I was Googling an equivalent for du lard du cochon and ran across the factoid that, before the 18th century, there were two seasons.
From about 4000 BC until then, annual events worth remarking bore holy names such as Saint Répétition or quaint ones such as Awakening of the Groundhog in the different dead languages.
Great, mysterious things then began to happen. Going on into the 18th century, believing firmly that making stuff was understanding it, and sure that anyhow it could all be reconciled to Biblical accounts, people started hairsplitting scientifically. Thus encouraged, taxonomy (phylum, order, genus, species) and industry began to proliferate.
Antonio Vivaldi was in 1723 thereby enabled to add Spring and Fall to our calendar and compose his celebrated Four Seasons concerti. Scrapping the wordy “let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth” his wonderful Seasons formalize a compact and gorgeous “natural world”, which, pretty much, exists to provide the lake and lightning that will henceforth inspire all aspiring Mary Shelleys and their shitty little boyfriends to write their own Frankensteins.
The inconvenience of another take on the world was documented in Best American Poetry/Beyond Words in late Summer, 2019: Sweltering in Paris: Going to ground with Michel Onfray, Greta Thunberg & the death of Descartes.The “natural world” is as difficult to intellectually and morally shake off as its wordier predecessor. And, so much the worse for humanity, it is increasingly more difficult to maintain Nature at anything like service-optimal levels.
Alexandra Lacroix’s dance performance, Entre nous, les saisons (“Between you and me, the seasons”), imagines “the fragility of [human] being” (in the environment) not as an alternative to the beguiling notion of a world all our own but as a more perceptive and sensible way of looking at it: Fragility is U. As a description of material peril and of the human role, “fragility” does a better job of highlighting humanity’s situation in the natural world than “(inter)dependent” and a far better job than “should be responsible”, that’s for sure.
The brilliant part of Alexandra Lacroix’s show is that she knows fragility is about showing and talk always gets to “should”: more do, less words.
The theater is a big hall, a concrete floor, bleacher-bucket seating; the stage is the space between the first row and the wall. To churn up a fragile ambiance, she uses musicians riffing on the Four Seasons with electronic and traditional instruments, amateur rock climbers, and scaffolding. The set is complemented with familiar images of the leafy and green and spectacular natural world projected through the scaffolding and on the back wall and sometimes accompanied by little NPR-tone talking.
The rest is metaphor, symbol, allegory, analogy, what have you.
The climbers clamber and fall and grunt and sweat up around and over scaffolds that give the impression of being stocked on, rather than part of, the set. A couple of the musicians, loosely centered among the scaffold struts and beams try out riffs and phrases and variations on the Seasons concerti. The climbers, singular and together, are absorbed in talk of choices, defeats and successes.
In terms of the rhythm and pace of movement and interaction, sometimes the climbers seem to lead the musicians, sometimes to follow them, sometimes musicians or climbers use the set environment as a sound board or an instrument or a challenge. Seasons is an actor: the concerti have shared History but also personal intimacy – I have stared out the window at the frozen Earth to the rattle of steam heat and Spring. The riffs and phrases and variations bounce against my expectations of Vivaldi, not those I have for the musicians.
In sum, as fragility-awareness training, Lacroix’s piece works really well. I was absorbed into its gentle (very subtly organized) chaos – trying to identify riffs on Vivaldi and mostly failing, for instance; the gentle chaos gently unsettles me, makes me feel my vulnerability, without scaring me. Fear’s an important factor. Low dramatic tension means low resistance to what’s happening. Maybe
my sense of vulnerability implies that the world around can and does act on and without me; it has agency.
Fragility of being, Entre nous les saisons’ gentle chaos suggests, is about me, not about the meanness of the hard hard world. And, when it’s all said and done, what’s about me is about you.
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I saw “Entre nous, les saisons” at Théatre de l’Aquarium, 18 September 2024, directed by Alexandra Lacroix assisted by Raphaëlle Blin, with musicians from l’Ensemble Le Printans et climber/performers Oscar Villamizar Rueda, Sarah Rochereau, Aymeric Schultze. Sound by Jérôme Baillet, video by Jérémie Bernaert and set by Fanny Laplane with assistance from Laura Bauchet.
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