Tag: reims scènes d’Europe

David vs. Goliath

David vs. Goliath

At Reims Scènes d’Europe, held between 24th January – 7th February, which presented artistically valuable works in performing arts marked by a diversity in genre, the performance Concord Floral premiered at the Comedie de Reims. Based on the award-winning play by the Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill, this production is part of a project by the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe, #digitalnatives19, which has brought together five theatres – from Cluj, Cologne, Thessaloniki, Vienna and Reims – to work with this play.

The starting point of the project, which commenced last June and is to continue until June this year, is to explore the balance between the digital and analogue world, especially among the teenagers growing up amidst global digitisation. The production at the Volkstheater Wien has focused on how digitisation affects today’s teenagers’ everyday life, as well as on cyber-bullying, while the performance by the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj will concentrate on positive and negative aspects of global digital communication. The idea is to have five interpretations of Tannahill’s texts, all performed by teenagers, amateur actors. It is worth mentioning that the text was created in Tannahill’s workshops with teenagers, that it has been performed both in schools and in theatres. That was also the case with the performance in Reims, which cast ten teenagers aged between thirteen and seventeen.

One of the reasons for casting teenagers, amateur actors, is based on Tannahill’s belief that it is the amateurs who will inherit the 21st century, as he states in his book, “Theatre of the Unimpressed”: “The Internet’s nature of openness and perpetual liveliness makes it a space made for amateurs who are given the chance to make themselves known through creating in innovative, ground-breaking ways”.

Within the frame of the Festival and of the project #digitalnatives19, Comédie de Reims was also the venue of a conference which tackled various aspects of digitisation. The conference was moderated by the anthropologist Elen Riot, while the topic of the amateur art breakthrough on the internet was addressed by Patrice Flichy, Professor of Sociology at the University of Marne-la-Vallee: “The internet produces amateurs, which is something that our society sees as a new phenomenon. Moreover, amateur practices are still developing thanks to the internet. Today, anyone can use creation and sharing tools which used to belong only to professionals. For example, amateurs can learn video editing by watching tutorials on YouTube, thus expanding their knowledge and creations. That is something we didn’t have before.”

Tannhill’s play takes place in an abandoned greenhouse known as Concord Floral, where a group of teenagers discover their torments, desires, dreams, weaknesses, sexual awakening, love of nature, while sharing it all in cyberspace. They have fled into the garden from the social plague, just like the heroes of Boccaccio’s The Decameron, which served as Tannahill’s main inspiration. However, while Florence in The Decameron is ravaged by the real plague, our present world is, in Concord Floral, affected by a metaphorical plague which all the children have escaped from, and decided to use the garden as a haven, a space of freedom, isolated, safe, and protected from their parents’ supervision. The Reims performance is marked by an extraordinary energy of the young performers who have won the audience with their dedicated, energetic, unrestrained, and sincere acting, playing the roles that echo their own lives. Dressed in colourful sequined clothes, they are placed on garish green grass. There are chairs scattered around, while the performers enjoy the rubble in the absence of parental order and supervision. Their play is guided by a DJ in the background, serving as a narrator who occasionally assumes the role of a controller, similar to the Orwell’s omnipresent Big Brother.

After long standing ovations, the director of the Reims performance, Ferdinand Barbet, said that the performance aims at revealing the real world to teenagers. During the rehearsals, they were constantly checking their mobile phones, immersed in various applications: “They keep taking photos and posting them on their profiles, that’s what’s typical for children of their age. They discuss everything quite openly on the internet, that’s what distinguishes them from my generation”, Barbet said.

In a very inspirational introduction to the conference about digitisation, Elen Riot said that Concord Floral was written with teenagers for teenagers, based on documentary material, and born out of young people’s reality: “It is a reflection on young people, on democracy and on the role of new technologies and social networks in their modes of socialization. If you don’t use new technologies, you are outside of society.” Furthermore, Riot mentioned some interesting insights made by Sherry Turkle, who claims that people are nowadays trapped in online exchanges and images they create about themselves. “I share, therefore I am”, has become a ubiquitous mantra, a contemporary response to Descartes’ rationalist thought “I think, therefore I am”. Today, sharing one’s intimate world has become young people’s life purpose, the primary means through which they construct their identities (and it is not only teens but also older generations who have become consumed by the same digital passion).  The phenomenon has been analysed by Steve Dixon, who has claimed that the internet and social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, are no longer mere virtual spaces, but fields of communication that keep gaining momentum, gradually becoming substitutes for real-life exchanges: “Internet communication is turning into a form of virtual performance of one’s self, it encompasses various forms of communication and representative aspects of everyday life. Theatre is being created by a great number of individuals who use the internet on daily basis, through e-mail communication, their personal websites and blogs, Facebook profiles, etc.” (Steve Dixon, Digital Performance. A History Of New Media In Theater, Dance, Performance Art, And Installation, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London,  2007, 4.) Numerous internet profiles and blogs are digital palimpsests of Goffman’s ideas about representation in everyday life, where subject is being progressively erased, redefined, and re-established as a person/performer, within a computer screen as a theatre proscenium: “The world wide web is a space of therapeutic catharsis, and it creates the greatest theatre in the world which offers fifteen minutes of fame to everyone.”(Steve Dixon, Digital Performance. A History Of New Media In Theater, Dance, Performance Art, And Installation, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London,  2007, 4.) That process leads to new configurations of individuality that obliterate borders between the human and the machine. Man becomes a cyborg, the one connected to the machines.

In line with these problems, Riot mentioned some new, alarming statistics published in Le Monde on 19th January, according to which an excessive exposure to monitors can cause problems, which is why young people in particular should learn how to be alone. The article states that intellectual and cognitive disorders have lately risen by 24 per cent, mental disorders by 54 per cent, and speech disorders by 94 per cent, all connected to an increased fixation to screens. Concluding the analysis of Sherry Turkle’s ideas, Riot expresses an attitude that the machines offer an illusion of friendships, without a demand for intimacy.

On the other hand, the teenagers in Reims’ Concord Floral find the value of the tangible, material world, which was also mentioned by Barbet after the performance: “In the play, the children discover the real world, the one which exists outside the internet and monitors, a life in the nature, in grass, the world outside, that is the point of the play. That is why we use real things in the performance: grass, old things, like this couch, objects filled with life, not abstract things.”

The analogue world of theatre is presented here as a ritual, holy space which preserves the reality crushed by the digital machine. It is a physically present stage which is trying to protect the material nature of the world. We recall the metaphor used by the theoretician Peggy Phelan in 1993, while considering the value of the presence in performing arts as opposed to digital art. She saw theatre as a poor David, struggling against the Goliath of the new media and technological capitalism. (Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics Of Performance, Routledge, Florence, 1993, 149) The hope remains that this David will save the old world, in its most valuable fragments at least.

Published on 27 February 2019 (Article originally written in Serbian by Ana Tasić and translated by Vesna Radovanović)

Identity, Sexuality, Language and Power

Identity, Sexuality, Language and Power

Nationalist temptations; the return to a reactionary morale; the refugee crisis; the crumbling of solitary bonds… the topics tackled at the Reims Scènes d’Europe festival show the bleakness of our times, but also give a voice to those who defend another vision of Europe, another possible version of Europe. At the backdrop of the emergency state and Brexit, the most European festival in France, taking place in Reims, gambles once again this year on the opening, the party and the debating of ideas—a veritable breath of fresh air.

Gorky-Theater “SMALL TOWN BOY”, a project by Falk Richter © Thomas Aurin

Since 2009, the city of Reims—better known within France for its champagne rather than its European spirit—has become, for ten days, the point of convergence for a crowd of people who’ve come from all over Europe. Artists, theatre professionals, spectators; you can’t count the number of nationalities there; even Parisians will now be rushing to Reims to attend this commotion of cultures, languages and ideas.

For this eighth edition of the festival, the artists have come from Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Cameroon, the Congo, Greece, Iceland, Iran, the Netherlands, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland and Syria. Amongst them: Sanja Mitrović, Louis Vanhaverbeke, Antoine Defoort, Argyro Chioti, Myriam Marzouki, Massimo Furlan, but also great European figures, such as Peter Brook, Falk Richter, Fabrice Murgia… A programme that is jointly carried out by seven cultural structures of Reims, one of which the Comédie de Reims, member of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe.

And this year, more than in the years before, diversity is mirrored in the programme: “conceived in the spirit of the Maxim-Gorki Theater in Berlin”, the programme of the festival intends to “present works that question our European identity by drawing attention to its diversity (origins, religions, sexual preferences or even through multiculturalism).”

Light-years away from any sort of chauvinism, the festival indeed paid tribute to the work of Shermin Langhoff, director of the famous Maxim-Gorki Theater. Figurehead of the “postmigratory theatre” (a cliché term today, considering its wild use), the latter described her theatre’s project as an attempt to “think of the city in its entirety, with everyone who has gotten there in the past few decades, whether they are refugees, exiles, immigrants, or simply those who grew up in Berlin.” The actors of the company are the spitting image of the great cultural melting pot that is the German capital: they are from Turkey, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Serbia… Their journey fits the, oftentimes violent, history of the migratory influx that continues to shape Europe today. They constitute the very subject matter of the shows of the Maxim-Gorki Theater, which relate stories from elsewhere as anchor points to tell our common history differently.

Emblematically, Falk Richter’s show Small Town Boy, produced by the Maxim-Gorki Theater, is the highlight of the Reims Scènes d’Europe festival. The show’s title is taken from a song of the Bronski Beat that talks about the “the escape of a young homosexual boy from a narrow and oppressive world to a freer and more distant city.” In his way, mercilessly, disenchanted, cruelly funny too, Falk Richter questions the promises of liberty that embody the city: the possibility to invent oneself outside of traditional norms, to love differently, to reverse dominating relationships, to live ones identity without fear or shame. In a stroboscopic flood of scenes with pop impulses, the show emits a harrowing energy, fury, and melancholy.

Identity, sexuality, language and power are also at the heart of the questions of I Am Not Ashamed Of My Communist Past, directed by Sanja Mitrović and Vladimir Aleksić. Written in the tradition of performative and political theatre, the show mixes personal and collective history for crossing the Socialist past of Ex-Yugoslavia; that country that no longer exists and that Sanja Mitrović and Vladimir Aleksić grew up in. Some childhood souvenirs and images from the Golden Age of Yugoslavian cinema tell the end of the Socialist utopia, and the dislocation of a nation united in its ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity. War, the rise of nationalism, the explosion of unemployment, and neo-liberal misdemeanours; the issues addressed here also remind us of the crisis in Europe today. It’s in this context of ruined ideals that the questioning of identities of these two adolescents divided between two possible compromises resound: the stopgap of European integration or the illusion of returning to their countries of origin.

Equally in gear with current events, Elfriede Jelinek’s The Suppliants is presented in the form of a lecture directed by Ludovic Lagarde and Ferdinand Barbet. In this text, written in 2013, Elfriede Jelinek directly echoes the tragedy of the shipwrecked migrants in Lampedusa, and the violent repression that lead to the interruption of a hunger strike started by 60 refugees in a church in Vienna. In a flow of language enamelled with mythological stories, philosophical quotes, and administrative and political language, a voice raises up—sour, brutal—that of the foreigner. Suppliant, menacing, furious, this voice takes the spectator to the task, sends him back to his actual responsibility and denounces the indifference of society and the contempt of the asylum politics of our countries; a chilling text of fearsome necessity.

If the violence of our century infiltrates and tinges some of the productions presented in the context of this festival, it is not a permanent feature of the contemporary creation. Without losing relevance, other artists prefer humour and poetry to express our times, including its most conflicting aspects.

That’s the case with Multiverse by the young Belgian artist Louis Vanhaverbeke. A hybrid performance, Multiverse convenes the phantoms of our collective memory and takes the spectator into the cosmogonic whirlwind of a fragmentary history of humanity, subjective and steadfastly pop. From Elton John to Johann Strauss, passing quotes from the Genesis and with a wink at Baywatch, Louis Vanhaverbeke composes a patchwork universe put together from founding texts, music hits, and mythical objects. At the same time poet, slammer, dancer, tightrope walker, musician and DJ, the artist makes cross-breeding and assembling his preferred mode of expression: music pieces are melted together, periods of time knocked together and objects are clustered, piled, motorised, forming strange constructions under our eyes that resemble the chimeras of ancient times. A production of enchanting poetry, where the simplicity of expression carries a rich and complex thought.

Another singular subject of the festival, Un Faible degrée d’originalité by Antoine Defoort is a journey through the history of copyright, from the Renaissance to the era 2.0. A priori nothing too exciting and yet… Between historical reconstruction, concept materialization, proof by contradiction, infantile jokes, scholarly content, popular references, suspense and dramatic turns of events, the lecture quickly turns into a show, and lets us dive into the mashes of the narrative that is as captivating as it is instructive.

While the festival is still in full swing, I have to interrupt this brief and yet incomplete inventory of the most remarkable shows that I’ve been fortunate enough to see during my visit to Reims. But a final image has come to my mind and I feel that it’s with this image that I want to conclude this article: that of a group of young people who have come from all over Europe to take part in this festival. Invited every year in the context of Reims Scènes d’Europe, they are part of a network of young European spectators, the “Young Performing Art Lovers”, financed by the Comédie de Reims and the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe, in the context of the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. They are 70 this year, gathered together to watch the shows, produce texts, organise meet-ups, discussions, and workshops. In the entrance hall of the Comédie de Reims, in the bar, or on the tiers, one can hear the hubbub of a joyful ‘globish’ with contrasting accents. They laughed openly during the performance of Multiverse; they applauded with fervour to the slick comicality of Antoine Defoort—the actors of Small Town Boy had to come back on stage six times… The ensemble of the festival is soaked with their youth, their energy, their many languages. The enthusiasm is infectious—only in Reims do we surprise ourselves by dreaming of Europe again!

 

 

Published on 14 February 2017 (Article originally written in French)