The Pulse from Paris Part Deux

So we are just about to pack everything up once again and make the trek up to Montparnasse train station to hit the road for the first time.  We are headed to Angers, one of my favorite cities and just the perfect place to kick off our tour.  But we do have to get there first.  Fortunately, we have help from our friend Muriel in Paris who is graciously offering to drive our bags (and probably our stage manager) to the station while I hustle up the street to meet them and help unload.  So I’ll let you know how all of that goes.

What I really wanted to tell you about was going to the Odeon Theater last night, one of the most famous theaters in Paris, to see Un Tramway, a very modern and abstract interpretation of A Streetcar Named Desire.  It starred the famous Issabelle Huppert, who despite the language gap was still an amazing performer.  I certainly had mixed feelings about the show as a whole, due in most part to not being able to understand much, but it certainly provided a lot of room for discussion in our group.  One thing I always love about seeing shows in French is that it heightens my critique of the technical elements and this show certainly didn’t disappoint.

First of all, the set was a bowling alley, fully functioning.  They actually bowled and had a system to reset the pins which was both simple and brilliant.  As a tech guy that kind of stuff just makes my day.  Then there was this long glass enclosure with a bathroom inside, it was set up on wheels and would at times move towards and away the audience, passing over the bowling alley.  They also used this glass structure for projection, more on that in a moment, and perhaps the coolest part about it was that they could periodically frost the glass, which had me stumped.  Surrounding all of this was three strips of neon lights which looked excellent.  Overall, I was pretty pleased with the set design, although my major gripe was how horizontal everything was and there was a lot of black space over top the set which was not so pleasing to my eye.

Ok, so the video.  First, a disclaimer, I understand that a lot of people use video and projection in their pieces and this is in no way a direct critique of anyone other than this performance.  However, my general view of video is that it must be well thought out and carefully crafted as well as being poignant in order for it to work.  I know video is the cool, hip new thing but I just see it so poorly done most of the time that it detracts from the beautiful work that artists do on stage.  This piece was no exception.  Essentially the entire show was shot by cameramen standing offstage, so it looked like a reality TV show.  Now I do have to say that in the early parts of the show they way the video was shot and manipulated made it look like Elia Kazan’s brilliant film version with Marlon Brando and in fact at first I actually thought they were splicing that in.  But as the show wore on it felt more and more like the director wanted to shoot a movie and since the technology is so easy to use nowadays I say if you want to shoot a movie shoot a movie and don’t make us sit through a 3 hour play trying to be a film.  Needless to say  I thought the video was entirely unnecessary, even when justified as giving everyone in the audience a better view, which I didn’t think it did anyway.

Overall, thought it was a brilliant experience, a little self-indulgent and egotistical at times in my opinion but nonetheless I am quite glad I went.  Plus where else would I get to see them use so many cool lighting toys (they had a like a million moving lights which I definitely just wanted to sit and play with for a while).  The other really phenomenal aspect to the whole experience was the magnificent painting by Chagal on the ceiling of the theater which was beautifully lit before the show began.  I, of course, assumed that it was part of the set and had read an entire story into it about how it related to Streetcar.  This was only reinforced when they highlighted it during a scene, but alas I was not correct and yet it was still beautiful and moving in and of itself.

I definitely walked away reaffirmed in my belief that experiencing art, regardless of language or cultural barriers, is the only path to enlightening oneself about your own art-making.  And now we work.  I must go finish packing so I don’t miss the train.  Au revoir!