Syndicate: Charleville encounters

[NORMAN <norman@wanadoo.fr>]

Dear Syndicalists,

Following eyebeam and syndicate in parallel is touching and
thought-provoking - a new sense of space and its mutant geometries, its
own spaces that are at times nested, at times fiercely discrete. A sense
of the more intimate syndicate sphere I know so well and am very attached
to, where there's a mingling of day-to-day info and often low-key chat,
then the more public sphere of eyebeam rhetoric (that's not pejorative),
more or less consciously projected. Which also has its twists - the
feeling that some people are really reaching out and meeting. There are
those who seek to dialogue and those who seek to monologue. Those who
speak to make others speak up, i.e. in order thereafter to listen, and
those who speak just to make themselves heard. I've felt the urge at
times to respond to eyebeam, but have just as often been put off
(inexplicably) by the echo of the forum, by its impressive colonnades of
knowledge and references, by its imperial scale. That's not knocking it
though, because there's also immense poignance coming through. For
reasons I can't explain, but which are undoubtedly significant in terms
of how we live and invest (and discriminate) these virtual spaces of
communication - perhaps triggered by your plea that we contribute, rather
than just being idle news consumers, Andreas - I want to write this here.

Yesterday, coming back in the train from a meeting at the International
Institute of Puppetry, I talked with a friend called Claire Heggen, who
directs the "Théâtre du mouvement"; she's a brilliant mime/ body master,
and is running a series of workshops in Madrid, Porto and Bratislava, on
how the town, the urban environment, is expressed, translated, across the
body, its movements, its deambulations. Calvino's Invisible Towns read
through gestures. In Bratislava, exercises Claire usually begins with
proved particularly deranging - things like "how do you get from your
place to the workshop" triggered violent discussion, because all the
streets have been constantly renamed; it was as though people were
reading their trajectories through different strata of history, of
cultural and ideological experience and identification - from Napoleonic
(and earlier) invasions through to Stalinism, through to a contemporary,
often random "nomenclature". Simultaneous mappings onto the same physical
space, the keys, the access routes being transformed by their alternative
"designations". And the anguish of lost keys - the multilingual culture
of an old European crossroads having been bulldozed on several occasions
into linguistic flatland, with the ensuing loss of references, of
possibilities to access the cultural wealth. Often, in Claire's class,
the only landmarks that seemed to draw any kind of consensus were
recently built fast-food stores - often "you know, the hamburger place
that was built where there used to be that shop that sold beautiful
handcrafted wooden toys"... etc.  It's giving Claire lots to think about,
and she's giving me lots to think about. Give. Donner. Data. Listening to
Claire and rethinking IO-DENCIES, the dynamics and fragile, live tensions
of urban space, where we have our own "collision detection mechanisms"
built in culturally, allowing us to side-step excessively alienating
places of difference. All this being bound up in the way we walk. And the
way we talk (that sounds like an old Eric Burdon song).

At the Puppetry Institute, where students were presenting their stage
works, I caught up with an Argentinian designer called Osvaldo Gabrieli
who works in Sao Paulo. An exuberant creator, who's been working day and
night for the past couple of months to build impossible theatrical
visions and lives. A magician with colours and shapes and textures who's
been teaching the students millions of things they'll need years to
assimilate. He goes back to Sao Paulo tomorrow, and I asked him about the
fire. He didn't even know about it. He'd voluntarily shut himself off
from the rest of the world for the past weeks, working in this strange
hometown that Rimbaud couldn't wait to leave, with March fog rising over
the Meuse river, and had no idea that large parts of the Brazilian forest
were meanwhile going up in smoke. He is not somebody I would describe as
"insulated" or "unaware". His theatre work was full of (enacted) smoke
and fire. Lamps and cardboard flames. What can one say ?

Soon we have a resident coming to the Institute for a research project on
nomadic theatre forms of the early nineteenth century. Cultural
crossroads. The strolling players. She lives in and works on Bratislava.

Strange days.

see you soon
SJN


Sally Jane Norman
Déléguée à la recherche
Institut International de la Marionnette
Charleville-Mézières
http://www.ardennes.com/asso/iim
inst.marionnette@ardennes.com


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