Six pm on a crisp and sunny-enough Fall Saturday at Théâtre de l’Aquarium in the bois de Vincennes, drinks and snacks abounding. We’re seeing Fusées (“Rockets”) by Jeanne Candel.
The house is full, crowded even.
Fusées is inspired by a 1995 documentary by Andrei Ujică called Out of the Present, the story of Sergei Krivalev’s the events surrounding an unplanned and near fatal 300-day stay on the Mir space station in 1991-92. Candel strands two guys, Kyril and Boris, in a rocket ship.
Looking around, Karine remarks that there are some kids, but not so many as you’d expect for a thing about rockets.
She nudges me, Aren’t stories about rockets for kids?
I usually take it that a performance for spectators ranging from the age of reason to the age of despair – not just kids – will be at least coherent. The “from 6 years old” on the Fusées blurb had puzzled me. I tell Karine I double checked to make sure that it wasn’t part of a children’s program.
The blurb, the rockets kept me wondering, though. Are there so many theater performances figuring rocket ships for kids under six? Are there so few plays for people over six set in rocket ships? After all, performance, even the old hoary talky classic plays I was trained up with, tend to be topical. Doesn’t daily mention of rockets for each day of the nearly 70 years now that I’ve been too chicken my quietus to make make rockets eminently topical?
Apparently, not.
A quick internet search shows that, no, there are no or virtually no theater performances set in a rocket ship and dealing with the realities and concerns likely appertaining to and generated by the typical environment thereof.
In the same way as Yorick’s skull is a conversation piece to the great quietus, rocket ships are launch pads for adventure and escape. Death happens in Elsinore castle and adventure and escape in Imagination; when it comes down to it, there are very few theatrical places in proportion to the places in which human experience happens; it strikes me that throne rooms are common-enough sets in contemporary theater performance and film.
That seems odd to me and as my psychoanalyst used to say, What’s odd is worth exploring. For instance, consider that, although the American Automobile Association estimates the average US person spends two hours a day, or 48 years of life, in their car – many of us even live, have lived or lived in a car – there are no or virtually no theater performances set in a car.
How does car space shape expression and why can’t Yorick’s skull figure on the dashboard? Anyhow, come to think of it, it’s hard to imagine a set that more perfectly represents the shape of contemporary life than a place where I’m constantly in danger of wheeling into very nearby sharp objects and somebody, likely a complete asshole or a deus ex machina, controls my air hose.
Anyhow, getting avid spectators wondering about space, place and set, is only the first good thing Candel’s Fusées does.
It entertains you, rolls out classic-contemporary-performance-like, dramatic but non-traumatizing, invites rather than drags a spectator in to enjoy a mix of the old and new theatrical gesture and prop on a stage that is a rocket ship:
People moving a topless box piano and a big thing under a blue plastified tarp.
The big thing under the blue tarp reveals as a rather small, vaguely antique Punch & Judy-style puppet stage.
The four cast members, each bearing casts and bandages witness to the spurns and whips of danger and adventure [involved in riding rockets] and assisted in their stories by such plastic hand props as a commercially available Mister Sun, use the little (and now crowded) stage to explain the origins of the world. Matters touched upon include black hole theory and the Big Bang along with the longings of the wild beasts to get on up and out into the vast Nothing-something.
Segue to the rocket, riders oppressed by induced gravity before forced to sort of moonwalk, which one will be doing from now on in rocket ships because there’s zero gravity. O! What terrible lightness of being on a rocket ship!
Cosmonaut Kyril is of course, nervous, taciturn to cosmonaut Boris’ cheerful, helpful.
Boris does the rocket’s whooshing and handles the passive-aggressive Q&A, ground control’s tergiversation and a competent and, therefore, sinister, AI, a self-modulating Whirr 45-89 Series, I believe. Boris of course beats the AI by tapping fast into a keyboard; the rocket ship gets moving.
They get someplace. As we all will.
Kyril disappears into a fold in space. Boris discovers a whole new universe. To paraphrase Ry Cooder, that’s just how things go on a rocket ship. Or so I’ve been invited to gaily imagine.
In addition to entertaining, with all this skill and noos, Candel manages to, as she says she intends to, “… Mime advanced technology, re-play the conquest of space with stage props and music… mak[e] an allegory of the indomitability of theatrical art, of its craft and of its space… The theater… in spite of difficulties, fragilities… even wobbling on a tightrope, is powerful stuff.
Fusées is theatrical performance at its best.
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I saw “Fusées” at Théâtre de l’Aquarium, 14 September 2024 with Vladislav Galard, Sarah Le Picard, Jan Peters and Claudine Simon as cast. Théatre de l’Aquarium has been operated by the cie La vie brève and co-managed by Jeanne Candel, S. Achache, Marion Bois and Elaine Méric since July 2019. The theater has as thematic the entanglement of music and theater. Jeanne Candel also works with the Opéra Comique, Paris.
Mr. Daninson's concatenation is a delight. The critic himself becomes art.
Posted by: Kyril Alexander Calsoyas | September 21, 2024 at 08:26 PM