I heard he sang a good song, I heard he had a style / And so I came to see him …/ He’d found my letters and read each one out loud…/ Telling my whole life … / Killing me softly …
– Killing me Softly with His Song, Roberta Flack (1973)
François Chaignaud’s dance performance Soufflette – that's “slap”, “blister” – whatever he means…
I got there, but late. Hurried into a blackness so complete I was sure a misstep would be the very first of my final, inevitable, long, painful plunge into Hell.
I dove into the first seat my hand could claw out of the obscurity, threw myself in, sat up straight as a prairie dog, hands on knees, and looked down on a flower-bedecked, human-crowded stage bathed in very bright white light.
What I was expecting as I sat attentive was something humorless: between a ribald take off on a Mafia funeral and a winking, nodding, transvestite Black Mass – “Camp”. But what Soufflette gave me was a brilliant, delicate, meta-portrait of visual and symbolic transgression. Through a Stonewall prequel.
In the bar just after the show, my friend Wan, whose gentle machinations had somehow overcome my firm intention not to see Chaignaud’s latest offering, asked me, cute little moon-face actually shiny with pleasure, if, after all, Soufflette wasn’t one of those sacred masses I’ve been on about lately?
Soufflette’s performance success is thanks in no small part to the Zen-master capacity of Carte Blanche, the Norway national contemporary dance troupe, to follow a choreographer’s thought to its essence, wherever that leads. This capacity was also on display last year at the Centre Pompidou with Bouchra Ouizgen’s Jerada during the Festival d’automne 2018.
But now that I’ve sat back and pondered, I think that Soufflette’s success was François Chaignaud alone, coming into his own, his ability to distill an essence.
That there is an essence isn’t easy for me to admit – until Soufflette, I’d never believed “camp” had an esthetic content. I do now.
To the Stonewall prequel.
Back when one could be a “notorious homosexual”, my eldest brother was. In those days, a favorite Saturday night amusement of the Columbus, Ohio, police was to go to a gay bar and beat the shit out of a patron or two, enjoy a little sweaty-palmed fear, maybe exact a blowjob on the sly. After a stint in the infantry in Vietnam, this customary amusement had come to seem unacceptable to my brother. Also, Steve had become what we used to call “nervous”, up-stress on ner and a bit explosive.
So, feeling he was both notoriously homosexual and too learned in sudden violence, Steve was more willing to complain. So, he had asked me to write angry letters about these police balls to everybody we could think of; in fact we’d started a little campaign. The dear fellow! He could hardly write a shopping list. That little failing, along with never, ever, being too drunk to fuck, had got him washed out of the college and sluiced into that old slop basin of the American dream, the army.
This must have been after he’d made the misstep that set him on the first misstep of his inevitable long plunge into Hell, but I once ran across some notes he’d made for a novel. It ran something like this: “Assuring himself it was truly empty, S. smashed the bottle against his father’s ugly angry growling mug. He watched satisfied as the latter fell lifeless. S. turned on his heel and walked into the night, not fearing knowing caring if the old bastard were dead or if he be were breathing. S. knew he’d be forever into the deadly Maw before an Oedipal re-action set upon him …”
Steve died of AIDS in 1989, I think it was, or maybe -88.
Taking a break from slapping the old typewriter keys, Steve and I were on the back porch, chatting over the equivalent of what would be a bit later something like “the fundamentals of queer”.
As I recall, he gabbled some absurdity about the Cockettes, and “Camp”. Destabilizing a boob with a rhetorical dose of Cockettes is one thing, I replied, sharply. The Cockettes aren’t Camp, anyhow, I continued. They are social satire. This “Camp” stuff is quite another – camp is a cultural support to the bourgeois order! “Outrageous”, I sneered. “Transgressive”, I snickered. Indeed, I huffed. Liberace! I spat. Pretence it’s your nose when it’s your cock!
Steve blabbered the 60s equivalent of “Camp is a way of getting queer sexual space. Peacock extravagance is the theater of the oppressed queer spirit – Mirabile dictu! Salvador Dali!”.
“Camp”, I hissed, is men doing a particularly oppressive-repulsive mimic of a “feminine” gender trope!
“Camp” is a way of getting in the good graces, just for a minute, mind, of a lubricious lynch mob!
“Camp” is sexual black face, I cried, theatrically.
That caught his attention. Steve was dead down on racism, so when the idea struck his brain that I thought camp and racism were connected, he shut his trap. No longer wanted to win the argument. Just in case I might be right.
So, it’s true, after all. We never do step into the same river twice. Me neither.
On 13 June 2019, at the MC93, avenue Lénine, Bobigny, France, François Chaignaud, with and through the performers of Carte Blanche, took “Camp” from the oppressively ridiculous to the touchingly sublime. I never thought I’d see that or that it was even possible… Nor, either, to turn “Killing me Softly with his Song” into more than a memory.
SOUFFLETTE • François Chaignaud with Carte Blanche (Norwegian National Company of Contemporary Dance ) • 75 minutes • MC93, 13 June • Rencontres choregraphiques internationales en Seine Saint Denis 2019
François Chaignaud (Cie vlovajobpru – with Cécilia Bengolea) performance calendar
Carte Blanche (Norwegian National Company of Contemporary Dance) performance calendar
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