Elsewhere: A Symbolic Review in Twenty Scenes

text Elsewhere A Symbolic Review in Twenty Scenes Maurice Donnay for Maitre Paul Verlaine Translated by Laurence Senelick Emile Goudeau and his band of chansonniers began to hang out at a bar called the Chat Noir (Black Cat), which had opened on 18 November 1881 in a former post office at the foot of Montmartre. It was run by the painter Rodolphe Salis (1851-97), son of a distiller, who intended it as a resort for artists ; on Friday nights the Hydropathes, a Paris group which Goudeau and others founded in 1878, and their friends would improvise a private concert. From the start, non-artists would drop by to catch the performance. And so this cabaret (tavern), by offering entertainment to a select public, became the pioneer cabaret artistique. At first there was no cover-charge, though Salis insisted on an obligatory beer. The cabaret proved to be too near the public dance halls of the Elys6eMontmartre , and so in 1885 he opened a new Chat Noir in a three-story private house on rue Laval, elegantly furnished with antiques and works of art. There Salis, richly dressed, would treat his guests with an almost chivalric courtesy. The Chat Noir's new locale affected the bohemianism of the atmosphere. Previously, recitation of songs and stories by their creators was the standard entertainment. The music hall ditty had been raised to a true literary 96 form, given to macabre and impudent subject matter. In the new premises, the leading genre was the shadow play. This may have been initiated by chance when the lights were once turned out on the poet Jules Jouy, and little shadows were cast to amuse the benighted public. In the earliest efforts, the images were cut out of zinc and backlit. Then the genius of the shadow play, the painter Henri Riviere, developed elaborate techniques using colored lights and paper and colored glass lit by an oxyhydrogenic apparatus to create illusions of perspective. By 1890 he could display wind and rain effects , clouds scudding across the horizon, looming storms, moon and sunlight on the water. The shadow playwrights took advantage of these enhanced techniques: between 1887 and 1896, forty-three plays by nineteen artists were produced. Of these plays, the acknowledged masterpieces were Phryng and Elsewhere by the poet Maurice Donnay (1859-1945), who recited them himself in a slow monotonous tone, extracting all the irony that lurked in the pieces. As Yvette Guilbert recalled, a Donnay dress rehearsal was a well-attended event, accompanied by the same silence one would hear at Bayreuth. The songs that studded these plays came up to the ideal defined by Donnay: "Drastic, audacious, satiric, sneering, mocking, rebellious chansons, intoxicated with disrespect for all the powers-that-be and all undeserved manifestations of glory, in continual opposition to stupidity, injustice and vulgarity." The excerpts from Elsewhere given here display the kinds of effects the shadow play was capable of, and the risqu6, Aristophanic satire it expressed. But "chanoirism" was non-conformist without being truly subversive, for the audience was drawn from the ranks of high society. Indeed, by 1889, when the World Exhibition opened in Paris, the Chat Noir had turned into a tourist attraction, and when Salis' lease ran out in 1897, he closed it. L. S. 97 PART ONE First produced at the Shadow Theatre of the Chat Noir, 11 November, 1891, with designs by Henri Riviere and music by Charles de Sivry. SCENE ONE The Institute The scene represents the Seine across from the Institute. - The dome of the monument and roofs of the adjacent houses are silhouettes against a sky whose blue background is strewn with an archipelago of clouds which, like snowflakes, drift before a pallid, circular moon. - The water reflecting them laps against the black mass of a landing-pier, flanking a solitary flatbottomed boat downstage. - A nearby clock strikes twelve. THE RECITER: The bell tolls midnight. We are on a bank of the Seine, across from the Institute, on a foggy November night. Far off in the distance, on the bridge in the background, a group of students passes by. These youngsters are returning from a banquet at which M. Levisse told them...