Ninth Festival de Theatre des Ameriques (review)

Ninth Festival de Theatre des Ameriques. Montreal, Canada. 24 May-10 June 2001

The Ninth Festival de Théâtre des Amériques in Montreal, under the Artistic Direction of Marie-Hélène Falcon, offered a substantial program with an eye to theatre that speaks across diverse generations and cultures. The first week featured work by Théâtre du Soleil, Canada's Urban Ink Productions, a combined Belgian company of Les Ballets C de la B and Victoria, and Canada's Teatro Comaneci.

The festival opened with the Paris based Théâtre du Soleil, now in its thirty-seventh year, under the direction of Ariane Mnouchkine who continues her experimentation with Asian theatre forms. Their production, Tambours Sur La Digue (Drums on the Dam), by Hélène Cixous, is billed as a "theatrical allegory," that takes place in an "unspecified kingdom" in the East. Lord Khang's realm is faced with imminent flooding due to rising river waters and to his aggressive nephew Hun's systematic deforestation for business and profit. Although Hun's plot to open some of the dykes and flood the poor peasant farmers (so that the city factories and businesses can survive) is uncovered and he is destroyed, disaster is not averted as the Northern dam collapses and the waters rush towards the city. By the end of the piece virtually all of the main characters, both good and bad, have been destroyed by each other or by the unleashed floodwaters. Tambours Sur La Digue refers to the drums played on top of Cherry Mountain to warn the citizens of the floodwaters.

Inspired by Japanese Bunraku, Mnouchkine transforms her actors into life-sized puppets. Dressed in traditional Japanese costumes, the actors' faces are covered with Bunraku style masks made out of sheer nylon. Two to three individuals, in the traditional black hoods and robes of Bunraku puppeteers, manipulate each actor, handling the human puppets with startling ease as they carry the seemingly weightless actors across the stage, manipulating their arms, hands, and heads in a manner that might well have pleased Gordon Craig in his vision of the "Ubermarrionette."

The actor-puppets are brought on and off through upstage entrances linked to hanamichi-like bridges that cross over to a raised center stage area. Enormous silk backdrops, with painted atmospheric landscapes evoking the stormy ending about to engulf the kingdom, drop to the ground with rapid grace as the scenes change. The center stage, a raised wooden platform whose walls slant inward on all sides, supports the floodwaters at the end of the piece when the wooden structure is literally filled with water in a powerful but somewhat overly realistic evocation of the flood.

The Théâtre du Soleil has yet again created an impressive theatrical experience through the actors' outstanding execution of their roles, as well as the singular beauty of the costumes, set, and mood evoking music, providing a work that resembles an exquisite copy of a museum piece. At times one can feel like a tourist watching a theatre out of the past which wants to draw us nostalgically back to distant origins and deny us our inevitable future. It would be interesting to see Mnouchkine make a fresh attempt to tackle world issues through the lens of the present or at least the more recent past.

Cixous' text, simple and direct in telling this familiar parable about the world at the brink of destruction, alludes to issues of ecology and human greed. However, the dominant theme is one of helplessness in the face of larger forces, as much evoked by the staging as by the text. For example, when the puppet actors reach the hanamichi leading to the exit, the puppet is turned to face the audience and then pulled off by the puppet handlers as if being sucked back into a void, leaving an impression of humans as helpless puppets, victims of the vicissitude of time, human greed, and a revengeful nature. There...