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

12. Recap and Coda: French Theatre Tomorrow

Centrifugal sweep The snapshot of Stefan Kaegi’s Cargo Sofia-Avignon in chapter 11 returns us to the multilingual, transnational masterwork with which we began this exploration of contemporary French theatre: Ariane Mnouchkine’s Le dernier caravansérail: odyssées (The Last Caravan-Stop: Odysseys). By coincidence, Mnouchkine’s film adaptation of that epic work enjoyed a sneak preview in the Honor Court of the Popes’ Palace on the night of July 10, 2006, just days before Kaegi, previously unknown in France, made his splash with Avignon audiences and with the national press. Kaegi explicitly distances himself from such older, ideologically driven theatre artists as Mnouchkine and Peter Weiss (1916–1982, born in Germany): “I stay away from that. For me, to be political today is to be a documentarian . . . [with an emphasis on] the economy, not ideology.”1 Yet as we have seen, Le dernier caravansérail, too, sprang from Théâtre du Soleil’s intense engagement with primary real-world documents, and its episodes often shed damning light on current economic inequities. Conversely, just as Mnouchkine squarely indicts the relentless violence of religious fundamentalism, so Kaegi— with a lighter hand and more ironic distance—exposes the soulless impact of multinational corporate capitalism on everyday life. More important, both Cargo and Le dernier caravansérail offer us shared voyages to the other, and with the other. Their common artistic aim is to promote human empathy without regard to fixed national identities . Structurally and dramaturgically, their sweep is centrifugal: Cargo’s truck-cum-bus literally steers us away from a familiar starting place, and Le dernier caravansérail’s mobile dollies—brought briefly on stage, precariously held to frame each sketch, and then swiftly 7 and In-between . . . . . 12 Recap and Coda French Theatre Tomorrow . . . . . . . . .. 10 Cultural Diversity (II) Operas and Circuses . . . . . . . . . . A V I G N O N 298 wheeled off stage—simulate the vertiginous, never-ending motions of diaspora. In their insistence on border-crossings and the erasure of frontiers , these two pieces bring to the fore an underlying dynamic that shapes many of the writers, directors, and works discussed in French Theatre Today. We can refer to this dynamic as a renewed cosmopolitanism . Its components include intense, explicit engagement with non-French artists and subjects—Claude Régy, Pascal Rambert, Michel Vinaver, Amin Maalouf; a markedly transatlantic vision— Fabrice Rozié, José Pliya,WaxFactory, Arthur Nauzyciel,Vinaver, Marcial Di Fonzo Bo; immersion in a multiplicity of cultural and national traditions—Koffi Kwahulé, Pliya, Vinaver, James Thiérrée, Di Fonzo Bo; a preoccupation with hybrid and fluid human identities—JeanMarie Besset, Coline Serreau, Nauzyciel, Noëlle Renaude, Olivier Py, Gisèle Vienne, Maïmouna Gueye, Booder, Josef Nadj; a recourse to languages other than standard French—Valère Novarina, Superamas, Philippe Minyana, Souria Adèle; and considerable stage experience with nonnative languages—Marion Schoevaert, Robert Wilson, Nauzyciel, Di Fonzo Bo. In harmony with this renewed cosmopolitanism is a second, more explicit dynamic traced throughout much of our survey: the embrace of expressive media other than spoken, text-centered theatre as seen in the formally hybrid and often unclassifiable works of Philippe Quesne, Superamas, WaxFactory, Thiérrée, Vienne, Gildas Milin, Novarina, Rambert, and Philippe Genty. All of these currents are consistent with Joël Pommerat’s ideal of operating above and beyond the French language, in a “wordless theatre .” As noted in chapter 11, Pommerat does not intend to have us take this formulation literally. His is more a statement about an impulse to keep French theatre moving toward a condition where its basic elements—its “vocabulary” and “syntax”—will be ever evolving; a theatre that will resist reduction to simplistic categories and that will fly in the face of an expectation of pristine “Frenchness.” Contemplating the future The plays of Bernard-Marie Koltès (d. 1989) remain an inspiration and a benchmark for the centrifugal and cosmopolitan tendencies in today’s French theatre. Midway into Combat de nègre et de chiens (Black Battles with Dogs, 1981) is a moving scene about breaking Recap​and​Coda:​French​Theatre​Tomorrow 299 free of the barriers to understanding imposed by differing languages. It presents the first intimate encounter between the two characters most marked as outsiders—Léone, who hails from Alsace and speaks German with the same facility as she does French; and Alboury, the African protagonist whose native tongue is Wolof: LEONE: Es ist der...