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

10. Cultural Diversity (II): Operas and Circuses

Rounding out the survey Socially driven plots and neo-expressionist scene painting. The boulevard and the experimental. Tradition-bound revivals and provocative riffs on the classics. One-person stand-up and big-cast spectacles. Extolments of the Word and dance-text-video hybrids. As the preceding four chapters have shown, the variety of contemporary French theatre in Paris is energizing, and one’s experience of the array can bring about both heightened enlightenment and richly textured pleasures. Before moving on to the final stretch of our three-city tour of the current French theatre scene, I want to share my observations on two more spheres of Parisian arts de la scène: opera and circus. At first glance these areas may seem beyond the frame of our main concerns.To be sure, each stands at an opposite end of the “Art versus Amusement” spectrum: on the one hand, a music-theatre medium generally linked today with a cultural elite, and on the other, an entertainment that speaks to the unschooled sense of wonder within us all. In point of fact, however, the Paris opera establishment is increasingly preoccupied with reaching out to greater segments of the overall populace. And performers associated with the nouveau cirque, or New Circus, are exhibiting higher, even rarefied levels of artistic originality that appeal to new and more sophisticated audiences. Moreover , we have seen that traditionally constructed stage works are increasingly sharing the spotlight in France with hybrid, mixed-media performance pieces. Opera and circus are in effect historical forerunners of this current trend. For these reasons the ‘cultural diversity ’ evoked in this chapter’s title—in contrast to that of the previous one—is mainly a label for embracing two components of current French theatre practice that are generally viewed by professionals 12 Tomorrow . . . . 10 Cultural Diversity (II) Operas and Circuses . . . . . . . . . . Cultural​Diversity​(II):​Operas​and​Circuses 239 and theatregoers alike as full-fledged partners among the arts du spectacle vivant. Opera in and for the suburbs? In the aftermath of the autumn 2005 riots, Gérard Mortier, then the director of the Opéra national de Paris, decided it would be a good thing to take affordable opera to the banlieues. Mortier (b. 1943) is recognized internationally as an artistic visionary and an intellectual powerhouse. His costly and inventive programs have, however, sometimes been critiqued for appealing only to connoisseurs. After being tapped in 2007 to become the next general manager and artistic director of the New York City Opera, often called ‘the people’s opera house’ and an affordable alternative to the Metropolitan, Mortier precipitously resigned from the post in November 2008 before mounting even one production. He claimed that the budget he was given, compared with that of the Opéra national de Paris, was insufficient to allow for a truly innovative first season. (In 2010 the Opéra national de Paris received 113 million euros of state monies.)1 Nonetheless, Mortier has regularly pointed to his boyhood as a baker’s son from Ghent (Belgium) in support of opera’s populist potential: “In our neighborhood, working people were open to beauty. . . . Many went to the opera.”2 Every operatic venture, Mortier insists, “must have a public function and be more than elitist entertainment . . . . It is a question of transmitting this enormous tradition to the young.”3 During his tenure at the Opéra national de Paris, Mortier launched a Youth Pass initiative, demanded that standing-room tickets be sold at no more than five euros per spot, and reduced the average age of the audience from fifty-six to forty-two years old.4 The Opéra national de Paris’s forays into working-class areas like Créteil, Bobigny, and Nanterre took place after my six-month stay. But Anthony Tommasini, the New York Times music critic, attended a performance of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786) that ran at the 900-seat Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers in April 2008. He reported that “the house was packed . . . with a diverse and noticeably young audience”; the final ovation, he added, was “uncommonly vigorous.”5 I saw this production of Le nozze di Figaro, directed by Christoph Marthaler and conducted by Sylvain Cambreling, when it debuted at the Palais Garnier—the “old” home of the Opéra na- ​ PA R I S 240 tional de Paris—in March 2006. (It was originally designed for...