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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 23.2 (2001) 28-34



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C'est-à-Dire

Leslie Satin

[Figures]

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The performers in this piece, in which fact and fiction overlap, are not quite characters but neither are they "simply themselves"; for the sake of simplicity, they are identified in the script as Speaker 1, Speaker 2, Dancer 1, and Dancer 2. The original cast was comprised, respectively, of Marjorie Gamso, Elaine Shipman, Leslie Satin, and Renni Greenberg Gallagher.

Part 1

[The performing area is set with a small table, placed upstage right and covered with a white tablecloth. Behind the table are two café chairs. Two more chairs, facing the rear wall, are set in the space; one is upstage center, the other slightly down and left of the first. The wooden chairs, their backs curved and sinuous, recall Degas's ballet studios as well as the cafés in which this fantasy begins.

Two women enter from upstage left and walk to the table. They are dressed elegantly in "timeless" street clothes--Speaker 1 is in a black and white print dress, Speaker 2 in a black one--with high-heeled shoes and brimmed hats; both of them carry suitcases. They go to either side of the table and begin to unpack the suitcases, which contain books and papers, cups and saucers, glasses, pens, cigarettes. They pile the stuff on the table, leaving the not-quite-empty suitcases ajar on the floor; then they sit. They gesture nervously, come together for a slow, mostly unison sequence of small actions: legs cross and uncross, palms turn down and up, heads swivel, an arm floats. Their gestures completed, the two women begin alternately to write on the papers and books and to read them. They continue these actions throughout the performance. Intermittently, one or another might raise a cigarette or a glass to her lips, or turn a page, or she might merely brush her fingers across an object and retreat.

During this section, two more women enter the space and go to the empty chairs. They wear full-skirted dresses that suggest both the long tutus of nineteenth-century ballet and the "New Look" Dior-inspired fashions of the 1950s; echoing their counterparts, Dancer 1 is in a black dress, Dancer 2 in a black and white print. They are barefoot, and their toenails are painted red. They stand behind the chairs (Dancer 1 center, Dancer 2 down left), facing upstage, their arms held behind them, their hands curled around the wooden loops of the chair backs. They are nearly still, moving slightly and very slowly, always connected to the chairs.]

SPEAKER 1: Prelude. And so life in Paris began and as all roads lead to Paris, all of us are now there, and I can begin to tell what happened when I was of it.

[Dancer 1 begins to dance, moving toward the table. As she travels, she picks up her chair--as though it were a suitcase--and [End Page 28] [Begin Page 30] re-places it, three times, then turns and heads downstage, dancing. Dancer 2 watches.

Note: The dancing throughout C'est-à-Dire is sensual, soft, stretched, its qualities and its lexicon bordering on and borrowing from the balletic and the post-modern. Each section is derived from a specific movement principle (for example, all of the movement in one section begins in the hips, and another is a series of balances) and travels along a set path in the performance space. Within those rules, the dancers improvise in performance, their in-the-moment decisions guided by the responsibility to avoid at all times any synchronicity of action and corresponding speech: a spoken description of the crossing of a leg, for instance, must never be accompanied by the enactment of that gesture.]

SPEAKER 2: Always, she had dreamed of Paris. She imagined herself in the salons of Gertrude Stein, gazing at the walls filled with paintings by Picasso and Matisse, murmuring her admiration of the images to the artists themselves over tea, bringing her face quite close to Pablo's--she called him Pablo...

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