Wilma's Webworld

Ephémères

All day long, all I’ve had to do is think about one of the scenes of the new play up at the Théâtre du Soleil and I run the risk of losing it. I just spent three and a half hours there in delightful company last night watching part 1. The first question on the way out the door was “So how are we going to make it to part 2?” Unfortunately, Titi de Paris just called to find out it’s all sold out. But they’re gonna do it again in 2008. We’ll be there that time around for a six or seven hour “intégrale” to refresh our memory about the first part and get in on the second. And I doubt we’ll even see the time go by.

It’s extremely hard to talk about what Les Ephémères is up to. In part because one of the things it doesn’t do is tell stories. There are characters, and most of the time the actors playing them are on more or less small, round, mobile stages: bubbles of worlds that the actors move onto and off of as the stages shift at the hands of other actors kneeling on the ground, scuffling around like crabs and then watching, attentively, what’s going on in front of them to know when to start turning, when to start turning faster, when to slow down, when to move the stage off-stage, as these mobile stages respond to the people moving on and around them, and to the other stages in its vicinity. There’s lots of motion in this play. There are, also, some words. Mostly, though, there are situations, with actors playing characters dealing with them. An old man who can’t sleep, whose wife joins his bubble to try and get him to go to bed. A phone call from someone who doesn’t speak, but who gets told that if it’s him, Laurent I think was his name, that he should know that everyone there loves him and thinks of him often. At which point enters another bubble, a door – and I realize now that the scenes often work that way: a “main” stage on one mobile stage, while the door to that space is on another mobile stage, and the space between the stages is more or less distant according to the availability of that main stage. Behind the door is Laurent, screaming that he needs money, that it’s for medicine, while grandpa crouches and grandma, flustered, runs to the shelter of the main stage, threatening to call the cops. You can imagine that the door is turning quickly under the pressure of all of this action, all this emotion.

For example.

A Hint from "The Animal Side"

This weekend I put this off for later and stayed in on Sunday and read this instead. Beckett, as is well known, can wait, especially since the exhibit is here until the end of June. I couldn't quite emerge from the animal side to get myself out the door. After reading Bailly's Le versant animal, with of course more than an occasional eye on Lulu-cat, I did end up making my way to the gym. It's nice to work the muscles on a Sunday: my guess is that the gym queens worked theirs on Saturday for their nights out, so the weight-machine room is, in comparison to the over-flowing cardio room, entirely negotiable. I haven't quite figured out the cruising thing at the gym, but Sunday I got a little inkling of how it works. And then today, with Bailly still vaguely on my mind, as I was crossing the cardio room, I saw two men on rowing machines, and I was sure that one was looking at me just like a squirrel, the other perhaps some kinda beaver. Animal eyes, at any rate, and so there we were.

Bailly says lovely things like the following that I've translated and that make me want to keep moving and thinking and help me to realize that my anxiety about "getting things down" might just not be for our day and age:

 

Genet: Loving Lucien

This is one of the ways the narrator of Jean Genet's Thief's Journal describes the man whose love accompanied the writing of that beautiful book:

This machine, capable of swinging punches, iron knuckles, and kicks, stretches out, lies down, unfolds, and proves to my surprise that it was only contracted, tied-up gentleness, folded onto itself several times over, knotted and swollen, and I learn how this gentleness, this supple docility in responding to my tenderness will transform again into violence and meanness if ever gentleness were no longer given the chance to be itself, if my tenderness stopped, like if I left the kid and took away from weakness the possibility of occupying this magnificent body.

Beets and Sundries

I seem to have gone all axiomatic, but I do still have a body. We just had a beet and endive salad for dinner last night which was super yummy. and I'm very excited to be in on the beginning of "La Nouvelle Star" (ie American Idol, i think, or one of those things, but in fransh) adventure. We got through day two last night while eating our beets and sundries, and the cut down to 40 candidates. Among last year's semi-finalists for the same show included a skinny boy nicknamed the turtle who sang like a woman and a dyke-ish woman of color who sang "Every Breath You Take" like a man, and people loved them. One takes one's hopes where one finds them these days. There's a big boisterous buxom diva on the jury who they often show tearing up when somebody does good. I am a faggot and I love her.

I think we should all pay more attention to our explosions of the real. At least that's what I'm planning on doing as I work on translating that transgression axiom of monstrosity onwards. This is not unrelated to my nascent addiction to "La nouvelle star." Seems to me like song does (and maybe has always done?) a lot in giving us access to that real. (Genet almost always theorizes his prose as song.) And plus, you know, on a show like this, that these are, like, real people, giving it up as much as they can and cursing themselves for not having given it up enough and being eliminated. Of course, there's lots of scary ideology to this, too: so long as they have that teary diva, and the rest of the jury, too, showing how they are sometimes moved, my ideological worry fades, and I give it up, too.

Monstrosity

Monstrosity is what needs love because love interrupts it.

Monstrosity is the transgression that the law needs because it opens up the possibility of its applying otherwise.

These modes of monstrosity are what need to be shown, if not exactly at the same time, at least in close syncopation.

Timing, in ritual spontaneity, is everything.

Random Thoughts

Power is vulnerable.

What we need is ritual spontaneity.