L'ombre miraculeuse
To Know More
a resumé
“…the experience has been very conclusive. On 17 October, at the 2nd and last performance, the students have shown a great calmness, concentration, an absence of panic and something which can be called joy – maybe not for each and every one of them, but still. A smile on the bearded face of An (she might have not recognized it herself). … This success, this opening now allows me to put some principles on the table which I have always incurred during the rehearsal work, and whose full meaning I now see glaringly apparent. For instance Anna: She played the out of tune piano. On the general, it just didn’t work (horrible); on the last night outstandingly gracious, even unforgettable. Same instrument (out of tune), same person (somehow out of tune as well), and still a difference of day and night. …Terror on the first night, confidence during the second. And the world has changed all over. Anna told me that what helped her was my proposal to play “quick and bad” (which goes back to Paul Claudel who told Jean-Louis Barrault, the theatre director in charge of creating his Le soulier de satin, “You need to play this piece quick and bad”, rather than slow and clever). Anna told me that this liberated her (for she always tries to “be good” in doing things). Of course for each case, each person, for each scene, each moment the good solution needs to be found, and this will always have to be the empirical one, the intuitive one, the one which works and helps to overcome difficulties and dead ends. For it is all about making theatre something easy, an art to get into (otherwise why should you present it in public?). But there are some principles without which I could not even imagine to do anything in this métier. To bring into being something – and I am now speaking strictly of theatre – motor and fuel will always be pleasure, and nothing but pleasure. Pleasure and opening up rooms for pleasure. Pleasure to a point the students will hardly be able to even imagine (even though the last night was something like a glimpse into this possible pleasure …). The pleasure of Rudolf Nourejev, of Maria Callas, of Pablo Picasso. It is all the same. Confidence. Forgetting about the idea “to take a risk” and even any kind of “confrontation” and “difficulty”. “Only do what you know to do”, is what I keep saying to my actors. And this is what I asked the students as well. Most of which, in the beginning, told me that they didn’t know to do anything. Which of course is not true. Anyway this is not how it works. As David Lynch says in his book Catching the Big Fish :
« I hear stories about directors who scream at actors, or they trick them somehow to get a performance. And there are some people who try to run the whole business on fear. But I think this is such a joke – it’s pathetic and stupid at the same time.
When people are in fear, they don’t want to go to work. So many people today have that feeling. Then the fear starts turning into hate, and they begin to hate going to work. Then the hate can turn into anger and people can become angry at their boss and their work.
If I ran myself with fear, I would get 1 percent, not 100 percent, of what I get. And they would be no fun in going down the road together. And it should be fun. In work and in life, we’re all supposed to get along. We supposed to have so much fun, like puppy dogs with our tails wagging. It’s supposed to be great living ; it’s supposed to be fantastic. »
This is what I would like to say too. And this is what I would like you to tell the students.
I know my métier, I know like Klaus Michael Grüber, that “actors are capable of marvellous things, but they are so afraid. All the work consist of calming this fear.” All the work. Of a stage director. I know. No other work. You don’t direct the actors, this wouldn’t help a bit, you calm them, that’s all. You have to offer them an environment of pleasure, a fairy tale. Which is why this quiet place we call theatre is so important. Even if it is just a hangar filled with water. Which people from the outside, people who have not witnessed this transformation (for us so radical) of a non-theatrical space into a theatre cannot really understand. Calming the actors, be they students, for them to be able to just “act” so as to invoke beauty; beauty which might also be invoked (and in the very same moment) by the spectators, who might not even be aware of this. But the show builds its own scene inside those who perceive it. Franz Kafka: “This is the essence of magic which does not create but invoke.” When pleasure becomes part of the game, the perspectives of “real” work and profoundness all of a sudden take a miraculous shade, like a text by Arthur Rimbaud. Everything opens up like a poem. Everything is new and shared. Sometimes this pleasure is not fully felt by the public – especially not in France and in the milieus I am dealing with. People go to the theatre for reason sometimes very far away from any notion of pleasure. Actors may suffer quite a bit when seeing their space tainted by such resistance or by the absurdity of a situation in which you have to share something with somebody who does not want or is not able to accept it. …For Felix, dancing in silence, this kind of thing did not happen. We had two very nice audiences, especially on the second night, when the spectators were younger, more open towards surprise, more curious. The students gave proof that they know how to seize such circumstances to come into being. Another step would be to learn and understand that in a certain sense all circumstances are in favour. That you can always bathe in confidence – in space, in air, as part of humankind. It is nothing but reality. This is what we would work on if I were to come back ; it is what gave us the firm impression that work could now really get started… after such an incredibly slow beginning which made me think at times that we might never understand the fact that rather than dealing with slowness, with “form” and with resistance, it was all about swiftness and informal, which is to say with love, and it is this perspective, from the Greek amphitheatre of nature and sun which opens up a blessed path…”
Yves-Noel Genod, 19 October 2008 (translated by Franz-Anton Cramer, 25 October 2008).
a resumé
“…the experience has been very conclusive. On 17 October, at the 2nd and last performance, the students have shown a great calmness, concentration, an absence of panic and something which can be called joy – maybe not for each and every one of them, but still. A smile on the bearded face of An (she might have not recognized it herself). … This success, this opening now allows me to put some principles on the table which I have always incurred during the rehearsal work, and whose full meaning I now see glaringly apparent. For instance Anna: She played the out of tune piano. On the general, it just didn’t work (horrible); on the last night outstandingly gracious, even unforgettable. Same instrument (out of tune), same person (somehow out of tune as well), and still a difference of day and night. …Terror on the first night, confidence during the second. And the world has changed all over. Anna told me that what helped her was my proposal to play “quick and bad” (which goes back to Paul Claudel who told Jean-Louis Barrault, the theatre director in charge of creating his Le soulier de satin, “You need to play this piece quick and bad”, rather than slow and clever). Anna told me that this liberated her (for she always tries to “be good” in doing things). Of course for each case, each person, for each scene, each moment the good solution needs to be found, and this will always have to be the empirical one, the intuitive one, the one which works and helps to overcome difficulties and dead ends. For it is all about making theatre something easy, an art to get into (otherwise why should you present it in public?). But there are some principles without which I could not even imagine to do anything in this métier. To bring into being something – and I am now speaking strictly of theatre – motor and fuel will always be pleasure, and nothing but pleasure. Pleasure and opening up rooms for pleasure. Pleasure to a point the students will hardly be able to even imagine (even though the last night was something like a glimpse into this possible pleasure …). The pleasure of Rudolf Nourejev, of Maria Callas, of Pablo Picasso. It is all the same. Confidence. Forgetting about the idea “to take a risk” and even any kind of “confrontation” and “difficulty”. “Only do what you know to do”, is what I keep saying to my actors. And this is what I asked the students as well. Most of which, in the beginning, told me that they didn’t know to do anything. Which of course is not true. Anyway this is not how it works. As David Lynch says in his book Catching the Big Fish :
« I hear stories about directors who scream at actors, or they trick them somehow to get a performance. And there are some people who try to run the whole business on fear. But I think this is such a joke – it’s pathetic and stupid at the same time.
When people are in fear, they don’t want to go to work. So many people today have that feeling. Then the fear starts turning into hate, and they begin to hate going to work. Then the hate can turn into anger and people can become angry at their boss and their work.
If I ran myself with fear, I would get 1 percent, not 100 percent, of what I get. And they would be no fun in going down the road together. And it should be fun. In work and in life, we’re all supposed to get along. We supposed to have so much fun, like puppy dogs with our tails wagging. It’s supposed to be great living ; it’s supposed to be fantastic. »
This is what I would like to say too. And this is what I would like you to tell the students.
I know my métier, I know like Klaus Michael Grüber, that “actors are capable of marvellous things, but they are so afraid. All the work consist of calming this fear.” All the work. Of a stage director. I know. No other work. You don’t direct the actors, this wouldn’t help a bit, you calm them, that’s all. You have to offer them an environment of pleasure, a fairy tale. Which is why this quiet place we call theatre is so important. Even if it is just a hangar filled with water. Which people from the outside, people who have not witnessed this transformation (for us so radical) of a non-theatrical space into a theatre cannot really understand. Calming the actors, be they students, for them to be able to just “act” so as to invoke beauty; beauty which might also be invoked (and in the very same moment) by the spectators, who might not even be aware of this. But the show builds its own scene inside those who perceive it. Franz Kafka: “This is the essence of magic which does not create but invoke.” When pleasure becomes part of the game, the perspectives of “real” work and profoundness all of a sudden take a miraculous shade, like a text by Arthur Rimbaud. Everything opens up like a poem. Everything is new and shared. Sometimes this pleasure is not fully felt by the public – especially not in France and in the milieus I am dealing with. People go to the theatre for reason sometimes very far away from any notion of pleasure. Actors may suffer quite a bit when seeing their space tainted by such resistance or by the absurdity of a situation in which you have to share something with somebody who does not want or is not able to accept it. …For Felix, dancing in silence, this kind of thing did not happen. We had two very nice audiences, especially on the second night, when the spectators were younger, more open towards surprise, more curious. The students gave proof that they know how to seize such circumstances to come into being. Another step would be to learn and understand that in a certain sense all circumstances are in favour. That you can always bathe in confidence – in space, in air, as part of humankind. It is nothing but reality. This is what we would work on if I were to come back ; it is what gave us the firm impression that work could now really get started… after such an incredibly slow beginning which made me think at times that we might never understand the fact that rather than dealing with slowness, with “form” and with resistance, it was all about swiftness and informal, which is to say with love, and it is this perspective, from the Greek amphitheatre of nature and sun which opens up a blessed path…”
Yves-Noel Genod, 19 October 2008 (translated by Franz-Anton Cramer, 25 October 2008).
Labels: felix dancing in silence yves-noël genod dispariteur
posted by Marie-Noëlle Genod, le dispariteur at 2:07 AM
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