When Words Do Not Match Reality - Annotation
This post discusses a show program publication:
“Les Parisiens Program (English).” Festival d’Avignon, www.festival-avignon.com/en/shows/ 2017/the-parisians. Accessed 24 July 2017.
A program, especially self-conscious coming from the artistic director of the festival, gives the audience a frame from which to look at the show and understand its creative process. The show summary begins by painting protagonist Aurélien in a positive matter, and the people who represent Paris and societal power negatively. Py identifies the play at multiple points as a “carnival”, and identifies that as a metaphor for the dissent of politics. The program then outlines Py’s and Weitz’s careers and styles before delving into an interview with Py that identifies his process of adaption of his book to play, Py’s attempt to tackle the rhythms and styles of the play, an analysis of his characters, and their rehearsal process. Py identifies his set as a mobile machine city and an opposition to bourgeois theatre, and completes the interview by identifying Paris as monster city.
Py’s analysis of the set exhibits a singularity of vision and lack of dramaturgical insight. The set’s backdrops, rigged onto vertical pullies, and pushable multilevel piece, were not assuming or unrealistic rather than unmarked and two dimensional. Hausmann-style décor, alluding to the reshaping of Paris by those wealthy and powerful, worked as a static symbol of antiquated power dynamics that Py emphasized. The set, while looming vertically and expansive visually, was too removed from the audience to feel claustrophobic, nor did it entrap the characters as they could move outside of the box formed by the walls of the city. If the show is a carnival, a critique of the bourgeois, designer Weitz only explores the falsity of carnival rather than its heightened freedom. Weitz identified the set as creating “complex dramatic locations to inhabit” and a “sensory experience”, but there was really one location, and the only sense incited was visual. The show’s checkered floors could have been a giant chessboard if character’s movements had been those of chess pieces, but the set was too far removed from the character’s world to complete the allusion. The set was static, referencing culture and politics only upon initial impact, unsurprisingly since it was removed from the rehearsal process. The program outlines the play’s themes, and taking the themes and set analysis discussed as intention, the program gives conclusive evidence that not only did the set fail to us, it also failed their own criteria.
