The insoluble pancake

A man hangs suspended in mid-air. His arms are outstretched. He could be a swimmer about to plunge into ocean depths. Except that he is fully clothed, and metres below him is the hard pavement. That he will fall, and fall heavily, on this unforgiving surface seems inevitable, certain, but in this instant this has yet to happen. It is still in the future. Perhaps it may not even happen?

The image is Yves Klein’s “Le Saut dans la Vide”; the man is Klein himself, frozen for an instant above a pavement in the southern suburbs of Paris. We do not know what happens next. A thirty-foot replica of this photograph hangs today from the outside wall of the Centre Pompidou, Beaubourg, in central Paris. It advertises their retrospective of Klein’s work, which will be shown until February of next year. I’ve been there myself to see the show, quite a few times now. I have a “Laissez Passer” for Beaubourg and I’ve been spending a lot of my weekends there. I’ll have to write about the other shows I’ve seen there, at some point.

I didn’t know so much about Klein before I went to see the exhibition, I certainly didn’t know that he died of a sudden heart attack at 34; all pictures of him are pictures of a young man. Before his intersection with the unyielding earth.

Klein invented a colour, “IKB” or” “International Klein Blue”. In exhibition space in Beaubourg there are entire rooms filled with paintings consisting of only this colour. Square canvasses of IKB. But it is a very strange colour. Wikipedia will tell you that it is location in colour space is #002FA7, a simple number, a simple shade of blue on a computer screen. But it is not. It has a luminous, fluorescent quality to it. It avoids one’s direct gaze. The edges of a IKB painting are obscure, it’s contours are difficult to fathom. A component of this colour concentrates the light around entering it, reflects it back as a deep and living blue.

I’d seen the IKB’s before, but never in such quantity. And the rest of the exhibition provided some interesting insights into the rest of Klein’s works, his philosophy based so strongly on the ephemeral and insubstantial. His designs for a city consisting where the buildings have no walls and ceilings. Everything is separated by a thin layer of air blown across the buildings. His endless experiments with flame and fire, the attempt to make a fountain for the Trocadero in Paris consisting of jets of fire and water which intersect and annihilate. Sculptures made from gaslight. His experiments with painting by flame and fire. In one (very funny I have to admit) film one follows the path of gas pipes and tubes — till the end, at once, there is Klein himself holding a canvas before a naked flame. A fireman with a hose stands at the ready, water to cancel fire. Klein even traces the form of women’s bodies against the flames of fire, flesh interposed between canvas and fire.

Just how serious was this man, I wanted to know. I thought of Rothko’s pantings, the colour field artists in America. What relation did they have to Klein’s eternal blue? Was this what Douglas Adams meant when he talked about a ‘superintelligent shade of the colour blue’ (probably not)? Enough to have tried. Enough to have tried. Meanwhile, Klein’s body still hangs suspended above the street, detached from the steel and glass surface of Beaubourg, and the future has yet to happen.

Over the past month, I have made two trips to the “Theatre Bouffes du Nord” with my friends to see two performances of short plays by Mr. Samuel Beckett. You know it is the Beckett centenary now, so there are many performances of his works in Paris. In London, I’ve heard, Harold Pinter is making probably his last ever stage performance in Krapp’s Last Tape.

Beckett of course is in that very small group of people who were successful in a language other than the language of their birth. Nabokov comes to mind. Beckett translated his own books back to English, from French; he said that process improved his style. He wanted to pare things down, to produce words which were simple and unaffected. Passing his words through the hand-wringer of a double translation perhaps was a way to achieve this.

The Theatre Bouffes du Nord is itself an amazing venue. From outside, arriving from metro “porte de la chapelle” (behind the Gare du Nord) one sees, on the other side of the street, what seems to be an ordinary row of Parisian apartments. Tall narrow buildings. Except that at the first floor level one sees the words “Theatre” and of course there is normally a large crowd of people standing outside, waiting. The theatre is completely integrated into the apartments around it. Or rather, the apartment buildings have grown up around the theatre. It was derelict for twenty years before Mr. Peter Brook took over in the early seventies. And did not restore anything! The theatre was left exactly as it had been; the seats were changed, but the rest remained untouched. One imagined that a lot of things had been said and seen and heard inside those walls, ancient tired air, old emotions…

The space inside the theatre is strange, and it is not like any theatre I have been to before. I am reminded a little of the unfinished Cathedrale de Beauvais: the stage is foreshortened, and the building itself is very very high. Each row of balcony reaching up to the domed glass ceiling is encrusted with centuries old intricately carved stucco. The stage is narrow, and there is almost no distance between it and where the audience sits. One is actually sitting on the stage. And behind that, there are tall walls painted a rough sienna brown.

Each performance I saw there lasted one hour and consisted of three short pieces written by Mr. Beckett. The very first was classic Beckett: a man who can’t walk (he is confined to a wheelchair) and a man who can’t see (he has his cane) confront each other. Both need the other in a very fundamental way — to see and move — but neither can stand to be with the other. What to do? They cannot escape. They run away from each other but always return. They are tender and violent. Blasts of absurd vaudevillian Beckettian humour provide relief for what would otherwise be an insupportable situation…

I won’t describe the other five pieces here. Just to mention that I felt that the first evening’s performances I found perhaps more interesting, and certainly easier to follow for me (well okay I admit, one of three pieces was without words – remember all this is in French!). But what was most amazing about the first evening was the lighting. Long rays of light fell on the sienna walls of the theatre. Somehow they seemed to change colour! At one time, they were a deep red, the colour of morning, the dawn. But then there was a clear colour, ochre; the soil of tuscany perhaps a little further away. A midday sun. This all happened before my eyes, but in a way I didn’t fully understand, I couldn’t really comprehend what was happening.

At several times all the lights went out in the theatre, we found ourself in a profound darkness. But not all that profound; from the high domed window, a weak pale glow filtered in from the night-time clouds over Paris, illuminated by the light from a million streetlights. Then a spotlight would come on, and it would illuminate a human face. Behind that, the century-old shape-shifting walls of the theatre. In that darkness, it was quite remarkable how one’s entire universe shrinks right down to that one point of reference, a human face in the void. I listened hard to each word because remember there was the filter of language to be traversed. Time, of course, stretched out in a very curious manner, under this weight of light and concentration. The hour was finished much sooner than one might have thought it would.
Technorati Tags: Paris, Beckett, Theatre

Last night I was at the “Cite de la Musique” to see Steve Reich and Musicians. I’ve been a fan of Mr. Reich for many years now, ever since a friend of mine loaned me a copy of Different Trains. Before I moved to Paris I had never heard any of his music actually performed (too much time spent in remote locations far from anywhere worth being…) But here in Paris his compositions are a regular fixture, and I must have been to at least six or so concerts in the last three years which featured one or two of his works. Last night one had the unique opportunity to hear Steve Reich’s music performed by Steve Reich himself, and his ensemble that have been playing with him for almost forty years I guess…

The “cite” was full to bursting point. I’ve never seen so many people there before. Leaving the metro 5 at the porte de pantin I was amazed to be accosted by people offering to sell me a ticket for the show. This never happened at any other concert I’d been to! Obviously this was a big event. I took my seat with two friends just before the concert began. The lights dimmed, the audience fell silent, and then – all the musicians got up and left. There had been some confusion over who got which set of notes! One of the violinists reappeared and ostentatiously placed a thick set of music on a stand and left again; a few seconds later his colleagues reappeared.

The first piece they played was the extremely moving Daniel Variations, a piece of music written for the journalist Daniel Pearl who was executed by Pakistani militants in 2002. The first time this music has ever been performed in France. Like in Different Trains, Reich scores his music to follow the cadences of speech – this case, words taken from the Book of Daniel; and words spoken by Daniel Pearl on the video of his own execution. The phrase, “My name is Daniel Pearl” is sung a dozen, two dozen times. ” My name is Daniel Pearl”. How could those people have done this thing? Pearl himself was a violinist; and when those words are sung, the string section comes to life, it’s melody shadows the words of Daniel Pearl. “My name is Daniel Pearl (I’m a Jewish American from Encino, California)”. Listening to Reich’s music I really felt it as something vital and living, a statement against the stupidity and pointlessness of the loss of Daniel Pearl’s life. Not all a requiem.

The intermission — and then Music for Eighteen Musicians. For this one, Mr. Reich came out from behind the mixing desk where he’d been stationed before, and took turns at the piano and xylophone. Looking at his musicians one certainly gets the impression that they’ve all been together on this musical journey for a long time. What I found myself thinking was — my gosh! this is the ultimate expression of Steve Reich’s music — by Steve Reich himself! The piece is quite long, and certainly one needs a certain kind of determination to remain concentrated throughout the entire time. For those of you who know Mr. Reich’s music, this one is particularly hypnotic, pulsating, yes, say it — minimalist — but at the same time it is full of all those wonderful contrapuntal structures that a hard-core Bach listener like me likes so much. At one wonderful point in the performance, Mr. Reich and three of his collaborators all play together on the same xylophone! At the same time, I was certain that one guy near the back of the mini-orchestra played the same note for the entire 58 minutes….

At the end of performance, Reich and his musicians were rewarded by rapturous applause. I felt a need to stand up and applaud too. Thanks Mr. Reich and happy seventieth birthday!

Before I left for the Germany I was at the cinema — I went to see Antonioni’s The Passenger (the English title is much better than the Italian or French one, if you ask me). The film, apparently, has not been in cinemas for a decade or so, and was re-released last year. It was on at one of my favourite cinemas, Le Champo, so I went along. For the very last projection. The one at 21.45, at the dead end of the day. And just like the other films of his that I’d seen, I feel a need to record here what I have seen.

The film is in English, and in colour. Mr. Jack Nicholson plays a reporter travelling through the remote wastes of Africa in search of important people, leaders of the resistance. That one great interview which could explain everything. But he finds nothing. His targets are elusive, they disappear. The sands shift and he is lost thousands of miles from where he should be. Antonioni, of course, pulls the camera back, we see the dunes and desert wastes, and hear the harsh breath of wind across the sands, see Nicholson’s desparation in the midst of this void.

Somehow — we are never sure how — he find his way back to his hotel, a small village, a few stone walls lost in the sand. He calls on his neighbour, a man he’d spoken to for a few minutes and finds — the man is dead. And he notices something, looking at his passport — he resembles the dead man, just a little. Enough to pass for him in this land far from white man. Surely this man’s life is simpler than his? He decides that he is the dead man, that the dead man is him. He lifts the dead man’s appointment book and sees the journeys he will have to make.

This idea is the core of Antonioni’s film. Does it really matter who you are, actually? From very early in the film it becomes clear that the answer is no, really it does not. Nicholson’s new identity is just as marked as his old one. That the film can only have one possible ending is very clear.

Every frame of the film is as carefully framed as a painting. Nicholson crosses ocean waters in a cable car, is suspended alone above the blue waters, unsupported. The film proceeds at slow, glacial pace but this does not matter as there is so much to look at, the buildings and people, the long shots full of space and distance. Nicholson arrives at each destination marked in the appointment book to find one empty square after another. No-one arrives. He waits for Godot. But others know who he is now. At the end, for the last frames of the film, a long unbroken shot carefully takes in many details over the course of almost ten minutes. It is a perfectly choreographed termination to Mr. Nicholson’s doomed trajectory. A great film, as great as any of the other Antonionis I have seen.