Tragédie by Olivier Dubois, and: Die Kontrakte des Kaufmanns: Eine Wirstschaftskomödie by Elfriede Jelinek (review)

The productions of the sixty-sixth Festival d'Avignon had a lot of space to fill, scenically, physically, and emotionally. The venues of the festival are typically large outdoor spaces, medieval courtyards of former convents and monasteries that allow the eye and mind to wander easily across the stunning architecture and history of the physical space. Designers and directors face the dilemma of how to work with the inherent openness of the spaces without diminishing the human performers onstage. Two pieces successfully solved this challenge by placing the human body and its frailty at the center of the work. Olivier Dubois premiered his dance theatre piece Tragédie, and Nicolas Stemann presented the French premiere of Elfriede Jelinek's Die Kontrakte des Kaufmanns: Eine Wirstschaftskomödie (The Merchant's Contracts: An Economic Comedy). Dubois and Stemann presented complex ideas with simple theatrics and grand violence, respectively, even as they emphasized the intimate spectacle of the human body to comment on human nature's vulnerability when faced with itself.

Using simple structural tools of repetition, focus, and tempo, Dubois's Tragédie offered a powerful reconsideration of the nature of tragedy and how it might be recreated today. Divided into three parts— Parodos, Episode, and Catharsis—Tragédie both quoted Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (specifically, the power of song and dance to entrance humankind and transcend daily life) and evoked the structural elements of Greek tragedy. Dubois thus positioned his work at the intersection of classical tragedy and contemporary dance. His triadic concept alluded to Aristotelian structure, but it also played out like a textbook diagram of climatic structure—or perhaps more accurately, crisis structure. There was an implied late point of attack, and almost all of the ninety minutes escalated the tension and narrative to a sublime climax, which was followed by a brief though powerful denouement.

In the first section, Parodos, dancers walked on the sixteenth note of the pulsing drum on a downstage/upstage axis. Often, there was only one body onstage, and nearly every dancer (none of whom were clothed) had a brief walking solo. This repetitive parade of the company introduced the audience to the pedestrian vocabulary that Dubois later complicated, and eroded any latent titillation in response to the dancers' naked bodies. We saw their bodies move, shake, and bounce for approximately fifteen minutes—time that created a curious homogenization of the human body, as the movements rendered the dancers' bodies essentialized though not anonymous. Dubois's repetition suggested not a single tragic hero, but eighteen. François Caffenne's music pulsed underneath the company's walking with a strong and metered drumbeat rhythmically supporting Dubois's use of repetition. Throughout, the music maintained its driving pulse, a simple yet effective reminder of tragedy's inevitability.

Dubois's repetitive walking phrase was so consistent that when he changed focus, the effect was striking. With all eighteen dancers coming and going, they each separately cast subtle glances to the high diagonals or a quick look down, and these furtive glances began to unwind the taut form established in the previous section as it transitioned to the second section, Episode. The distinct gazes developed unique identities among the ensemble, suggesting that tragedy arises both from the individual's self-awareness in society and his or her need to exist as an individual. Confirming this need, a man suddenly changed his path and walked from downstage left to upstage right. This was the first diagonal movement in the piece and again illustrated the impact of simple choices to communicate deeper ideas. His movement immediately marked him as unique, as against the collective identity of the ensemble. The diagonal walk, soon taken up by the entire ensemble at different moments, gave way to less regimented movement, marking the...