Eggs akimbo: The Avignon Festival and the work of Philippe Quesne
The highlights of my all too brief visit to this year's Avignon Festival.
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In 1985, Peter Brook staged his legendary production of the Mahabharata in the Boulbon quarry some 15 km from Avignon. This other worldly space on the fringes of the city was last used as a performance venue in 2016. During this year’s Avignon Festival, it was reintroduced as a venue, providing the backdrop for Philippe Quesne’s weird whimsical Le Jardin des délices.
Even the walk to the site from the carpark has an off-planet vibe, the evening sun burnishing the ochre stone, the effect only slightly diluted by the presence of some nifty ovular Portaloos and a bar serving wine and fancy snacks. The temperatures had hit a sweltering 37 degrees earlier in the day (there are repeated warnings about wildfires) but the air is getting cooler as night sets in.
Quesne is a director, designer and visual artist, founder of Vivarium Studio, ‘a laboratory of theatrical innovation’ and, until recently, artistic director of Theater Nanterre–Amandiers. I think it is fair to describe his work as “quirky.” It is playful, strange, absurdist, and visually striking with a streak of silliness running through it. His recent show, Farm Fatale – which UK audiences got the opportunity to see at Glasgow’s Tramway last year - was a kind of bittersweet fable in which birds have become extinct, depriving scarecrows of their purpose in life. The scarecrows – actors in unsettling Leatherface masks – sat around on bales of hay singing songs and discussing ways in which the planet might be saved.
At the start of Le Jardin des delices (The Garden of Earthly Delights) a bus is wheeled into the quarry. It contains an eccentric band of travellers, dressed in tan slacks, leather jackets, big sunglasses, blonde wigs and cowboy hats, like extras from Dallas. Are they cult members? Interplanetary tourists? Oxygen masks are dispensed within the vehicle, before they disembark and carefully roll a giant egg into the middle of this vast, alien space. The egg is like a totem around which they perform various rituals. Whether it’s something they hope to awake or keep at bay is, again, unclear. They recite poetry and sing songs, including a memorable rendition of ‘In Dreams’ (not quite as disquieting as Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet, but close). There was a post-apocalyptic campfire vibe to the whole thing that put me in mind of Anne Washburn’s Mr Burns, a post-electric play. It also had the endearing energy of a vintage episode of Doctor Who, a show which regularly capitalised on the lunar properties of quarries.
The show takes its title from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych which it uses as a kind of thematic and visual springboard, as Quesne describes in this interview.
Bosch gathers his questions like so many hints about his own experience, he invites the spectators to engage in a similar investigation on themselves, and today I’m starting the same research with a team of actors and creators: we’re working our way through the painting, focusing on the hints it reveals about us and our time, as if we were watching a science-fiction film.
Sometimes it directly references details in Bosch’s imagery. At one point one of the characters dons a white bodystocking and drapes himself over the egg, at another point they play the music that is written on the bum of one of the damned in the painting. Motifs from Quesne’s own work crop up too. Farm Fatale features much egg veneration, The Melancholy of Dragons features a group of people in a clapped-out vehicle stuck in an inhospitable landscape. The creation of small communities is also a recurring theme in his theatre.
Though my French could charitably be described as rusty and I couldn’t always keep track of things, this didn’t dent my enjoyment - I suspect that making sense is not chief among the production’s goals. There’s nothing here as straightforward as a plot, but as a sensory experience, it’s incredibly rich - and an awful lot of fun. Eventually the bus is spectacularly dismantled, sending showers of sparks into the air. The troupe stage a mock gameshow. Someone runs around with a camera as if filming a documentary. There’s a very fever-dreamy bit featuring what I think was a giant mussel shell and a man capering about in red. The French surtitle screens start to glitch before being consumed by tiny fires. There is some gorgeous cello playing.
The quarry itself becomes a character and Quesne fully exploits its theatrical potential. At one point he projects an army of flying skeletons onto the quarry walls, later he generates his own thunderstorm, with flashes of lightening and cloud-splitting thunderclaps (the sound design by Janyves Coïc is fantastic), the actors dashing for cover from an imaginary downpour. My favourite moment was when one of the performers grew frustrated at the constant chirrup of crickets in the night air and simply turned down the volume as one would on a TV. The ending, which saw lasers of light pointed at the quarry walls and kind of triangular portal opening up, had a wonderful retro sci-fi vibe. The audience reaction was, however, surprisingly muted given what a wild ride the show had taken us on, but I was immensely charmed by this occasionally meandering but chaotically entertaining and endless inventive spectacle which, given the heatwave then scorching southern Europe, also conveyed a timely sense of planetary wrath.
Following the performance in Boulbon, Quesne took Le Jardin des délices to other dramatic spaces including the Roman theatre of the Acropolis of Athens, a hangar in the Ruhr, and the shores of Lake Geneva in Vidy-Lausanne.
Avignon Festival: The English are coming
Le Jardin des délices was of part of Tiago Rodrigues’ inaugural programme as artistic director of the Avignon Festival. He promised an English language focus for his first festival, stating an intention to focus on language not on country. (You can read more about this in my interview with Rodrigues in The Stage). What this meant in practice was work by well-established names like Tim Crouch and Alexander Zeldin (already well-known name in Paris where his production company is based), and the Royal Court, in the form of Alistair McDowall’s All of It, performed by Kate O’Flynn. Tim Etchells was there, albeit with a new work in French performed by Bert and Nasi, and America was represented by Elevator Repair Service (the company behind the amazing eight-hour Gatz) with Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge, a re enactment of the famous debate. (Though this was in no way true of the festival as a whole, there was a noticeable lack of women present in the UK artists represented). There were also French performances that drew from English language source material including Pauline Bayle’s Écrire sa vie, based on the work of Virginia Woolf and Julie Deliquet’s Welfare, based on the documentary by Frederick Wiseman’s 1975 documentary about the American welfare system.
This was my first visit to the Avignon Festival, a brief three-day stay for The Stage - you can read my round-up here - further abridged by flight delays. It quickly became apparent that three days was not nearly enough to get the most out of the festival, I spent quite a lot of that time wondering around slightly drunk on the beauty of the place, a feeling accentuated by the intense heat and that the Festival Off, Avignon’s fringe, was also in full swing, so the slightly surreal experience was heightened by the frequency with which I found myself being offered flyers by aliens, dragons, flamenco dancers, a man driving a tiny DeLorean, and a pack of lads in what I believe are called tiny-whities.
Neanderthal: Bones and all
In the air-conditioned cool of L’Autre Scene, a modern performing arts space located a short drive from the old city, David Geselson gives me a tiny fragment of black rock, a piece of earth’s history to hold in my hand. Geselson is an actor, writer, director and founder of the company Lieux-Dits. Known for making work in which intermixes fiction with the factual, his latest show Neanderthal is a striated piece of storytelling inspired by the life of geneticist Svante Pääbo and his work on the neanderthal genome.
Drawing on the biographies of other scientific pioneers, Neanderthal tells the story of a group of scientists who are in the process of perfecting a new method of extracting neanderthal DNA. Previously this had been difficult to do without contaminating it. This new process will, they hope, allow them to determine the origin of humanity. It becomes, fittingly in the dark, with two scientists bumping into each other during a black out at a symposium. It is 1986 and the Chernobyl atomic power plant has just exploded in Ukraine. Rosa is terrified of what this might mean, Ludo calms her down.
Along with Lüdo and Rosa, who go on to become lovers, the play introduces us to other characters including Adèle, a paleo-geneticist who has degenerative genetic condition that will gradually rob her of her memory, and Jan, Lüdo’s Nobel Prize-winning father. The play charts their various romantic entanglements and professional ambitions over a period of years.
The set resembles an ancient cave, flickeringly lit, the floor strewn with earth. On one side is a stage, a lab is constructed, wall by wall, by stage crew using drills and winches. (I am a sucker for a show in which elements of the set get constructed during the production). The lab is the source of much comedy as the protective clothing they need to wear to avoid cross-contamination proves not to compatible with extramarital snogging. Within the lab, an artist creates drawings in sand which are then projected on the windows of the lab, while a cellist provides atmospheric accompaniment throughout much of the play.
Neanderthal tackles ‘big’ questions: identity, history, the things that make us who we are, but in a mostly dexterous way, with moments of levity and pockets of emotion. Geselson weaves in subplots including the Israeli-Palestinian peace process of the 1990s and the work of the Missing Persons Commission in Croatia, identifying the remains of the victims of the Srebrenica genocide. Adele, whose sense of self is being slowly sabotaged by her genes, develops a relationship with charismatic scientist who has devoted herself to the detective work of putting names to the human remains in her care (a much less well-resourced than their exploration of neanderthal DNA). The Croatian scenes are some of the most tender and heart-breaking of the play.
The way Geselson handled these themes reminded me at times of Complicité’s multifaceted approach to storytelling, while there were moments that also brought to mind David Byrne’s similarly layered Secret Life of Humans. And though it definitely felt as if it had one subplot too many, I remained gripped for its interval-less two and a half hour run time and its depiction of the men and women driven by a hunger for discovery.
This Week in Theatre
Dublin Theatre Festival – This year’s festival kicks off on the 28th and features an exciting programme including Dead Centre’s To Be a Machine vol 2.0, Belgian theatre maker Miet Warlop’s One Song and Gosia Wdowik’s She was a friend of someone else, about Poland’s restrictive abortion laws and the lack of access to reproductive healthcare.
Lost – You Go Slavia – Co-curated by artistic directors Oliver Frljić and Şermin Langhoff, Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theatre begins a season of work inspired by the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Featuring theatre, exhibitions and film as well as guest performances by prominent directors in the region, including Sebastijan Horvat and Selma Spahic, it asks what can we learn from the past as war rages in Europe once more.
MESS festival – The 63rd edition of the international theatre festival in Sarajevo will be held this year between 30th September to 8th October and will feature work by Lithuanian director Oskaras Koršunovas, Kosovar director Blerta Neziraj, and the premiere of new production of Susan Sontag’s Alice in Bed directed by Zoltán Balázs (more on this production to come).
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