A performative look at Europe today - La Trilogie des contes immoraux (pour Europe) by Phia Ménard
Waiting for La Trilogie des contes immoraux (pour Europe)
©Mehmet Kerem Özel, April 7th 2024, Théâtre du Nord - Lille
A punk woman with distinctive hair, make-up, and clothing is sitting on the floor, leaning against the back wall of the stage. After the announcement and dimming of the theatre lights, she confidently walks around the cardboard, as if exploring the floor. She then retrieves a spear from a tall container behind the stage and uses it to remove and discard pieces of the cardboard. Her movements are deliberate and controlled.
The show is about this woman constructing a structure using thick and heavy cardboard on the floor with the cut-fold-paste logic I mentioned. As an audience member, after a certain point, you can't help but identify with her. You'll feel joy when she overcomes difficulties, sadness when she fails, and laugh at her naivety of some of her confident actions. You'll also recognize and regret her mistakes. Over time, you start to notice that the protagonist, who comes across as self-assured and somewhat arrogant, also has a clumsy and bewildered side, which effectively makes her a contemporary clown.
Just as the structure, which resembled a typical ancient Greek temple, was being completed and she was preparing to boast about his work on the side, the rain came down. As the minutes of rain slowly collapse the cardboard structure, she collapses to the side and remains helpless. Isn't this how we build our buildings, our surroundings; cardboard shelters for the homeless, refugee camps, earthquake tents, war-torn cities; isn't this how we, the people, have always done it throughout history; and isn't it always because of the "dark clouds hovering above us" that our constructions fall to the ground; because of those dark clouds that could be a real hurricane, but could also represent rising fascism, relentless ultra-liberalism...?
To make matters worse, thick smoke covered the stage along with the rain, making the surroundings invisible. When the storm subsides and the smoke clears, we realise that she has disappeared.
So, this marks the end of the first part of the triology La Trilogie des contes immoraux (pour Europe). Its creator, Phia Ménard, is one of the most unique and unconventional artists in the world of performing arts today.
Ménard is unusual because her work defies categorisation. Dance? Theatre? Performance? Contemporary circus? Magic? Puppet theatre? None of the above alone. Like Dimitris Papaioannou, Ménard draws inspiration from the plastic arts (formerly “fine arts”) on the one hand, and the visual arts (post-1960 art forms such as arte povera, land art, performance art, and installations) on the other. What distinguishes essentially Ménard from other artists of contemporary performing arts scene is that not only she incorporates unconventional materials such as air, water, and ice into her shows, but also she allows them to transform in their own natural way during the piece. Perhaps I can briefly describe Ménard as an artist who creates works in which the performers are moving through the installations that are transformed on stage.
I first met Ménard ten years ago at a show I happened to see in Paris: L'aprés-midi d'un foehn (The Afternoon of a Foehn*). As the title suggests, the piece was inspired by Debussy's famous composition L'aprés-midi d'un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun). In this piece, Ménard makes rubbish bags dance in the air, almost without touching them, like a magician, thanks to the air currents she controls with fans. The piece is intended for children over the age of 4, but it is a moving experience for people of all ages. In the years that followed, I also had the opportunity to see Ménard's Vortex, another piece using fans, but this time designed for over 18s and performed by Ménard herself, and Et in Arcadia ego, created especially for the Paris Opera Comique, based on the compositions of Jean-Philippe Rameau. As these pieces reinforced my admiration for Ménard, I attended the final performance of the Trilogy of Immoral Tales (for Europe) at the Theatre du Nord in Lille at the beginning of April last year.
The first part of the trilogy, Maison Mère (Mother House), was first staged in Kassel in 2017 as an example of performance art as part of documenta 14, entitled Learning from Athens and Parliament of Bodies. As is well known, for the first time in this edition of the five-yearly documenta, a second city, Athens, was designated as an equivalent venue to Kassel, and the artists invited to the exhibition chose one of the two cities to produce and exhibit works inspired by both. Ménard was one of the artists who chose Athens.
The completion of the trilogy, with the addition of the second and third parts, took place at the Avignon Festival in the summer of 2020. Since then, the trilogy, which lasts a total of three hours - the first 75 minutes, the second 95 minutes and the last 10 minutes - has toured various cities in France and Europe, ending its journey in Lille.
After Maison Mère, which I interpret as feminine because of its horizontal architectural effect, and which is destroyed by nature, in the second part, entitled Temple Père (The Father's Temple), Menard builds a tower on the stage, this time as a masculine, phallic construction. This time the structure is not built by a single person, as in the first part, but by a group of four slaves working under a master. And it is erected in all its majesty at the centre of the stage, while the slave workers, moving in parallel to the aesthetics of the machines that repeat the same movements endlessly and inexorably, are led by a ruler who dominates and oppresses them with ceremonial gestures. It was as if I were watching the helplessness and subjugation of human against nature in the first part and against the ruling class in the second.
The third section, entitled La recontre interdite (Forbidden Relationship), seemed to reveal the fragility and vulnerability of the human being; Ménard himself descended naked from the top of the tower structure, gliding down between the structures that make up the tower. The contrast between the phallic, dark structure and the naked body was striking. So, this part of the piece becomes even more layered in terms of masculinity-femininity, exploitation-defence and transformation.
As Ménard reached the floor, a huge transparent curtain descended from above with a sudden and violent sound reminiscent of thunder, separating the entire stage with the tower structure from the front, leaving the naked body on the audience side. When Ménard sprayed the curtain with fire extinguishers placed at the sides of the stage, black liquid came out instead of white foam. The image of the towering structure behind the transparent curtain darkened.
Perhaps fragile, perhaps vulnerable, perhaps naive, but certainly looking around with fresh eyes, the "new human" did not extinguish and save the fire of the old order, which represented all forms of oppression and exploitation; on the contrary, s/he added fuel to the fire and buried it in the darkness of history. For only in this way can a new environment be built from the ground up...
Applause for La Trilogie des contes immoraux (pour Europe)
©Mehmet Kerem Özel, April 7th 2024, Théâtre du Nord - Lille
*Warm wind blowing in the Alps.
[The original version in Turkish was published in unlimited.]
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