After a summer pause, the By Jove blog resumes this week with the first of two posts by co-artistic director David Bullen, who has been going back to the roots of the company…
This week I stood on a stage and was directed by Ariane Mnouchkine.
I was trembling: both from fear and from exhaustion – the improvisation I had just performed with seven others had been a manic three-minute blur. Our bodies were tired, our hearts were thumping, and we were about to hear what Mnouchkine thought of our efforts. Not much, as it turned out – but it was only day two.
Mnouchkine, for those who haven’t heard of her, is a theatre director and one of the founders of the Théâtre du Soleil. She has worked with the company almost continuously since its formation in 1964 and has directed the bulk of their output. While not especially well known by the British general public – they rarely work over here – the Théâtre du Soleil have produced a steady succession of internationally acclaimed productions, each a theatrical tour-de-force. Mnouchkine – who trained at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq; later alumni include Steven Berkoff, Geoffrey Rush, and Julie Taymor – is now widely recognised as one of the foremost theatre directors in the world.
Both Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil have been major influences on my life. Studying the company’s 1990-1992 Les Atrides, directed by Mnouchkine, was a watershed moment in my undergraduate experience. Not only did I rediscover Greek tragedy – Les Atrides is based on Aeschylus’ Oresteia (Robert Icke’s version of which is currently playing at the Trafalgar Studios in the West End) and Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis – but I saw, for the first time, that it was possible to make theatre in a way that could profoundly seize the imagination and the intellect. This was theatre that boldly challenged both the prevailing dominance of gentle, pseudo-cinematic realism that I was so used to and the ingrained misogyny of Western culture I was becoming increasingly aware of. This was how I wanted to make theatre – and in that realisation I discovered that I wanted to direct. I wanted to be like Mnouchkine.
When, along with other keen friends, I founded By Jove a year after graduating from my BA, Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil were major influences. We wanted to create a theatre ensemble – not a production company – that made exciting, evocative work openly influenced by a feminist, socialist ideology. Even our first London production took a cue from Mnouchkine: like Les Atrides, it was a feminist re-imagining of the Oresteia.
So you can imagine my dual joy and terror when the prospect of working with the woman herself came up earlier this year. Over the last few months, the Théâtre du Soleil have been running their École Nomade in various locations around the world, including Sweden and Chile; now it has come to Oxford. Neither a training programme nor the creation of a performance piece, it is two weeks of intensive workshops led by Mnouchkine and actors from the company. As Mnouchkine explained on the first day, the company don’t have an explicit formula for making theatre, but over the two weeks we would be immersed in the kinds of activities they undertake when developing a show. There are other ways of making theatre, Mnouchkine acknowledged, but here we would do things their way.
Ariane Mnouchkine on the set of ‘Les Naufrages du Fol Espoir’. Photo: Vincent Josse
We are now at the end of the first week with a single day off, looking ahead to seven days straight of intensive workshops. This week began with a baptism of fire – two days of performing improvisation games in small groups. There are just under seventy people involved and only one space: the impressive stage at the North Wall theatre. Each day was taken up with a single, simple game. But – as Mnouchkine said late in the day on Tuesday – their simplicity makes them so very difficult.
The groups take turns on stage, performing for Mnouchkine, the Soleil actors, and the rest of us. The space is theatrically lit and a huge yellow curtain hangs at the back – it is from there that performers enter to begin a scene. The performance area itself is sacrosanct – we are never to casually walk across it “like it is a Starbucks” (Mnouchkine’s words, again) on our way to the dressing rooms or to backstage; nor should we should ever pass through the curtains unless it is in a performance context. This is where we work; or rather, where we play.
Mnouchkine herself sits on a stool in front of the stage, a laptop and a microphone in front of her. She decides on the choice of music that becomes the ‘text’ for each improvisation, and with the mic she urges, adjusts, shapes and encourages each fledging scene. When it comes to feedback, she pulls no punches but is never mean: her notes, precise and insightful, may contain harsh truths but they are pertinent none the less. After my group’s Tuesday performance, she told me that I was not clear (a fact that will amuse By Jove’s actors – “clear” and “not clear” is a constant refrain in our rehearsal room) and that I needed to really see what others in the group were doing. I needed to form a relationship with them, not grab attention. I needed to receive and respond, not think.
All of this was true, in ways I hadn’t realised. We had come up with the idea of an increasingly shaky train carriage filled with people determined to go about their daily lives even as the train grew more and more out of control. I began simply enough, but too quickly I was over-thinking what I was doing: I misinterpreted the actions of the person in front of me and responded in a way that only served to confuse him; more or less everyone else was doing the same. And so our scene failed, even when one of the masterful Soleil actors, Delphine Cottu, stepped in as a pregnant woman about to give birth – we had no relationship to each other, and so the drama was lost. Mnouchkine saw this, and was able to tell us exactly what went wrong for each person.
I remember almost jumping with shock when I turned to see Delphine had entered. Like the other Soleil actors, she is a master of her craft – able to transform into distinct characters, head to toe, in the space of a moment. To see them work together on stage is one of the real treats of the process. In particular, Juliana Carneiro de Cunha – who has worked with the company for decades and played Clytemnestra in Les Atrides – is a sight to behold. She can as quickly and easily become the clumsy buffoon as she can the young, flighty lover. On Wednesday and Thursday we saw this first hand as we watched three of the company’s recent works: Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées) from 2006, Les Éphémères from 2009, and Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir from 2011.
Yet, as a final note to this first of two posts on the École Nomade, a great revelation was that these great actors were not beyond failure themselves. As Mnouchkine sent one of them into a scene to demonstrate what she meant by a particular instruction, she turned to those of us in the auditorium and said: “I do not know if she [the actor] will be able to do it. I do not know if she will fail.” When the scene finished, Mnouchkine gave notes as precise and constructively critical to the Soleil actor as she did to the École participants. The actor told us all afterwards that there were moments in the scene when she had to stop – she had become disconnected and so once more she needed to find her relationship to what was going on.
Even the superhuman Mnouchkine herself has decidedly human moments. At one point during the first day, the music was interrupted by the computer generated voice of a device assistant – something akin to Siri or Cortana – emanating from her laptop. Mnouchkine threw her hands up and cried, “This man is haunting me! He has haunted me since Sweden!” As of the time of writing, neither Mnouchkine nor any of us in the École have been able to switch the voice off.
Mnouchkine and the actors from the Théâtre du Soleil will be part of an open discussion at the Maison Française D’Oxford at 5.30pm on Wednesday 25th September – all our welcome. There will be wine and cheese! Mnouchkine will also be in conversation with Oliver Taplin at 5pm on 2nd October at the Oxford Playhouse.
