Theater genes
If you ever get a chance to see “Au Revoir Parapluie,” I strongly urge you to do so.
The work is impossible to describe, although this NY Times review (and this post of mine) try. It’s playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through next weekend, and then on to various non-US venues.
Let’s see: there’s dance, acrobatics, circus, slapstick, music, mime, and scenery; part Twyla Tharp, part Pilobolus, and part Julie Taymor, as well as countless other parts. But even though there’s really no story to speak of, all of it is riveting theater.
I hesitate to put this You Tube video up here because you might get the wrong idea; the video consists of brief episodes that don’t even begin to do the performance justice. That hanging rope at the beginning, for instance, which looks tiny on the computer screen—something like a tassel—is actually gargantuan, spanning the height of the entire stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, hypnotically overwhelming as it twirls and spins for what seems like many minutes.
No image represented in two small dimensions can ever capture an experience experienced live in three large dimensions. But the video will have to do for now:
The five actors/dancers hang from ropes in ways creative and risky that can hardly be imagined, much less performed. They move as though boneless. They act without words. One sings, the others don’t, but some pretend to. They interact with props and scenery to form striking images and conjure up imaginary worlds.
The director of the company, James Thiérrée, has star quality. If the young Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin had had the capacity to have a love child together, it might have been Thiérrée, who combines qualities of both in his ability to mime, project comedy and pathos, and control every aspect of his body.
And so it’s hardly surprising to learn that Thiérrée actually is the grandchild of Charlie Chaplin. What’s more, he is the great-grandchild of Eugene O’Neill, through Chaplin’s wife Oona, O’Neill’s daughter, whom Chaplin married when he was 54 and she was 18 (she broke up with J.D. Salinger to do so, after having also spent some time dating Orson Welles, not a bad list for an eighteen-year-old). O’Neill disowned Oona upon her marriage to Chaplin, although you really couldn’t say he was ever much of a father in the first place.
So it seems that Thiérrée has enough theatrical blood coursing through his veins to power a small factory, as do many of Chaplin’s many children, a disproportionate number of whom have entered the theater in one way or another, but none of whom have achieved anywhere near the fame Chaplin did. Not surprising; he was a tough act to follow, and Thiérrée is unlikely to do achieve it, either. But he posesses some sort of genius all the same.
[NOTE: This post took me a long time to write, mostly because, once I go to You Tube, I can easily get trapped in its Garden of the Forking video Paths. This time I was tracking old dance performances.
Even though it has little to do with the subject matter at hand,
here’s one that introduces snippets from another of my favorite dances, David Parsons’ “Caught.” It’s a simple idea but one that engenders one of the most magical effects ever: a solo dancer’s movements are “caught” in a strobe. The illusion thus created cannot be “caught,” however, in a video, which only barely suggests the awesome (in the literal sense of the word) effect this produces on stage (be patient; wait till about 00:34 to see what I mean):
Once again, the lack of three dimensions and scale nearly destroy the effect, which is of a man defying gravity and floating in air while making beautiful shapes. I’ve seen it several times in person and never fail to experience a sense of wonder.]
Surreal, Neo. I had these weird and exotic pictures in my head from watching the youtube vid on the play.
We live in a decadent age indeed if patience is required for something lasting less than a minute. There are still wonders being produced, though. That will continue to be until the next Dark Age, most probably.
After misunderstanding your comments on the French Impressionist (or whatever style) painting, months ago, your few-word picture of Leonard Cohen was so apt, and Cohen so enjoyable, that I quickly followed this link to the dancers, wondering what else I had missed — while surviving the ’70s — that your much younger generation has created, or now values.
Correction: not all your generation, rather those who became neocons, i.e., pre-’65-liberal types who are willing to choose better over worse, and even join the military to fight for it, however confused the engagement.
P.S. The videos indeed are limited renditions, hinting at the excitement of being in the theater.
I bought the ticket and going to see the show tomorrow – thank you for recommendation, Neo!
No. But I do have the complete works of Mel Brooks.
Wish I were in NYC to see this….it sounds and looks to be right up my alley. I just rejoined BAM this weekend and love every opportunity to go there. Thanks for posting on this….
Looks and sounds like it would appeal to Cirque du Soleil fans (and vice versa).
Neo, have you noticed this in BAM Dance program?
Jan 2 isn’t too far away.
After the show: amazing physical prowess nonwithstanding, ther still must be some sense in what’s going on on the stage. Slapstick and mime tricks are vulgar, but at least they mean something comprehensive; increasingly long technically difficult antics of a “child” (excellently played by a Japanese dancer) don’t. I lost any, however scetchy, understanding of what the director tried to express somewhere in the middle of the performance.
A very undercooked show.
Tatyana: Sorry you didn’t like it too much. For me, from the start, I didn’t think the director wanted to express much of anything in terms of plot or message—other than a sort of visual and kinesthetic magic. So I suspended any attempt at getting much of a meaning out of it, and that didn’t bother me at all.
That Japanese dancer was something else, though, wasn’t she? Amazing.
I can’t say in all certainty that I didn’t like the performance. But I’d appreciate some editing done in some places and some expanding/clarification – in others. On meaning: it’s not like I need some resemblance of plot, but clarity in expressed emotion would be good to see. Few examples – the whole “hiding in the ropes->looking for past love” thing was clear enough, as well as the final badmington scetch; the ice pond scene wasn’t. It didn’t help, also, when the whole play with dried grasses’ thing deteriorated into a grotesque “duel” – something real, interesting and profound was discounted by actors themselves, more pity.
The whole genre (aesop’s language in art form) is not something new, especially for post-Soviets; there is a long interesting tradition, especially in Georgian cinema, of fables seemingly devoid of meaning, which in reality are full of witty observations/generalities. One example of film like that is cultish Kin-Dza-dza by Danelia. I don’t know if it’s available with English subtitles, but even without it, the film is clear enough.