PS21 (Chatham, NY)

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    The Passion of Adèle Haenel, an Artist of Fierce Political Conviction

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    Haenel, working with the choreographer-director Gisèle Vienne in “L’Étang,” is trying to “pierce through the surface of things.”The actress Adèle Haenel bristled when asked what drew her to radical art and politics. “The term ‘radical’ is used as a way to discredit protest discourse,” said Haenel, who is best known in the United States for the 2019 art-house hit “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” That was also one of the last feature films she worked on. Since then, she has opted to dramatically alter the course of her life and career.Over the past few years, Haenel, 34, has become one of the most visible and committed faces of the #MeToo movement in France. In May, she wrote an open letter published in the influential French culture weekly Télérama to explain her absence from movie screens: “I decided to politicize my retirement from cinema to denounce the general complacency of the profession toward sexual aggressors and more generally the way in which this sphere collaborates with the mortal, ecocidal, racist order of the world such as it is.”She has, she told me, “a political understanding of the world, and my actions are consistent with it as much as possible. Calling someone radical is a way to say ‘She’s hysterical, she’s angry.’ I prefer coherent to radical.”I said that I had used the word in a positive way — to suggest bold choices that steered clear of the artistic mainstream. “I’m not annoyed with you,” Haenel said. “I’m reacting strongly, but it’s just to make myself clear.”Making herself clear is important to Haenel, who has an intense focus and frequently looked to the side as we talked, as if to better organize her thoughts away from an interlocutor’s gaze. She sometimes wrote down points she wanted to come back to later — and she did return to them.We were talking in a house on the bucolic campus of PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, in Chatham, N.Y., where Haenel was appearing in the director-choreographer Gisèle Vienne’s show “L’Étang.” The show comes next to New York City for performances at New York Live Arts, Saturday through Monday, as part of the Dance Reflections festival.By American theatrical standards, “L’Étang” (“The Pond”) is pretty close to radical, though. Based on a short play by the Swiss-German writer Robert Walser, the dance-theater piece locks Haenel and Julie Shanahan, a longtime member of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble, in a helix of escalating tension performed in often excruciatingly slow motion, a tempo familiar to those who saw Vienne’s hypnotic “Crowd” last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Haenel takes on multiple roles, most notably that of Fritz, an adolescent who fakes suicide to attract his mother’s attention, and his two siblings; Shanahan plays their parents. The atmosphere is somewhat hallucinatory — Vienne has cited David Lynch among her influences — but it requires consummate precision, both physical and emotional.“We worked a lot on trying to pierce through the surface of things, and that’s not something you can do alone,” Haenel said. “Among the people onstage, we tried to better understand what’s implied, to understand a person’s feelings. You start anticipating when a person is going to stop moving. That’s a kind of communication I feel very strongly with Julie. We don’t need to talk about it endlessly; I just feel how long she’s going to take to do something.”For Vienne, effort is an integral part of the process. “What I do is very technical from a choreographic and interpretive standpoint,” she said in Chatham. “This virtuosity is the result of a long physical and theoretical training — sociology, philosophy and politics are important to understanding what we’re in the process of building, and the formal choices we make as we create the piece.”This rigor and commitment suit Haenel, as she passionately pursues a path in which artistic goals are intertwined with politics and life, a dedication that coalesces in her work with Vienne.The two met in 2018, when they were on the admissions committee for the National Theater of Brittany’s acting school. Haenel participated in a workshop with prospective students led by Vienne. “I loved it,” she said. “The improvisation was related to her show ‘Crowd’ and involved developing slow motion as a new sense, like seeing or hearing, that would allow you to live or experience things differently.”Making herself clear: Haenel, who has retired from the movie business, has collaborated with Vienne on a few projects. “At the heart of ‘L’Étang,’” Haenel said, “is the issue of violence.”Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesThe pair further explored that theme in “L’Étang,” which became their first official collaboration and, after a Covid 19-imposed delay, premiered in 2021. Over the course of our conversation, Haenel often circled back to what she referred to as de-hierarchization. In the show, for example, words, movement, music, sound and lighting all contribute to communicating information, feelings and emotions. This undermines the traditional place of text at the top of the theatrical pyramid, and makes us reconsider what carries meaning onstage.And “L’Étang” subverts the usual link between the performers’ body language and the way text is delivered — especially since the voices are often electronically distorted. (Adrien Michel did the sophisticated sound design.)“It’s about the friction between text and subtext,” Haenel said. She brought up an especially intense scene in which she and Shanahan are face to face. They barely move, but the effect is one of terrifying brutality. “Julie actually speaks very calmly, but for us it’s a crazy scene of aggression because there is a negation of the body language,” Haenel said, adding that something they explored with Vienne was dissociation. “We’ve achieved a level where we can have a body that looks almost stoned with a speeded-up voice.”The impact is intended to be as much political as it is aesthetic. “At the heart of ‘L’Étang’ is the issue of violence,” Haenel said, “and this violence is not about saying tough things, but about turning someone else’s speech into silence.”Haenel and Vienne’s partnership has bloomed since 2018. In August, they premiered a new show, “Extra Life,” also starring Theo Livesey and Katia Petrowick, at the prestigious Ruhrtriennale festival in Germany. They are also involved with public readings of work by Monique Wittig, the lesbian philosopher and activist who died in 2003 and has been enjoying a revival in France over the past few years. While in New York for “L’Étang,” Haenel is participating in a Wittig event on Wednesday at the Albertine bookstore, which its organizers conceived in collaboration with Vienne.“Talking about Monique Wittig is a political act of active memory creation,” said Haenel, who is trying to get new English translations of Wittig’s work off the ground. “I’d love to help her be read again in the United States, to be studied more.”Digging deep with Vienne and championing Wittig are of a piece for Haenel. “I’ve always tried to engage in a thinking process,” she said. “The idea is not so much to become better, but not to become calcified in an antiquated relationship to the world. What’s at stake is not whether that relationship is truer or not — I find the idea of a criteria of truth super-problematic — but whether it’s more alive or not. At least for me.” More

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      In a Double Bill, the Avant-Garde Meets a Very Good Girl

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      Excellent performances, including one by a well-behaved dog, warm up two experimental plays upstate.CHATHAM, N.Y. — There is nothing less avant-garde than a dog. Put one onstage and the artiest notions immediately dissolve into Instagram moments.Or at least that was my experience with a play called “The Art of Theater,” running through Sunday on a double bill with one called “With My Own Hands” at PS21 in this Hudson Valley town. “The Art of Theater” stars Jim Fletcher — a stalwart of the New York avant-garde scene — and Delia, a local newcomer best known (according to her owners) as “a smart if goofy black Labbish sort of beast.”You don’t have to be W.C. Fields to know who wipes the floor with whom.Even without canine competition, the avant-garde has been having a hard time of late. By “of late” I mean both the last several decades and the last two years. The political, aesthetic and social disruptions that have often bred theatrical experimentalism can just as easily suppress it; take a look at the plight of the Belarus Free Theater, banned by the Lukashenko government in its home country, forced into exile and now seeking a new base in Europe.But the Covid pandemic has done even more than dictators to push avant-garde theater off the map. In New York, the three big January showcases of experimental work were once again radically curtailed: the Exponential Festival retreating to online production; Prototype and the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival folding entirely.Well, almost entirely. “The Art of Theater” and “With My Own Hands,” both by the French playwright, director and choreographer Pascal Rambert, survived the Under the Radar cancellation at this supercool avant-garde hothouse in Columbia County.And supercool it was on Saturday afternoon — just 4 degrees outside — when, despite free hot toddies and cocoa, an audience of about 25 sat not just masked but variously scarved, coated and hatted as the program began in PS21’s black box theater.“With My Own Hands,” which came first, is not exactly a warming experience. This 1993 specimen of the classic avant-garde — if that isn’t a paradox — consists of an intense, disturbing and mostly impenetrable 45-minute monologue delivered at breakneck speed by a character bent on suicide. At least that’s what I think was going on; the script, mimicking the disorderly and pressurized output of a mind in fatal distress, speeds right past pauses and punctation as it twists multiple points of view into a furious screed:“M. says to me you’re getting on everyone’s nerves you smother anyone’s slightest desire to listen stop bawling someday I won’t stand for it anymore and I’ll lock you up pants down in a dark room facing yourself facing myself I write to Hans facing myself here I am facing myself while the bombs come down around me I sunbathe here.”Ismaïl ibn Conner in “With My Own Hands.”Steven Taylor As a technical matter, speech like that cannot be easy to perform, but Ismaïl ibn Conner, under the playwright’s direction, shapes each clause, no matter how bewilderingly it butts up against others, into razor-edged shards of anguish. Grandiosity, paranoia and pathos flicker like pages in a flipbook, sometimes (in Nicholas Elliott’s suitably grim translation) coalescing into memorably awful images. “Tear all the memory wires out of your head,” the character begs himself, or perhaps the audience.But if the actor’s grasp on the character is astonishing, the character’s grasp on the audience — as is too often the case with the avant-garde — is weak. To make up for it, the playwright eventually brings out the gun you’ve been expecting all along.In a way, a gun onstage is not unlike a dog: It rips the fabric of theatrical artifice, replacing it with its own kind of drama. A gun’s drama, though, is usually dull, with only two possible outcomes: It gets used or it doesn’t. But as “With My Own Hands” transitioned (cleverly) into “The Art of Theater” — a 30-minute monologue from 2007, in which an actor played by Fletcher muses aloud to his dog about acting — it was the dog’s drama that took on living dimension.Not just because the script invests her with human intelligence. (“Theater is low,” the actor instructs. “Speak low. And if you bark — bark low.”) Rather, Delia, a 4-year-old rescue with a sweetheart face and very good manners, can’t help insisting on the canine kind of intelligence. Though she generally sits and listens as required, there is no suppressing her brilliant improvisational skills. Do I smell peanut butter? Let’s get some! Was that a noise in the audience? Let’s investigate! She is less the straight man in the actor’s tale than he is in hers.Fletcher, best known to New York playgoers as Jay Gatsby in the Elevator Repair Service production of “Gatz,” speaks beautifully and never barks. Still, I didn’t find the actual text of “The Art of Theater” — again translated by Elliott and directed by Rambert — very fascinating. The actor’s thoughts about his art, and the theater types he usually works with, are unsurprising except when occasionally off-putting.“I never liked old women,” he says. “Old women are so boring.”But the contrast Rambert draws between this self-involved sourpuss and a good girl like Delia is a brilliant way of making you think about performance. Not just what it costs the performer — though it’s poignantly true, as he says, that “as an actor you have understood that you are a dog and that you will be abandoned.” In that sense, all people are at the mercy of masters; even the character in “With My Own Hands” is “a man trapped in a dog’s body.”A dog is not trapped in a dog’s body, though. She is her body. She doesn’t have actorly affectations or a good side to turn to the light. She is simply happy to make her people happy; in a way, that’s her job, and Delia is very good at it. When, late in the play, Fletcher picks her up in his arms for a slow dance, she licks his face as they sway.On a very cold day in a rather cold genre, that was finally warmth enough. More

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      Under the Radar Festival Returns, Smaller but Still Funky

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      The experimental festival at the Public Theater will return in person with fewer shows and, for the first time, performances outside New York City.The Under the Radar festival, the Public Theater’s annual showcase for experimental theater, will return in person next year, Jan. 12-30. The event, now in its 18th year, will feature nearly two dozen artists, with performances held at the Public and Mabou Mines in Manhattan as well as a venue in upstate New York.Those who’ve attended in past years will notice a few differences: The festival will run for three weeks instead of two and include only 15 productions at the Public — all 90 minutes or less — down from the 22 at the 2020 festival.“I’m happy we have a smaller festival this year so we can really concentrate on these pieces and give them the attention they deserve,” Mark Russell, the festival director, said in a phone conversation, adding that he hadn’t yet determined whether the change would be permanent.One of the pieces that Russell said he was most excited to land was Jasmine Lee-Jones’s “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner” (Jan. 12-16, 18-23, 25-29). Staged to critical acclaim at London’s Royal Court Theater last summer, the 90-minute two-hander explores cultural appropriation, queerness, friendship and the ownership of Black bodies online and in real life.A cultural re-examination is also what Annie Saunders and Becca Wolff have planned for the New York premiere of their hourlong show “Our Country,” a meeting of mythic and modern America set in California’s marijuana country and inspired by Sophocles’ “Antigone” (Jan. 12-16, 21-23).A pair of solo shows also highlight the schedule: The playwright Inua Ellams (“Barber Shop Chronicles”) will perform his 90-minute, music- and poetry-filled piece “An Evening with an Immigrant,” which chronicles his journey from Nigeria to England (Jan. 18-20). Roger Guenveur Smith, an actor known for his roles in Spike Lee films, will return to the festival with his hourlong solo show “Otto Frank,” a historical account of the father of Anne Frank, who was the only immediate member of his family to survive the Holocaust (Jan. 13-16, 20-23).Rounding out the slate is a double bill of “Mud/Drowning,” two intimate works by María Irene Fornés, a Cuban American playwright and director who died in 2018, which, following a sold-out run last year, will return to the experimental theater company Mabou Mines (Jan. 12-16, 18-23, 25-30). “Mud,” a play by Fornés, is a grim consideration of ignorance, poverty and desperation, while “Drowning,” a half-hour “pocket” opera by the composer Philip Glass, is adapted from Fornés’s five-page surreal play based on a short story by Anton Chekhov.A new initiative, “Under the Radar: On the Road,” will also bring a pair of Pascal Rambert monologues, “The Art of Theater” and “With My Own Hands,” to a venue called PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century in Chatham, N.Y., which sits on 100 acres of orchards, meadows and woodlands (Jan. 14-15, 22-23).Following the Under the Radar Festival, “An Evening with an Immigrant” will also be performed at Oklahoma City Repertory Theater (Jan. 22-23) and at Stanford University (Jan. 29-30), and “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner” will transfer to Washington, D.C., for a three-week run at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Feb. 14-March 6).“We’re acknowledging that small-scale work needs touring to survive and reach the widest audience,” Russell said.The festival will also include eight works in the “Incoming!” works-in-process series and the return of concerts by artists including Migguel Anggelo, Salty Brine and Alicia Hall Moran at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan.A full lineup is available at publictheater.org. More