French poet’s work alive in fascinating performance
Young creative talented trio portray optimism with a touch of melancholy in a charming and clever way
IT’S extraordinary to watch a performance and be transported magically to another world, a world where song, puppets and clever imagery bring to life the lilting, descriptive poetry of a great French poet. Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) is revered as one of the most influential poets of all time, considered the original enfant terrible of Western literature; a child “genius” of 19th century literature.
He crammed the body of his work into a few intense years of writing, his first poem crafted at the age of 16. At 21, he abandoned his work as a poet, to pursue a life of travel through Europe and ended up in Africa as a trader before returning to France where, after ailing for years but misdiagnosed, at only 37 years old he succumbed to cancer.
As a man of letters, he created one of the most formidable cultural legacies, with the likes of luminaries such as Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan, André Breton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, Patti Smith, Henry Miller, and Van Morrison all inspired by his poetry.
It must be quite a challenge, considering the immense body of work that exists in the form of music, film and opera to do further justice to Rimbaud, but the collaboration between Naomi van Niekerk, puppet designer Yoann Pencole and musician Arnaud van der Vliet, has come up trumps.
Van Niekerk uses tools such as sand, a comb, drops of ink and transparencies, to paint beautiful pictures that are screened overhead, as the alchemy of the words of Rimbaud’s poetry are translated by Van Vliet to melodious and haunting songs, while Pencole alternates between reading poems in French and moving two puppets atop a wall.
Rimbaud was a master in envisaging what he wrote: from golden wheat fields, to the lushness of the Ardennes countryside and the sea. One of his greatest poems,
Le Bateau ivre (“The Drunken Boat”) describes the drifting and sinking of a boat at sea in a first-person narrative, awash with vivid imagery and symbolism, ideal material for the three to interpet.
While many of Rimbaud’s poems and letters describe his anguish from an unsettled life, notably The Alchemy of the Word, much of what he writes portrays a sense of hope and almost contentedness.
It’s reassuring to find that young creative folk, like this trio, can portray optimism with a touch of melancholy, in such a charming and clever way.
● Presented with the collaboration of the French Institute of South Africa.