Ideas will get into the air. No sooner do I start thinking about criticism and difference (Festival Every Body 2024: Performing with difference), then all sorts of complexities wink on in the gloom: era, psychic construction, typology… you name it.
For instance, when I was a kid, there was still a Fat Lady at the local fair, a friendly monster… (Who, by the way, didn’t seem so very fat to me, just poor, while the uber-bellied Muscle Man surely was fat. His strength was all in the hollow barbells). Also, I realize that I seem to have been seeing my aging pretty much as deliquescence: I’m a wrinkling Captain Willard, waning with each vital breath as, all around, the jungle waxes hungry.
What’s the mission? What’s the mission?
Under cover of Christophe Martin’s Faits d’Hiver 2024 program, with performances of Grand Jeté, a new piece, and R.OSA, a classic, creator Silvia Gribaudi made a planned release of thornier perspectives for both age and body at Théâtre des Abbesses.
Gribaudi’s R.OSA twists the scrawny neck of my remembered Fat Lady friendly monster narrative. She doesn’t sweep her away as incorrect or supply me an updated version. She fixes her permanently in the corner of my eye, as a pense-bête.
Performer Claudia Marsicano, body mass deformed by obesity, balances delicately on tiny feet, gestures with tiny hands. The adipose swell of her thighs presents a baby-smooth bulging sex to me. Marsicano, between a gorgeous warble and well-meaning, no doubt healthy, weight-reducing, series of shared exercises, creates a sort of revenge porn that flays off the moral high ground and stuff a body can intellectually snatch at as she neutrally self-affirms: I am not just more out of control and weaker and stiffer than this fatso Claudia Marsicano, my thinking is cloudy, too.
R.OSA ends with a rendition of Brittney Spears’ Toxic – eminently danceable for Marsicano. But not for me. Marsicano also manages to capture the inscrutable doubleness of the song’s video. Abbesses was not full – it seemed to me younger people were more absent. Like me, they were afraid, I guess, either of dealing with the Fat Lady monster issue or with having to submit to a possible failure in a satire of it.
Age! Niagara Falls! Slowly I write, and step by step, inch by inch, I get up to … Gribaudi’s Grand Jeté. Jeté is ballet jargon for “jump”. Grand is “big”. Tone is important. Grand Jeté is vaudeville not comedy, parody, not farce.
The parody features the MM Contemporary Dance Company, a company so good and so full of zest and energy that it put me in mind of the wonderful gusto of Hofesh Schechter. But without the gangland-murder-on-the-Basel-zubringer affect.
With preternatural teamwork, MM Company do everything from classical hip hop to girly ballet-school twirls to buck and shake a joyful Gribaudi choreography that boils down to a variety show with singalong and acts explained (why?) in embarrassed euro English interspersed with pidgin French and a little muttered Italian.
Silvia Gribaudi, not MM Dance, however, dressed for middle-aged dumpy, makes the show, highlights the company’s excellence, makes the audience laugh. She’s the disabused host of Yugoslav state television’s Saturday Singalong (you can see her trying to gauge how she can get by on inertia and expectations; there’s a lot of confused applause and participative false starts). Part of it is just the charming lost-ness of a good clown assuming the well-worn embarrassment trope. The Old Girl is tiredly game for it: she struggles to twist, bend and crimp up with the company’ lithe young assassins. Gribaudi (pretends to tire?) tires quickly, lets go, her expressions (are meant to?) comment her fatigue, the strain of entertaining.
At a certain moment everyone takes off their top. All fold an arm over their breasts; Gribaudi, though, has very big breasts. Not so easy to hold. And, quite suddenly, I realize that – even if I could see that she has been hamming it up, there’s no way a dance performer of Gribaudi’s experience would be such a dead mackerel – every bit of her out-of-place-ness is because of what she is: gotten older but not because she’s old. And it’s not so much that she’s out of place but that there isn’t a place for old, just for the play acting of age and its problems. At least, there isn’t if all you mean to do is Jump Bigly! …
In Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange, the first victim of Alex and his droogs is an old drunk. The drunk is a sort of Don Juan figure: he not only survives (a fierce kicking), his song becomes motif: “It’s a stinking world because it lets the young get on to the old, like you done. Oh, it’s no world for an old man any longer…”
So, what are we all doing here? Out of place? Or playing at it? What’s the mission? Is it funny?
Go to Source
Author: Paul Tracy DANISON
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