French Theatre Today: The View from New York, Paris, and Avignon

5. Edgy and Cool

New ‘media theatre’ In addition to the dazzling works representing theatre of la parole, ACT FRENCH treated New Yorkers to choice specimens of another leading strain of stage pieces, one that might simply be called ‘media theatre.’ These were experimental works—by such younger creative artists as Philippe Quesne and Pascal Rambert, and by vibrant international collectives like Superamas and WaxFactory— that played with, against, or parallel to contemporary media and information technologies. Almost always they were inventive, iconoclastic , and frolicsome. Media theatre is akin to theatre of la parole inasmuch as it, too, operates within a dramaturgic paradigm that makes our familiar notions of plot, dialogue, and character fairly irrelevant. But where theatre of la parole holds as precious the intimate link between staged spectacle and composed written text, media theatre takes as a given that much literary writing for the stage and much theatregoing itself are fairly quaint, if not totally anachronistic, phenomena in a worldwide marketplace saturated with mass-mediated moving images. As a result these idiosyncratic, exploratory stage pieces typically strive to stake out fresh territories for theatre within the larger cultural landscape. They aggressively collapse old barriers between the individual arts (theatre, cinema, dance, video, music, song, painting, architecture, and so on), and they dismiss hoary distinctions between High Art and entertainment. Above all, they engage— in ways ranging from unabashed collusion to ironic complicity to radical critique—with the changed status of actors, spectators, and performance in a mainstream culture attracted to high-tech enter4 to Parole . . . . . 5 Edgy and Cool . . . . . . . . .. ​ N E W ​ Y O R K 78 tainments that are nominally “live,” such as sports events, rock concerts , and most Broadway-style plays and musicals, but that Western and Westernized consumers increasingly experience as mediatized events in which the possibilities for relatively spontaneous and immediate human-to-human interaction are considerably attenuated. All of ACT FRENCH’s media theatre took place at downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn venues. The events were almost always sold out. They shattered the canard that experimental theatre from Europe is too often a weighty, gloomy, and pretentious affair. On the contrary, several of these shows were among the festival’s most lighthearted, colorful, and funny. It was also clear that these were the only ACT FRENCH offerings that routinely attracted the Generation Y crowd— young adults in their twenties and thirties who came of age immersed in a digitally driven world of cell phones, laptops, and iPods. For them, the edginess of these quirky imported pieces felt familiar and “cool.” Geek chic Performance Space 122, at the corner of First Avenue and Ninth Street, has for decades been a prominent East Village hub for emerging stage artists inclined to take risks. It was an apt venue for the weeklong run of The Itching of Wings (La démangeaison des ailes)— a jaunty performance piece conceived and directed by one of France’s fast-rising stars, Philippe Quesne (b. 1970). The show started in effect the instant we crossed the main entrance to the upstairs theatre. To reach the raked seating area we first had to walk through a patchy plasterboard maze of narrow corridors that led to a small, underequipped recording booth with a Plexiglas window. Through this pane we could view those ticket holders who had already found their places. After exiting on the booth’s far side, we then traversed, in whatever path we chose, the main playing space—which resembled the living area of messy college suitemates . Littering the floor were laptop computers, a cheap minifridge, empty bottles of beer and cranberry juice, shoddy chairs, and stacks of used books and CDs. One wild-haired dude seemed to be napping on a worn bare mattress, flush with the floor. Three other guys idled about, studiously inattentive to our presence. Near the fridge was a Edgy​and​Cool 79 small video monitor running looped footage of a geeky man, shot in close-up, who twisted his mouth into odd shapes while repeating, with various inflections, the words “la démangeaison des ailes.” Once seated we could take in the full array of screens that filled much of the auditorium’s rear and middle spaces: a wall-length vertical surface, stage right; a midsize rectangular one, upstage center, that abutted the sound studio’s glass frame; and several feet above the monitor near the fridge, stage left, an oblong horizontal panel for projecting English supertitles...