It’s been 7 hours and 15 days since you look your love away/
Since you’ve been gone I can do whatever I want/I can see whomever I choose/I can eat my dinner in a fancy restaurant/Put my arms around any girl I see/
But nothing I said nothing can take away these blues/'Cause nothing compares/Nothing compares to you
Nothing compares to u, Prince Rogers Nelson (Sinead O’Connor)
It’s the “7 hours” that gets me.
I wake after four or five hours. She is sitting on my chest, her pubis somehow pressing hard on my breast bone, looking down into my face, occupying my interior commentary. I start counting the hours. I remember only later that I’ve been doing this same half-lit heart-crush now for better than two weeks.
This isn’t the only sort of vaguely psychotic repetitive behavior I can get absorbed in. Since the 1980s, I have seen Georg Buchner’s Léonce & Léna and Woyzeck whenever I’ve noticed one or the other’s being staged Paris intra-muros.
Léonce & Léna and Woyzeck started getting regular play in the early 70s, just as I did, perhaps taking the place of the Situationist International. Both pieces have Ur-propos that can be welded into almost any post-1968 conundrum. For love (or is it duty? Or lust? Or congenital idocy?) Private Woyzeck, otherwise a barber, makes himself a guinea pig to a heartless doctor and a slave to a thoughtless hussar. Prince Léonce and Princess Léna both run away from personally untenable situations. Love or its material equivalent is out there, somewhere, but neither Léonce, nor Léna, nor Woyzeck can hide from the tragedy of the situation they were born into.
I was to the MC93 – Maison de Culture of Seine Saint Denis – for a ninth anniversary performance of Alan Platel’s Out of Context for Pina (Bausch), on the evening before the foggy ragged Sunday afternoon I went to see Léonce & Léna at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, to the west of Paris.
Nanterre is the town where`68 broke out, where Situationism bore fruit, where Daniel Cohn-Bendit tapped his finger on a 500-page report on youth and observed that there wasn’t a word about sex in the whole damned thing. ‘Though that moment has been obscured by memory, the tear gas, strikes and street fighting and politics, everything that has really mattered, I think everything that’s happened since then, proves that sex and gender has mattered far more than anything else.
The MC93 made a perfect setting for a tenth anniversary performance of Alan Platel’s Out of Context for Pina (Bausch), which included all the original cast members. Pina Bausch, died suddenly of smoking-related cancer in June 2009, though the piece is for her, not in her memory. If you’ve seen Bausch’s inimitable choreography you’ll see why that must necessarily be so.
There’s a lot of memory in the MC93, an angular bare-concrete slab building, located on the boulevard Lénine in a place called Bobigny. Thanks to Charles De Gaulle airport and its discrete but extensive underground police complex, Bobigny is site of the busiest immigration court in France. Following a foolish confusion of passports in the besotted wake of a morally shocking, day-long, all-night, series of vigorously consensual acts, I was able to create my own high-security memories there.
At the end of Out of Context, a scratchy-voiced version of Prince’s Nothing compares 2 u reminded the cast as well as myself that nothing compares, period. Life just goes on; the performers returned one by one to the seats in the audience from which they’d hopped up onto the stage and begun the piece, becoming spectators to the ghost of their own memories.
I thought, “This play cannot ever be this play again”. A tear ran out of my eye. Probably because I don’t sleep enough.
Kaori Ito, now a much-in-view-performance-dance-choreographer with a babe in arms, was in the original cast of Out of Context. She came and sat back down in the seat next to mine; I asked her after if she felt as moved as I to reckon whatever was done was always finished forever. Ito said she did.
This time, Léonce and Léna seemed about taking your place, no matter what. That’s what I remember. So this. Is the situation now that all the Princes and Princesses, fifty years after ’68, must stand ground, make an end of the old memories while waiting for Léonce & Léna to play again?
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