Avignon-Paris: from fest to antifest
Naturally, every drama festival is like a mosaic portrait which allows for bynames, compliments, and tags. The one held in Zurich last year was described as an innovative one with pensioners served in Chinese sauce, precisely because it included an excellent musical performed by Broadway veterans in collaboration with three Chinese troupes. The one in Katowice was tagged tragic (with all plays based on tragedy scripts); the one in Belgrade was described as dominated by monk-actors (in almost all plays actors prayed using orthodox or freshly composed texts). The situation with the Avignon fest is complicated. No one was able to watch the entire program. The main one included 28 performances that were staged within 22 days. The OF Program had 532 plays schedule for 111 stages. Add here the troupes’ market self-advertising and mini-performances held as soirees wherever possibly, strictly in accordance with set schedule. The city is engulfed by the theatrical element and is enjoying this atmosphere. Hotel accommodation prices are twofold and there are no vacant rooms. The restaurants are busy round the clock. This city would not mind the publicity campaign if the posters were glued to walls. There are medium- and small-size cardboard ones, seldom the size of a regular sheet of paper, with all kinds of images, hanging from strings like some chimerical garlands, iconostases, self-created collages. These add an enticing enigmatic touch to the city. Anyway, somewhere in this sparkling diversity of the festival was the dominant component. The Avignon festival is 60 years old. The jubilee program collected world starts.
Ephemerality is a new Ariadna Ptushkina’s production. For eight years a canvas with a portrait of mankind is weaved, with a great many scenes from the lives of countless families. All people are one family. A simple and concrete idea, yet this concept has not been mastered of centuries. Without a doubt the inspiration born of this performance shed more light on the road to the understanding of this idea.
In the stage director’s previous production, Travelers, this theme was studied in regard to illegal immigrants. These people die in water, under automobile wheels, when struggling across barbed wire fences, when trying to flee acts of violence; these people pay with their lives for the right of every man to have freedom, respect, and equality. In both productions the director practices the same technique; all scenes are performed on mobile platforms that are moved by actors who are not taking part in these scenes. Whereas in the former case the impression is that of endless running, in the latter the heroes and their problems are presented to be viewed on all angles. Anyway, wherever the Du Soleil company performed, the audiences were free to visit the makeup rooms and share stand-up buffet menus of five courses with with actors peforming as witers, including Mnushkina as the chef and emcee.
From syropy nonexistence to death, with a heavy square head, through acts of violence, misunderstanding, and cruelty. So much for what we know as life. This is precisely how Romeo Castalucci portrays it in his Hey Girl!
After midnight a young female figure emerges from a flowing mass by the altar of an ancient cathedral. Her body is almost lost in the mist. The sword laying on some linen cloth gets red hot. Its burning smell guides her. She raises the sword, puts on the linen cloth with the sign of the Cross burned in it by the sword, and starts fighting the evil forces. She wins her battles at first, inspiring [her comrades in arms], but her first defeat finds her betrayed, defeated, an outcast. The actor’s head is a double-size photo copy, which is further enlarged in the finale and tranferred to a blak woman’s body. Once again, literally, the head is swelling and the body is getting even darker out of violence. A crowd of angry men is chasing her, brandishing stakes, because of her courage and femininity. “Joan, Anna...”
And at precisely this moment three glass disks, crystal dreams, start falling from the cupola and crashed on the floor.
Rodrigo Garcia’s characters are young Arabs who live on a dump heap. They make fun of each other and try to enjoy their life; they have beers, hot-air sessions, and fistfights that are aimless, ending in a truce and dances. They are going through the motions of living a life of sorts. Their dumb lifestyle begets dumb concepts. On stage, they start jumping around with jumping barrels and tanks, as though high on drugs. Young men begin stripping, dousing each other with ketchup, oil, throwing handfuls of flour, slapping each other with chunks of dough and pizza-sized rings of cheese. The whole stage is like a pizza; it starts sizzling. Here the people are food for worms, perishables that have to be consumed quickly. Then everybody washes, puts on clean clothes, and comments on his photo dating from his innocent childhood. All will ask the same question: “Why are all of us born the same way, although some do so in dirt and misery, while others are born with the proverbial silver spoon in their mouths?” This inequal possession of civiliziation’s amenities appears to be quite a problem. This problem has always existed. Today, however, our home, the planet Earth, proves to be a small world. The clumsy Chornobyl move affected our neighbors on the other side of the ocean. Are there ways to achieve universal equality? Kids who live on dump heaps argue on the subject. Are there any people upstairs who are really concerned about the matter?
The gorgeous Sasha Waltz also believes that civilization and the individual are incompatible. Man ends up being punished for his dreams, tireless creative work, quest, and the fruits of his toil. The play An Incident [?] was kept in the newly fashionable design theater style, performed in a semidark hangar.
The setting was a silver sphere, with pillows, a TV set, a fridge, several large rooms with shop windows, a transparent cube, a wooden cage, a parallelepiped with a ribbon window along the perimeter, and a landing with a barred hole in the floor on the lower level, down a winding staircase.
There were six pendulum-type fixtures in the hangar corners, with the foreman’s booth in the center as a denominator over a curly-haired numerator. This stage props element becomes a single whole in the finale when the people notice the loss of the baby afte casting aside their games and surrogate lifestyles.
This event acquires the scope of a whole lifestyle suffering a shattering defeat. The pendulums are swinging, counting the last seconds of the construction site of this civilization. Loss of the future means loss of the past and death of the present realities. All the accents are made where the cast gathers. The viewers, who were previously wandering over different sites of action, join the cast here. The hangar becomes boundless and all present within it are just a handful of people, envoys of the human race, whose task is to find the missing child.
Trying to find out the sense of man’s existence, signs of the future in current daily realities, the indestructibility of the past, man’s responsibility for what happens every moment and for eternity - these acute issues and other nuances made up the message conveyed by the Avignon festival. This message will be echoed not only in the theatrical world. This message may become even more topical owing to the performances done in a Paris suburb, as part of the Anti-Avignon Festival, in defiance of Avignon’s format and principles.
The young experimenting troupes cannot afford to rent premises or undertake any obligations for the next year, in order to take part in this famous festival. After all, their experimenting would have hardly provided for such expenses, let alone any revenues. It is also true, however, that any experimenting, by any drama groups in any countries, is impossible without financial support.
Casting all digressions aside, the only play I watched during the “antifes”, a production based on [the Polish dramatist, prose writer, and cartoonist] Slawomir Mrozek’s Out at Sea, showed true respect for one’s own and perfectly original interpretation of contemporary classics. The shipwreck survivors in a lifeboat in a stormy sea make a conscious decision to become cannibals and eat one of them so the others will survive. Habitually the very issue [of this kind of cannibalism] rates special debate. In this case the option of remaining human is offered through the translation of manslaughter into a salutary sacrifice. The adage about beauty saving the world is called into question and laughed at by the cast. Will this antifest serve to uphold the new drama trends? This question can be answered by theater-hardened audiences, all these experienced, inexperienced, professional, naive, demanding and kind-hearted people. It isn’t the stage, the script, even the cast, without which a drama company simply cannot exist. It is the almighty audience.
