Complex interplay of racial justice and environmentalism
Iam loitering awkwardly at the base of the monument to revolution and democracy that adorns the Place de la République in Paris, wondering if I am in the wrong location, fretting over the 2% battery charge on my phone. But I needn’t worry: Eric Bouvron strides towards me, shakes my hand and kindly points me to a pedestrian crossing.
As we walk to La Favourite Turbigo, a nearby brasserie, Bouvron tells me about the masterclass he has been giving to aspirant actors over the past two days. My rolling suitcase splashes through puddles and clunks over cobblestones. My paltry French dissipates in the face of the maître d’hôtel, along with the final vestiges of the hopes I had cherished at Charles de Gaulle airport just a few hours before that I would blend casually into the Parisian scene.
Bouvron has a revelation to reassure me. Although he has lived and worked here for almost three decades, receiving numerous accolades from the French theatre sector — including a prestigious Molière Award in 2016 — he still feels like he is not entirely “at home” in France. Born in the Egyptian city of Alexandria to a French father and a Greek mother, Bouvron grew up in SA before moving to Paris in the 1990s to study at the renowned Jacques Lecoq school of physical theatre.
Prior to this, he had learnt at the feet of two masters of movement, Gary Gordon and Andrew Buckland, at Rhodes University. He cut his teeth as a young professional at the Natal Performing Arts Council with the likes of James Ngcobo. And he was one of the brave young choreographer-performers who featured at the inaugural Dance Umbrella in 1989, along with dance and physical theatre pioneers such as Carly Dibakwane, Robyn Orlin, Jeannette Ginslov and Gerard Bester.
The friendships Bouvron made and his experiences both on- and offstage during this period continue to be a generative force in his work. It is no coincidence that there is a character named James Ngcobo in his most recent creation, Rhino (the French title is Braconniers or “poachers”), nor that the play engages with the contentious political discourses that seem to place environmentalism and racial justice in opposition.
For Bouvron, Rhino is a means to revisit his conditioning as a white South African under apartheid, to wrestle with the attendant guilt and to forge a reconciled identity that incorporates it but is not defined by it. Bouvron’s SA background and the time he has spent in other African countries have informed previous works like Afrika! and Ngubi the Bushman, in which Europe’s exoticising view of “distant” Africa is treated with irony even as the continent’s contradictions and complexities are celebrated.
A number of the other shows staged over the years by Barefoot, the production company Bouvron runs with his wife, Elizabeth Brownhill, have presented a similar invitation to contemporary French audiences to imagine other times and places, often through the perspectives and voices of historical figures: from Maya Angelou to Lawrence of Arabia, from Alexis Zorba to Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.
Bouvron’s magical storytelling mode may be described as one informed by Lecoq’s clowning, Jerzy Grotowsky’s “poor theatre” and Peter Brook’s insistence that art finds its strength through suggestion — an argument for a pared-down, actor-centred approach that resists sets, effects and spectacle. Yet South Africans would recognise it not through this European framework but through a performance style partly influenced by an African oratorical tradition and partly by the conditions of theatremaking under apartheid.
As our conversation comes to an end, I express a hope that Bouvron will bring his work “back” to the country that has, in various ways, enabled it. Happily he has plans to do so, and I have no doubt that Rhino and other Barefoot plays will find eager audiences — even if, as Bouvron admits, he is also not quite “at home” in SA.
In parting, I suggest to him that many artists have found exile, or the experience of always being between countries and identities, a productive condition. “It’s good for creativity,” he replies philosophically, “but it’s not an easy state to live in.”