Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004
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Reviewed by
De Montfort University, UK
The Paris Jigsaw: Internationalism and the City’s Stages (2002), edited by David Brady and Maria M. Delgado, offers a new and exciting approach to modern French theatre. Instead of following the usual, canonical method of writing about drama - citing key texts, seminal playwrights and definitive productions - the focus here is on geography and cultural politics. Jim Carmody, one of the contributors, provides a good definition of the book’s aim:
The book is interested in Paris as a geographic and cultural locus […] that is continually traversed by foreign theatrical performance. Indeed, the book exists as testament to Paris’s extraordinary ability, today and historically, to find a place within its boundaries for work made by others from other places. (251)
Reflecting the diverse interests of the numerous collaborators (many of whom are practitioners), the book, inevitably, is a jigsaw itself, combining different approaches and methodologies. In addition to standard academic essays, there are a number of fascinating dialogues with actors and directors, including an interview in the pub with Bruce Myers, one of the original members of Peter Brook’s company, and an e-mail conversation with the Catalan director, Lluìs Pasqual. The editors skilfully manage the exuberant heterogeneity of the text by dividing it into three separate sections: a lengthy introduction, a series of case studies, and an analysis of the different theatre traditions informing internationalism in Paris.
David Bradby and Mario Delgado’s ‘Introduction’ performs a number of key tasks. First, it explores the complex nexus of geographical, historical and cultural factors that allowed internationalism to flourish on the Paris stage from 1945 onwards; second, it examines what is meant by internationalism and looks at its politics and ethics; and third, it shows how internationalism produces a new form of performance practice, challenging performers and audiences to cross boundaries and confront the strangeness of the other.
The general issues raised in the ‘Introduction’ are developed further in Part One through four case studies of individual practitioners and their centres: Peter Brook’s CIGT (Centre International de Créations Théâtrales), Jacques Lecoq’s Ecole Internationale de Théâtre, Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil, and Augusto Boal’s Centre du Théâtre de l’Opprimé in the twelfth arrondissement. Despite the common focus of the practitioners mentioned, two very different stories of internationalism. The first story, told by David Williams, Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, David Bennent, Yoshi Oida, and David Bradby amongst others, recounts Brook and Mnouchkine’s heavily subsidised attempts to discover an international performance language. One that would root out the ‘codes and impulses that are hidden all the time at the root of cultural forms’ (Brook, 43), and allow for the rediscovery of theatre’s ‘universal laws’ (Mnouchkine, 130). The second story told by Paul Heritage, Maria Delgado, David Brady, Mercè Saumell, Augusto Boal and Rui Fruti is grittier, and ultimately more dynamic, than the first. For both Lecoq and Boal, internationalism in the theatre is not simply a metaphysical quest for the essence of communication. In Lecoq’s case, it is about providing young performers who come to his school with the necessary physical tools to create theatre companies in their home countries or elsewhere. And, for Boal, the political activist, it is about combating the forces of globalisation, which he (correctly) believes results in a cultural ‘monologue’ (165).
Where the first half of The Paris Jigsaw focuses on specific practitioners, the second half looks at how Paris has embraced different national theatre traditions in the past 50 years or so. Rudolf Rach, David Bradby, Phyliss Zatlin, Maria Delgado, Frédéric Maurin, Jim Carmody and Judith G. Miller explore, respectively, the enormous impact German, Russian, Spanish, Argentine, North American and African theatre has had on French theatre. Appropriately, Peter Lichtenfels rounds the book off by comparing British and French attitudes towards internationalism. Despite some fascinating insights, Part Two of the book is, in my view, less successful than Part One. This is not related to the quality of the essays included, but rather is caused by what is left out. Why, for instance, is there no discussion of Polish, Algerian and Asian theatre traditions? Equally, why is so little space given to African theatre, particularly in the light of the crucial and complex questions raised by Judith G. Miller in her hard-hitting interview with Sylvie Chalaye about the difficulties faced by African companies in contemporary France. By developing a view of internationalism which is too reliant on European and North American ‘presences’, The Paris Jigsaw runs the risk of endorsing the very thing it is so concerned to avoid: an exclusionary concept of multiculturalism.
This is not so say, however, that the view of internationalism emerging from the book is either simplistic or naïve. Though all agree that the French government and the Mairie de Paris provide a conductive environment for international theatre research through generous subsidies and grants, none are blind to the economic and political factors involved in Paris’s deliberate cultivation of internationalism. Maria Shevtsova, in a perceptive essay, highlights just what France gets in return for its ‘enlightened’ cultural policy:
During Francois Mitterand’s presidency […], France witnessed an unprecedented flowering of broadly cultural and, more narrowly, artistic activity, which, although having a national thrust – the goal was to transform the cultural morphology of the nation – was well and truly receptive to international input and sought to use it for both local and global ends. In a country like this, then, all indications of how France not only recognised exceptional talents but also facilitated their progress were bound to elicit a feeling of complicity and the sense that France was consolidating her position in the vanguard of cultural affairs for the present, as she had done in the near or distant past. (187)
Jim Carmody is equally sensitive to the dangers of subsidised ‘internationalism’. Referring to the French appropriation of Robert Wilson, Carmody writes: ‘Wilson in contemporary French culture is an assimilated, quasi-resident artist, and an exotic, if frequent, visitor. (250)
This desire to confront the darker realities of cultural politics is one of the great strengths of The Paris Jigsaw, for it means that internationalism is not simply consumed as a utopian idea by the reader. Rather it is portrayed as a site of conflict and tension between practitioners and government officials. Equally importantly, Paris is never romanticised in the book. Several contributors, notably Boal and Fruti, stress the chauvinism of Paris, and the difficulties experienced by foreigners there. At the juncture, and if we wanted to be hypercritical, we could say that the book misses an excellent opportunity to explore the complex relationship between internationalism and post-structuralism’s philosophy of difference. To have done so would have produced an interesting (and important) debate about what genuine internationalism is and how it can be brought out. Although David Williams, Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe and Judith G. Millar touch on this in their respective essays, the question of difference, and how it relates to the thorny issue of humanism, is never really developed in the book, at least to my satisfaction.
These criticisms, however, should not detract from the excellence and overall lucidity of The Paris Jigsaw. The book is a valuable and comprehensive document and makes an important contribution to theatre/performance criticism. It was fascinating, for instance, to hear the views of practitioners such as David Bennet, Giovanni Fusetti and Suzy Wilson who are conventionally passed over in favour of ‘star’ names. In my view, The Paris Jigsaw ought to attract a wide range of specialist and non-specialist readers, and will be of particular interest to those involved in French and Theatre/Performance Studies.