More than forty years ago, Robert Wilson took up the challenge of a show lasting 24 hours. More recently, Jan Fabre revisited his old provocations with Mount Olympus, thereby drawing the circumference of a circle and confirming the durability of a practice that seems to be particularly vital on today’s scene, where shows lasting between twelve and sixteen hours are no longer a rarity.
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The theatrical inclination to produce dilated works has counterparts in the other arts: many novels are six or even hundred pages long, and Paul Auster’s latest book numbers over a thousand. In cinema, the films of Béla Tarr shatter established temporal limits. In galleries, the space occupied by installations grows and grows, beyond the usual norms. With its Monumenta series, the Grand Palais too has gone with the flow and enjoyed great success with hénaurme events—as Alfred Jarry would say—by Anselm Kiefer, Christian Boltanski, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, and Anish Kapoor. As for Christian Marclay with The Clock (2010), an audiovisual work lasting twenty-four hours, he created a time machine that leafs through a century of cinema, minute by minute. All share the same temptation to produce “oversized” works, and manifest their attraction to the abnormal, the incommensurable.
A RECURRING PRACTICE
As a symptom of current art, this penchant for “large formats” (1) surprises by the way it bucks the general reaching for speed. But does that make it a form of resistance, a way of rejecting the acceleration imposed by virtual means of communication? No doubt, because these giant works stand as citadels that raise the drawbridge in the name of a determination to form refuges, a shelter from the connected assailants of the “global village.” Even the print media— Le Monde in particular—has joined this movement, by adopting what was thought to be the bygone practice of long opinion pieces, of in-depth investigations, of choral debates. Thus, the cell-phone message, theoretically programmed for a maximum of two minutes, is countered by the polemical practices of large formats and slowness, both yesterday and today. “Slowly, slowly,” exhorted John Cage in his famous “Lecture on Nothing” (1949), as did Milan Kundera, in his essayistic novel
Slowness. And is not the base of the most famous modern spectacle, Deafman Glance, this treatment of duration which has lost its singularity and engendered a veritable contagion in time? However, a distinction needs to be made. The distinction between, on one side, the recourse to slowness as the rhythm of the show—which Bob Wilson had the genius to initiate—and on the other the epic dimension of a story that one wants to recreate in its integrality. In this case, representation does not slow down the acting and the movements, but it does acquire incommensurable extension because of the desire to follow a work through its full arborescence. A few adventures asserting this kind of practice opened the way in the 1980s. They remain exemplary: Le Soulier de satin, by Paul Claudel, directed by Antoine Vitez, the
Mahabharata by Peter Brook and JeanClaude Carrière, and the complete version of Goethe’s Faust by Peter Stein. Shakespearian cycles showing the same tendency also marked the European theatre scene, notably the successes of Ariane Mnouchkine, Luk Perceval and, more recently, Krzysztof Warlikowski. The desire to explore the text without cutting it in any way explains this theatrical “longue durée.” The motivations behind it were diverse, but the result was always to value the “big” rather than the previously dominant, converse formula that “small is beautiful.” This did not demand a programmed “minimalism” but required the constraints of the framework in order to attain the “essence,” the ultimate center, like Jerzy Grotowski in the famous Constant Prince, Eugenio Barba in Min Fars Hus, or again Beckett and Ionesco.This attraction to condensed expression also explains Roland Barthes’ interest in haikus at around the same time. After the retention of the past, today it’s extension: like the heart, art follows the alternation of systole and diastole.The polemic of tirelessly confronting forces.
SUSPICION AND RECONCILIATION
Large formats are not innocent, for they recall giant manifestations with explicit propaganda purposes, whatever the ideology. Anything official requires the presence of the masses and considerable space. The postrevolutionary spectacles in Saint Petersburg conceived by Meyerhold and Nikolai Evreinov, Nazi parades and Chinese shows are forms dedicated to state policy and the cult of personality, from Hitler to Mao. Historically, large-format aims to legitimize the powers that be and demands collective submission. Small-format has never been associated with such aims; it remains marginal, and subversive. It goes without saying that today’s large-format venturs escape these exercises of rhetorical overload in the service of power. But it is difficult to ignore the fact that in order to happen it needs considerable financial investment, which means that it is dependent on official decisions. Even so, it is also this scale which ensures its impact and, if it avoids becoming official art, it can be pretty intense. In 1973 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s
Gulag Archipelago was a bombshell not only because of the truths it brought to light, but also because of its huge scale as an epic of modern times, and as the unofficial countertruth to the epics canonized by Stalin, like Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don. Large-format work straddles this ambiguity. It draws strength from its excess.
AN EXTRA-ORDINARY EXPERIENCE
Large-format, from Bob Wilson to Jan Fabre, produced by artists as emblematic as Frank Castorf or less high-profile practitioners like Julien Gosselin, becomes an experience. A community experience on the part of spectators faced with the extension of the time of representation and, at the same time, invited to share the unusually extended experience in a theater. This in part explains the enthusiasm of the applause that marks the end of such shows: the public is thanking the performers but also congratulating itself: it has stood the test, it has left everyday time and collectively shut itself away in the long night of a show. “We have lived through something together,” is what these men and women, these fascinated young people, are implicitly saying. And sharing the experience produces the reassuring effect of a temporary social bond. These shows require real preparation so that those involved can keep the adventure going, not capitulate. For Mount Olympus, not only was there the constant possibility of sustenance, but beds were laid on for rest
and there was even a first aid facility. You never know. As for the actors, systems were put in place to organize their night, to control the rhythm of effort and rest. I remember being backstage with Antoine Vitez during Le
Soulier de satin, gently waking up actors who had dozed off while waiting to come on stage again, five hours later. In the Orient, long duration is common, notably in traditional kathakali and kabuki shows, in which the audience has a freedom that has been lost in the West. Before, you could leave and reenter a theater, and especially an opera, at will. Wagner condemned such frivolity and, by having the lights turned out, ensured that spectators stayed put. For the events on stage to exert their power, stillness is essential. Large-format shows somewhat disrupted this Wagnerian concentration. Bob Wilson told me, however, that the audience responded cautiously to these invitations to mobility, reluctant to engage with the relaxed atmosphere of Oriental performances. By spending twenty-four hours watching Mount Olympus, young spectators demonstrated their freedom and their refusal to be cowed by the law of silence by coming and going. The experience was one of plunging into the river of time, and sometimes coming up for air. A combination of survival and pleasure. This is the condition for this collective adventure.
NARCISSISM AND EPIC REACH
Sometimes—in the worst cases—the epic extent of these shows is simply down to the narcissism of the artist, who is entranced with his or her own propositions and refuses to have them reduced or cut, preferring to pile idea on idea. Hence the heterogeneity that sometimes results. In Mount Olympus, scenes of great splendor knock together with shoddy, stereotyped theatrical fixes, especially where “mythological” representations are concerned. Jan Fabre, understandably, wants to meet the temporal challenge and cannot bring himself to ablate, abbreviate or cut the way Tadeusz Kantor, a man of extreme vigilance, used to do. Cutting is a way of improving, a moral alien to “marathons” whose merit, like Duracel batteries, is founded on duration. If you love you do not cut, you go deep into time, as into the fog, without a compass and without censorship. Among proponents of this XXL theater, some, like Ivo van Hove, Luk Perceval, and Thomas Jolly, adopt the extension characteristic of modern times by riding an epic energy that is impelled by such exploits. It is this energy that drives their projects and provides a dynamism free of the risk of narcissism. These directors dedicate themselves to the unconstrained exploration of an epic story or a cycle. It is the material that they retain which legitimizes these radical experiences undertaken in the age of the brief and erasably virtual.This takes us back to the origins of theater which, in Ancient Greece, was a day-long event. (Okay, it only happened once a year.) The antithesis of this are shows in which duration is rooted in the nature of the artist himself. Bob Wilson, for example, has always liked to use repetition, favoring the infinite reprising of a given motif, like on the walls of an Egyptian pyramid. Repetition evokes ancient practices, particularly in the Orient, which are being revalorized by this use which shatters inherited Western codes. For example, Jan Fabre in his early work, or more recently the English group Forced Entertainment, who integrate the improvisational procedures of jazz. These shows are processes with which long duration is consubstantial. They bear the imprint of an artistic identity.
Mount Olympus is the most recent challenge in dance-theater. It is to the honor of Jan Fabre that he put on this show which delights an audience less in thrall than we think to the imperatives of speed and mobility. He withdraws into the work, like a recluse entering a hermitage in the middle of the city.
Translation, C. Penwarden