Because their latest work
for Big Dance Theater was co-commissioned by the French Institute/Alliance
Français and Les Subsistances in Lyon, co-directors Annie-B Parson and Paul
Lazar began exploring possible French source material. They gravitated to the
influential films of the Nouvelle Vague, but instead of renting DVDs, they read
the screenplays. They made that their focus, Parson explained recently,
“because I felt that stylistically, the films are so powerful visually that
there would be no place for me in it. So I wanted some vestige or artifact from
that period.”
They read and rejected
quite a few screenplays before landing on Cléo
From 5 to 7, Agnes Varda’s first feature, made in 1961. It follows a young,
modestly successful pop singer through the early evening hours as she awaits
the potentially dire results of a medical examination. “With a lot of the
scripts, I couldn’t relate to the subject matter at all,” Parson said. “Cléo was the first one that wasn’t about
an affair, or a young woman’s coming of age sexually. The subject matter
excited me, and I loved the divisions of time. It’s famous for being in real
time and it’s broken up in funny places, in surprising places, by chapter
headings.”
Parson and Lazar—she
choreographs, while they share directorial credit— have collaborated on many
distinctive, often idiosyncratic works for BDT. What they share is that each conjures
up a specific world, and incorporates a varied, blend of elements—from theater,
dance music and now video—to bring these imaginative worlds to vivid life on
stage. For this piece, Comme Toujours
Here I Stand, they included all of the screenplay’s dialogue, while
layering in “off-camera” scenes and conversations involving the actress who
portrays Cléo.
“We’re using the obstacles
of staging a script in a theatrical form to make a new piece. So it’s an
adaptation of a screenplay,” Parson said. An array of constantly changing
costumes by Claudia Stephens allude to early ‘60s chic (large sunglasses for
many characters!) while video by Jeff Larson plays a crucial role in propelling
the drama and providing the shifts between “on” and “off” camera situations.
The creative team and
performers, most of them BDT veterans like Molly Hickok, who portrays Cléo,
were in Lyon for an extended residency last year, so Comme Toujours benefited from a first-hand immersion in France
itself. Their experiences making the piece there fed into the “off-camera”
sequences, just as Parson’s observation that “Lyon is filled with ancient
stairs that go up the sides of the hills” influenced the inclusion of a rolling
staircase that is a central set piece.
The film’s title, Parson explained,
incorporates a European expression referring to the time of day when people
conducted their romantic liaisons. While others were out conducting their
affairs, she suggests, the singer “was having an affair with death.” Petulant
and self-dramatizing, Cleo veers between mundanity and mortality, with the
streets, faces and overheard conversations of Paris reflecting and influencing
her moods.
The meticulously charted
time sequence of the film, following Cléo, her confidante/personal assistant,
the man in her life, her songwriting team, a free-spirited artists’ model and a
man Cléo encounters in a park, actually concludes at 6:30 p.m. It is set, also
very specifically, on the first day of summer in 1961.
Parson and Lazar
scrupulously avoided viewing the film itself, focusing on how to interpret the
screenplay itself for the stage. This led to some challenging instances, Parson
recalled. “There’s a part at the end, where one of the characters says this
long piece of text which makes absolutely no sense. It turns out, when I
finally did see the movie, it’s a song. And I didn’t know that. So I turned it
into something completely different. So that’s the beauty of not knowing; it
gave me the possibility of being trapped into finding my own solutions.”
Comme Toujours Here I
Stand
Oct. 1-4, 7-10, The Kitchen, 512 W. 19 St. (betw. 10th & 11th Aves.), 212-255-5793; 8, $15.
