If film and real-time video have become common tools of playwrights and directors to explore theater’s fundamental dialogue between reality and fiction, two plays in the Festival d’Automne challenge notions regarding the use of the filmic and photographic image on stage. In “Un Magicien,” director Marc Feld has chosen to make a documentary about the life of the prestidigitator Pierre Edernac as the basis for a philosophical reflection on illusion, while in “Shadows,” the Sydney-based photojournalist William Yang employs slides to construct a commentary on exile and the marginalization of Aborigines and German immigrants to Australia. Both shows are noteworthy for their deliberate implementation of documentary images for the purpose of creating a fiction on stage. Is there such a thing as reality theater?
“Shadows” takes its form from that earliest of “reality programs” familiar to many a middle-class family: the home slide show. It is a medium for which the 60-year-old Yang has earned international recognition, with pieces chronicling his youth as a third generation Chinese on a tobacco plantation in North Queensland (“The North,” 1996), his homosexuality and experience of the AIDS epidemic in Sydney’s Gay community (“Sadness,” 1992) and his grappling with identity and family history (“Blood Links,” 1999). In these and other shows, the soft-spoken, vaguely mischievious photographer acts as a timorous guide through hundreds of images documenting his travels and personal search for meaning.
Yang, who struggled in the early ’70s with playwrighting before turning to photojournalism, has likened his shows to the monologues of the American actor Spalding Grey, but whereas Grey’s stories bring to life a fictional world in the minds of his listeners, Yang purports to show a reality to what he has called the “captive audiences” at these guided photo exhibits. “Shadows” continues in this vein: commissioned by the Adelaide and Sydney theater festivals to explore the theme of reconciliation, the show treats issues familiar from Yang’s earlier works, such as colonialism, assimilation and marginalization. But, whatever their subject, or the number of images used to document them, these stories are necessarily fictions, as seen through the eyes of the artist. In Yang’s theater pieces, the line between life and art is tenuous and the result isn’t always satisfying on either level.
“Un Magicien” examines another problematic entirely. While the show pretends once again to present through documentary footage some exterior reality, in this case the life of the magician Pierre Edernac — his childhood in Paris’ 15th arrondissement, his early experiences with magic at the Lycée Michelet in Vanves, the beginning of his career in Nice, his travels and pedagogical work — that reality is troubled by the very nature of Edernac’s métier, which is illusion itself. Marc Feld’s film seems to answer the question that lies at the heart of his show: How can the fiction of theater reveal the reality of the fiction that is magic? Only by retreating to the terra firma of Edernac’s lived, material world and from there showing in what sense magic disturbs that reality. As indeed it does, to judge from Feld’s inventive scenography, a kind of “cabaret imaginaire” drawing on his training with Jacques Lecoq and Annie Fratellini, where the prestidigitator in question appears in the flesh — stepping as it were out of the film itself -— to demonstrate little gems of legerdemain. Meanwhile, the double narratives of Edernac’s life and work are brought face to face with philosophical and scientific questions concerning the nature of reality and the subject’s perception of it, through a poetic text constructed from the discourses of various disciplines (physics, mathematics, history...). Where does reality end and fiction begin? As in Yang’s piece, that question is unanswerable, but in “Un Magicien” the pleasure of this clever little show is enhanced by the mystery it creates.
“Shadows,” Nov 17-23, Mon & Wed-Sat 8:30pm, Sun 5pm, Pompidou Center, pl Georges Pompidou, 1er, M&Mac251; Rambuteau, 9,50-14E, tel: 01 44 78 12 33.
“Un Magicien,” Nov 12-23, Wed, Fri & Sat 8:30pm, Thur 7:30pm, Sun 4pm, Théâtre 71 Malakoff, 3 pl du 11 Novembre, Malakoff (92), M&Mac251; Malakoff-Plateau de Vanves, 15.50E/12E, tel: 01 55 48 91 00
