could it be
popular?]…a dizzy evocation within space and time -- between the huge and the
diminutive." And there's this, about Angelin Preljocaj's dance piece "Nobody
Marries a Medusa": "The dance steps in this performance are determined, and in
opposition to illusion."
But then this writing is delightfully like current French philosophy
(think Foucault or Derrida), and might be honored as a way of groping toward descriptions
of largely abstract pieces, in which we watch parades of images without much narrative to
hold them all together. Not everything in Avignon was like that -- Shakespeare
productions, over by the time I arrived, began the festival, but nearly everything I saw
was. "The Imaginary Operetta" turned out to be pure delight, inspired gibberish
set to devilish music written (and dizzily accompanied on accordion) by Christian Paccoud.
Though what held my attention above all was an eruption of detail in the staging, whose
meaning lurked just outside of consciousness.
The "Medusa"
piece, by one of France's most distinguished choreographers, used hip-hop and techno
music, refused to be either ballet or modern dance, and sometimes refused to be dance at
all, interrupting itself with imitation TV glitz What stayed with me were scenes where
hyperactive TV anchors got pulled into the unscripted depths of real art, scenes full of
slow movement, with two men clinging to each other helplessly, or a woman's white leg
stretched against a darkened stage.
It wasn't all wonderful. In "Theatres," the much-hyped French
playwright (and director) Olivier Py invented a character called (none too charmingly)
"myself," and let him ramble endlessly. In "Rwanda, 1994," a Belgian
troupe called Groupov wished to overwhelm us with nearly six hours of harangues and
eyewitness reports about massacres in Africa. This was a work in progress, but so far
Groupov has neglected to create any real theater (at least in the first act, after which I
and many others in the audience decided to flee) It made me wonder whether a six hour
lecture, without any notable insights, does any more to prevent future massacres than a
simple letter to the editor.
Maybe the most inventive
piece I saw was "Maistora I Margarita," an adaptation of Bulgakov's novel
"The Master and Margarita" by a young Bulgarian director, Stefan Moskov. Here
music and speech, speech and noise, and film and live actors all seemed to blend into a
single, supple experience, in which phrases muttered in Bulgarian carried as much delight
as the insinuating meows of a talking cat.
The moral of these events?
That non-narrative theater comes alive when something happens on stage, though from the
"off" Compagnie Alain Rais, I saw a wonderfully deft comedy, "The Anarchist
Banker" (adapted from the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa), where all the action came
from a dialogue of ideas.
The happiest piece was
"Auto da Paixao," a folk passion play from Brazil staged with great joy at
midnight in gardens high above the city. And earlier that day the festival became its own
best critic. An "off" company from Lyon had turned Offenbach's "La Vie
Parisienne" (real, not imaginary operetta) into a four-person cabaret. This turned
out to be a persuasive idea, but the cast was little more than amateur, and were shown up
that same evening by an "off" cabaret troupe, smooth professionals, singing in
the street. Stay in Avignon long enough, and the festival itself becomes theater -- and
also a theatrical critique.
Wall Street Journal Europe, August,
1999
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