Author: Yana Meerzon

Avignon 2019-Outwitting the Devil: a Mesmerizing Dance and an Hypnotic Experience created by Akram Khan

Avignon 2019-Outwitting the Devil: a Mesmerizing Dance and an Hypnotic Experience created by Akram Khan

 

Photo Christophe Raynaud de Lage   Outwitting the devil

 

Outwitting The Devil, Akram Khan’s latest work, truly stood out within the line up of very diverse works featured at the 2019 Avignon Festival. Performed at the magnificent Cour d’honneur du Palais des Papes this work resonated the architectural grandeur of the space and echoed its spiritual splendour. It reflected the palace’s glory through its own choreography, mythic themes and hypnotic sound and lighting designs.

Akram Khan, a British dancer and choreographer of Bangladeshi descent, captivated the world of contemporary dance in the early 2000s. A student of the kathak, a traditional Indian dance, he performed in Peter Brook’s Mahâbhârata. Later he created highly experimental solo and ensemble work that would draw his viewers’ attention to the hybrid language of dance as invented by Khan himself, the language in which traditional elements of the Indian dance would neighbor and dialogue with many components of  western performance. To enrich his vocabulary, Akram Khan engaged dramatic narrative and humor, approximating in his style the so-called tanz-teatr as developed by the German choreographer Pina Bausch.

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Avignon 2019: Seeking the Other – Staging the Paroxysms of Orientalism

Avignon 2019: Seeking the Other – Staging the Paroxysms of Orientalism

Mahmoud & Nini    Photo Christophe Raynaud de Lage

MAHMOUD & NINI  is an unusual show –not only it does not look like your typical proscenium theatre, with elaborate plots and developed characters, colorful costumes and sets; it also reminds one of a lecture hall. Two people –Mahmoud: a Egyptian  man, black, homosexual, speaking Arabic; and Nini:  a French woman, white, with a shorthair and complex ancestry, speakingFrench–sit next to each other, facing audience. They use direct address to enumerate  assumptions about each other and their cultures, all based on biases and stereotypes. It is unclear whether they’re seeking understanding or simply re-enforce what people of different backgrounds think of each other ;  whether they want to show our  ignorance  and how dependent we can be on media discourses, or propose some kind of action or solution to these endless miscommunications that only breed fear and mistrust.

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Avignon 2019: Outside – between testimony and political provocation

Avignon 2019: Outside – between testimony and political provocation

Outside, Russian production by Kirill Serebrennikov

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Provocation – artistic, political, personal – is the signature style of the Russian theatre director Kirill Serebrennikov, the creator of the performance OUTSIDE that had its world premier at Avignon 2019. It is Serebrennikov’s third production to be featured at the festival, and it is as provocative and personally urgent to the artist as his previous works were. Made without any financial support from the Russian government, as the director’s assistant Anna Shalashova said at the press-conference with the Avignon public on July 17, OUTSIDE was created with as much artistic and inner freedom as it was possible given Serebrinnikov’s current situation.

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Avignon 2019: Histoire(s) du théâtre (II): on the pros and cons of theatrical commemoration

Avignon 2019: Histoire(s) du théâtre (II): on the pros and cons of theatrical commemoration

HISTOIRE(S) DU THEATRE II
: Direction, choregraphy, sound, text Faustin LINYEKULA. the Ballet National de la Compagnie Theatre National Congolais . Photo Christophe Raynaud de Lage

 

In the narrative of history, the question “who is telling the story” is the most important one. HISTOIRE(S) DU THÉÂTRE II, created by the Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula, frames its chronicle from many perspectives and several temporal settings. It connects the history of Zaire under Mobutu’s dictatorship with the story of the glory and the fall of its national symbol – the National Ballet of Zaire.  Created in 1974, the company served as an export image of a new Zaire, touring the world with its iconic production L’Épopée de Lianja. However, with the changes in the country’s politics and economics, the company, together with Zaire’s people, started to experience financial drawbacks, with its latest production dating back to the 1980s. Some of the performers, who joined the company yet in 1974, are still there, although many of them have either left or passed away.

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Avignon 2019: The Rest Will be Familiar to You from Cinema – as told by the chorus from the banlieu

Avignon 2019: The Rest Will be Familiar to You from Cinema – as told by the chorus from the banlieu


The Rest Will Be Familiar to you from the  Cinema.    Photo Christophe Reynaud de Lage

Le reste vous le connaissez par le cinéma written by Martin Crimp, translated by Philippe Djian and directed by Daniel Jeanneteau, is among the most politically urgent works in the Avignon 2019. Not only that it builds on the enigmatic and ever wise text of Martin Crimp, it also references the new realities of today’s France with its over-populated banlieues that drastically redraft the face of the country’s cities.

An adaption of Euripides’ tragedy The Phoenician Women that was itself a take on Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, Crimp transforms the old Greek story into a thesis play with the Chorus centre stage. In this version of Oedipus’ myth, Jocasta does not kill herself. Upon learning the truth of her son/husband, she lives to see his shame and her sons’ death. The play opens with Jocasta’s account of the past and a warning that the guilt of the parents does not simply go away. The blind Oedipus, locked up by his sons Eteocles and Polyneices, has cursed them for this deed. He declared that neither of them will rule the city without his brother. Now, Polyneices, who exiled himself to Argos and married a foreign woman, has returned to Thebes to claim his inheritance. Eteocles is of course not interested in sharing power. After a short mediation between the brothers organized by Jocasta, they resume the fight and kill each other.

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Avignon 2019: Irène Bonnaud’s Amitié and the Lessons in Juicy Comedy, Delicious Acting and Humanity of Being

Avignon 2019: Irène Bonnaud’s Amitié and the Lessons in Juicy Comedy, Delicious Acting and Humanity of Being

Friendship     Photo Christophe Raynaud de Lage

Let me tell you a secret – I love the old good comedy, its extensive gestures, inappropriate jokes, actors playing off each other, a quick change of a costume, a bit of dancing and singing; all that routine that seems to be fading away from the professional stages across the world, giving its place to serious, self-conscious, experimental and politically aware theatre. Please, do not get me wrong – all that seriousness is very important in the world that is falling apart due to its wars, economic crushes and changes in the environment. But comedy – people coming together to laugh and cry at their own follies – is vital too.

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Avignon 2019: ‘Young Yacou’ and ‘The Odyssey’ – Adapting the Odyssey in Avignon, 2019

Avignon 2019: ‘Young Yacou’ and ‘The Odyssey’ – Adapting the Odyssey in Avignon, 2019

Young Yacou   Photo Christophe Reynaud de Lage

A defining text of Western literature, Homer’s the Odyssey has recently resurfaced as the point of reference in many theatre productions wishing to speak to the conditions of contemporary migration. A narrative of the travel that focuses on being on the road, on the endeavours and the trials that an exilic traveler faces, the Odyssey allows contemporary theatre makers to approximate the impossible. Theatre often speaks in allegories and metaphors – contextualizing these metaphors through the actual experiences of today’s refugees brings these metaphors to life.

Avignon 2019 has seen several examples of staging the Odyssey.  

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Avignon 2019: ‘L’Amour vainqueur’: la crème brulée of the Avignon Festival 2019

Avignon 2019: ‘L’Amour vainqueur’: la crème brulée of the Avignon Festival 2019

 

Love Triumphant L’Amour vainqueur
Photo Christophe Raynaud de Lage

What a delight, a relief and a sheer pleasure to sit through Olivier Py’s operetta for children and adults L’AMOUR VAINQUEUR. One hour long, this musical adaptation of Brothers Grimm’s Maid Maleen tale takes the audience through the history of French theatre, including its highbrow traditions of the Alexandrine poetry, usually reserved for tragedies, and the charming, even if it is a bit over-the-top, theatricality of its cabaret performances and musical halls.

The story is your typical children’s tale with the charming Prince and Princess in its centre. There are also an evil King and even more malicious General, and a pair of simpletons helping the lovers to get together. Olivier Py’s tale, of course, has an adult like twist: at the end it was aimed both for the children and their guardians.

Py’s Princess is brave and open minded, she also likes to practice her free will. A true feminist, she refuses to marry the English King because she loves another. For that, she is severely punished. Her father sends her to the tower for seven years without a chance to talk to her beloved or see the light of the day. When she is finally released from her prison, Princess learns that the world of her childhood has vanished. There was a devastating war and most likely Prince, the love of her life, has perished in it.

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Avignon 2019: In search of multiple selves: “Multiple-S”by Salia Sanou and “Oskara” by Kukai Dantza

Avignon 2019: In search of multiple selves: “Multiple-S”by Salia Sanou and “Oskara” by Kukai Dantza

 

Multiple-S  Photo Christophe Raynaud de Lage.  Nancy Houston and  Germaine Acogny

The focus of this review is inspired by the title and the theme of Salia Sanou’s multidisciplinary creation Multiple-S that he brought to Avignon 2019. Migration, exile, economic travel and global tourism created a myriad of people who identify themselves with many languages, cultural traditions and habits at the same time. Multiplicity is the name for their state of being and for their minds.

Multiple-S by Salia Sanou and Oskara by Kukai Dantza offer two different artistic and philosophical takes on this aspect of the age of globalization. In these interdisciplinary works, the artists of different backgrounds, dancers, musicians, signers and a poet engage with one more pressing issue of our time – the sense of divided self and the loss of roots.

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Avignon 2019: On exile and empire: reading the open ending of Sous d’autres cieux (Under different skies)

Avignon 2019: On exile and empire: reading the open ending of Sous d’autres cieux (Under different skies)

 

 

Sous d’autres cieux  Photo Christophe Raynaud de Lage

An imaginative, dynamic, and visually striking production SOUS D’AUTRES CIEUX continues the Avignon 2019 theme of exile and making history. Kevin Keiss’s adaption of Virgil’s The Aeneid directed by Maëlle Poésy, the performance from Dijon takes us back to the mythological time of Trojan wars and the rise of Roman empire. Constructed from the fragments of Virgil’s poem that Keiss translated from Latin, the few episodes the company wrote themselves, and the scenes they developed during the rehearsals, SOUS D’AUTRES CIEUX focuses on the journey of Aeneas. A hero of the Trojan war, the son of the prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite (or Venus in this version), Aeneas is one of the more controversial figures of the Western literary canon. A soldier of his own command, in Virgil’s tale he a toy in the hands of Gods thrown into what Paul Ricouer calls a collective singular of history against his will.

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