Further Adventures in Live Performance

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Bougeurs et trembleurs,

I haven't suffered an overdose of creative self-expression like last night's since I went to art school in the early 1970s. (And if any of you say you recall my having said I miss the experience of art school in the early 1970s, either you're hallucinating or you're a liar.)

Gwen told me she'd be performing at the same theater near the Place des Fêtes that Sandra's baby has been known to frequent, and though I felt improperly attired, not having yet had the chance to locate a tee-shirt that said, "Je ne fumerai pas dans le bac à sable si vous n'amenez pas votre enfant au théâtre" (I won't smoke in the sandbox if you don't bring your child to the theater), I was delighted to go. Gwen is an extraordinary performer—a jazz singer whose talents I've been loathe to write about before because I can't come up with a description to do her justice. Whether singing a familiar jazz standard or an obscure gospel hymn, she's astonishing on stage, with an incredible vocal range and an infectious energy. She's absolutely electric, vibrating from within even when still, yet evincing a center of calm when at her most frenetic. And she can get very frenetic.

Her appearance last night was no disappointment, a ten-minute improvisation with her dance instructor, Elsa, and the drummer from Sandra and Julien's last performance. Gwen entered the theater imitating a freight train, hissing steam. Then, crying "All aboard!" she launched into an old Peter Yarrow/Paul Stuckey number styled after a negro spiritual, in a solemn a cappella moaning…

This train…
done carried my mother…
well, this train…

Gwen took long pauses between the lines, as if she was waiting for the words to find their way from deep inside her and bubble up to the surface…

This train…
done carried my mother…
well, this train …

With Gwen center stage, Elsa appeared from the side and approached her as if pulled, physically, by the sound of Gwen's voice.

This train, done carried my mother
my mother, my father, my sister and my brother
this train, done carried my mother, well this train…

Her tempo quickened and she and Elsa faced each other. While Gwen sang, Elsa danced as if she were a marionette whose strings were being jerked by the rhythm of Gwen's words, and then the drummer started in and Gwen and Elsa just went wild as if possessed, and the initial plaintiveness of the spiritual dissolved into a joyous, crazy, raucous frenzy.

When they finished, the audience went nuts applauding, and well they should have, because it was just stupendous. It was wildly creative and simultaneously funny and moving, a combination I don't understand how one arranges or choreographs for, but from witnessing it in Gwen's previous engagements and in Sandra and Julien's dance that Elsa had conceived and directed, I know isn't accidental.

But Gwen and Elsa's performance was the last of the evening, and Gwen shouted her initial "All aboard!" after 10:30 p.m.—long after the train that I wished done carry me—home—had left the station. Because aside from this spectacular finale and the act that immediately preceded my friends’—two shirtless, contortionist break dancers who whirled themselves into pretzels accompanied by a young man who recited the articles and advertisements from a tabloid newspaper in a beat-box, forward-and-back turntable-scratching style—the rest of the program was at best lackluster and was at worst right out of Alfred University circa 1974, had all Alfred's ceramic arts majors taken up modern dance. The motley assortment of entertainment began at the very un-artfully early hour of 6:45 p.m., and performances took place in various corners of the multi-room theater building over the next four hours.

First up were two middle-aged men with shaved heads, wearing jock straps over nylon track pants, who to space-age techno music danced the roles of space explorers in a wayward rocketship. This was represented by a seven-foot cube of steel tubing, its walls formed by a criss-crossing of bungee cords in which were entangled a couple of dozen G.I. Joe dolls in various military get-ups, adventurer costumes, and cowboy suits. The two space cowboys swam in slo-mo through their simulated weightless environment, making emergency announcements in futuristic-computer voices and picking up random G.I. Joes and waving them back and forth while making whhzzzzhh-ing sounds (which, as all boys know, indicates that your G.I. Joe flies really, really fast).

Some time after I exhausted all hope of finding answers to the question "What the fuck??" that was begged by this spectacle, the music segued into something less techno-sci-fi and more techno-gay-dance-club, and the pair donned boxing gloves and head guards, thus transforming their bungee-and-steel space station into a bungee-and-steel sparring ring in which they first did a little pole dancing like the girls down at the Badda-bing do, and then re-created the slow-motion fight scenes from Raging Bull, but without the sweat and blood, the crisp black-and-white cinematography, or any of the drama Scorcese offered attendees of the film version.

After they had sparred for a few minutes, and their last right-left right-left jab-jab ended in a sexually ambivalent embrace, the pair stepped apart and in an apt metaphor for the artistic masturbation their performance embodied, they each reached down into their jockstraps. But rather than stroking their cocks they instead pulled dental protectors from their crotch protectors and inserted them (in their mouths) for some final bit of symbolism that in all honesty escaped me. A more literal interpretation might be that they feared violence by their patience-stretched audience. I have no idea. (And to be truthful, their audience was far more generous than I am being, enthusiastic in their appreciation of all the evening's performers. I admit that only I was the crab.)

A long intermission followed, during which attendees had a choice of listening to an “intervention musicale à l’harmonica” (which is exactly what it sounds like) or stepping outside to smoke with a couple of other artists on the program, two young men who had hung a large canvas on a wall in the courtyard and were covering it with spray paint. The burning cigarettes dangling from their lips and from those of the theatergoers as the small outdoor space filled with volatile paint fumes added some otherwise-lacking suspense to the evening.

Upon my return to the auditorium, two solo dancers wordlessly challenged me to endure them until Gwen’s promised appearance. The first did a dance I can only describe as an interpretion of the hypothetical existence of an unlucky love child borne of Anna Pavlova and Marcel Marceau, in which said offspring inherits the dancing talents of his father and the miming talents of his mother. (If this was indeed the motivation for this dance, it was sheer brilliance.) The second, by a woman who was a much more gifted dancer, but who occasionally reminded me of the character in the Jules Pfeiffer cartoons who was always offering up a dance to some modern-day neurosis or political situation, was simply way too long.

One more intermission to inhale paint fumes and risk self-immolation with a much needed nicotine fix, and then a drawn out performance piece (I won't call it dance) in which a woman wearing nothing but a 20 x 40-foot satin tarpaulin that completely covered the stage ever-so-slowly rose from the floor where she lay as the audience filed in to take their seats, reciting a long list of first names of people who may or may not have known, know, or will know each other, winding the enormous fabric around her all the while, and I was inspired to choreograph my own performance, “A Dance to the Stay-at-Home Parisian.”

And tonight, I am doing just that. (Not developing a dance, but staying home.) And that’s my latest news from here, where the daylight already lasts late into the evening, the weather is warming up, the public gardens are a-riot with blooming flowers, and Spring has greatly improved the mood of the average Parisian.

Profitez des beaux jours,

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