ROMEO AND JULIET IN THE ANTHROPOCENE AGE - A REVOLUTIONARY ROMEO AND JULIET IN FINAL DAYS AT THE HOTEL CALIFORNIA: A Review of Catherine Gaudet and Jérémie Niel’s La Tres Excellente et Lamentable Tragédie de Romeo Et Juliette 13- 17 January Usine C
The Impossible III by Maria Martins , 1946
ROMEO AND JULIET IN THE ANTHROPOCENE AGE - A REVOLUTIONARY ROMEO AND JULIET IN FINAL DAYS AT THE HOTEL CALIFORNIA: A Review Catherine Gaudet and Jérémie Niel’s La Tres Excellente et Lamentable Tragédie de Romeo Et Juliette 13- 17 January Usine C
“On the side of the hills suddenly it is the very expanse which launches the chariot into its wonderment in the cicatrices of the cane (sugarcane) , always in the black tibia the water proclaimed red so many times by the touch of my voice Here, the resurgence of my bounding in the stride from the quick tempered depths of the glades but also the leafy high priests of my patience ah yes I only want the last voyage of my lassitude as proof between the dry leaves and the foam the flowering of the islands, the foamy geography of the islands on the open seas’ stomachs our songs, our foreheads barred from origins our feet stuck in the tempests the cutting, the cutting of your long gesture of the aurora where the birds look in vain to perch between the mesh of the drums despite me the overturning of the earth The side of the winds in contestation the weight of shoulders in the scintillation the nights employed for the night.” - Edouard Glissant
“Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.” ― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
It (La Tres Excellente et Lamentable Tragédie de Romeo Et Juliette) starts out with a bang, and rather moreover here with a set of poetic bangs - all of the following poetic words (furies) throughout the play really are all infused into the stretches of the silent (that we witness) in the scathing small dance fragments; the poetic words (-furies) are also all infused into the scars of the roaring-screeches of Juliet and Romeo played by Clara Furey and Francis Ducharme, with their in-roads into the irreverent (at times playing on aspects of the phatic nature of our contemporary advertising type of world ) but never losing the eternal classicism/ elegance of the piece (R&J), and with the play’s “skid row flash pans” of the sacred and of the profane - that are the specific brand of this here Niels’ and Gaudet's Romeo and Juliet.
La Tres Excellente et Lamentable Tragédie de Romeo Et Juliette is couched in a Hotel California (1) circa now, not unlike had been Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe or Sid and Nancy back then at the Chelsea Hotel, or perhaps like the solitary yet multiple (2) Valerie Solanas after trying to kill Andy Warhol, in her final days at the Bristol Hotel in the Tenderloin District of Sanfrancisco. Niel’s and Gaudet’s skid row (Romeo & Juliet) lovers, live at the edge of time (3). And also like many other“skid row”demonlovers, Clara Furey and Francis Ducharme incant many other “skid row demonlovers” (4) beyond Romeo and Juliet like Beckett’s Hamm and Clov (Endgame)or “lovers of valdaro” -the skeleton couple found in an eternal embrace Mantova, Italy, or the South African Playwright Athol Fugard’s couple Boesman and Lena eternally walking along the side of the road from shanty town to shanty town during apartheid.. And by “skid-row”, I am pointing at something liminal, something other than a status quo sentimental union between a couple; what is meant is skid row (in Los Angeles especially) being the last stop, at least in this normalized lifetime. Niel’s and Gaudet’s Romeo & Juliet plays very much on this being the last stop for the couple they portray, and actually it could be said Niel’s and Gaudet then offer the Romeo& Juliet they portray “one thousand other lives”; beyond their deaths, throughout the play Clara Furey is resuscitated and throughout the play Francis Ducharme dies a thousand lives only to be back again, breathing one unto the other.
And in fact in La Tres Excellente et Lamentable..., (Clara Furey & Francis Ducharme ) might each be alternating between playing the roles of Juliet and Romeo throughout the piece. And with Ducharme definitely having a lot to keep up with, with the always fierce Clara Furey, Ducharme stepped up to the plate and gave an outstanding performance that moved between the subtle, the iconic, and plain frightening madness as a Romeo full of incantations going beyond the confines of this hotel room.
As for Furey, as with every piece she imbibes, incredibly moving through the one hour show like a feral feline always lost, never lost, always on the brink of coming back, always finding something, always discarding that thing, to always find it again. The circle of life as always with this audacious actress-dancer - who could be considered one third lynx, one third epuisé cabaret habitueé, one third excited mystery guest on a future gameshow that has yet to be invented. There is something ancient in her movements, yet we cannot place it. There is something playful in her movements yet we cannot quite place it. There is something dreadful that lies light and distilled/ disturbing/ beautiful that floats around the stage of Niels and Gaudet's Romeo and Juliet, almost like two humans (Romeo and Juliet) who having been lynched have come back to tell the story before that act which separated them, sent here to play to to replay all the other possibilities, bringing us through all the motions, helping us to forget the rope that hung them, helping us to believe in some other kind of horizon, not simple sentimental love but something perhaps to do with some kinds of beautyful ones/ideas. states of being that are not yet born. The suction of Furey’s mouth to Ducharme’s mouth at the end of the piece gives us the signs of the vacuum between the two (R& J), a (societal) suction which shreds, and with the caustic warnings of love better lived hopefully in another time, in another way, “love in the time of cholera”. The detritus signs of our contemporary advertising world litter the “hotel room”/ stage and it is obvious that we must certainly find another way among all the detritus hanging about. The reduced stage set ( a hotel room we walk into) is a couple of meters away from us. We are invited to live in their house. An intimate performance, a “close” look into Clara and Francis, Juliet and Romeo.
Furey truly has set the mark for any young actresses/ actors who truly are ready to act with everything coming equally from mind and body, in an embodied sense especially (Just see Jonathan Romney’s “feverish” article on Guy Maddin’s fever dream 2015 film Forbidden Room where Furey plays “several roles” as Margot) The chameleon like chimerae that Clara Furey spews on stage was addictive and hypnotic, if not just right down scary and joyful, all at once. There was her signature hand motions that make swathes (come ) across her face, a sort of vertical wiping of the face and other hermetic hand gestures, like motions welcoming us into a/her secret society (see her in Guy Maddin’s Forbidden Room also). After Juliet has parted from her Romeo for awhile, Furey (playing Juliet or Romeo at that time) moves to the “hotel room’s” shower and through the vitrine we had first watched the early stilted and naked Romeo through, we now see Furey (Juliet or Romeo at that time) doing her signature moves and adding some new hand body fragmentation gestures to her ever growing dance vocabulary (see her last performance Untied Tales at Theatre la Chapelle). The moves she does in the hotel’s “shower” were somewhere between the “waacking” and “something else”, she and Ducharme do many times in his screaming fits, trying to shake the “ancestral rigidity”, as they incant in one line among many other lines. Earlier on, Romeo (Ducharme) had attended to the always falling ill Juliet (Furey) and performed an operation to try and “heal” her from her always feeling ill (‘j’ai mal). The operation does not work and they try and instead to move through other ways to usurp the world of family vs family, tribe against tribe - not welcoming the newly brought together Romeo and Juliet: “Two households, both alike in dignity In fair Verona, where we lay our scene From ancient grudge break to new mutiny Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life Whose misadventured piteous overthrows Do with their death bury their parents' strife.”
Instead they (this Romeo and Juliet) walk on the precipice (see Trisha Brown’s iconic 1970 performance Man Walking Down the Side of a Building ) instead of along the tried and exhausted route (of the ancestral rigidity), instead they scream and stir, instead they realize the ideal of “to be fucked or not to be fucked”, instead they do fragmentation dances (not whole dances), instead they wipe their faces (see Furey’s shower scene and signature movements mentioned above which moves like reading through the first chapters of the famous anthropologist Henri Van de Lier’s Anthropogenies which describes our first enterprise moving from quadrupeds towards transversality), instead they (this Romeo and Juliet) face the shame, admit themselves honestly into the bestial subterranean of love, instead they horizontally not vertically, instead they resist elastically, instead they put their finger filling their respective mouths to stop the further foaming (l’ecume) of an already failed civilization, instead they resist the ruins of a “Great House”. All this to renew with their wildness and move beyond the structures that bpth their families “live by” (de-legitimation of inveterate structures). This Romeo and Juliet seek to renegotiate their/ our relationship between our aggressivity and intimacy:
“The body of Vertebrates, Mammals anterior to Homo in particular, made a distinction (a) between the front and the back, in the aggressiveness (ad-gredi, going towards) and the escape; (b) the bottom and the top, in the weight; (c) the dorsal and the ventral, in the repartition of their organs from their spine into a progressive intimacy (intimus, the most ‘intus'). These three sensory-motor dimensions (degrees of freedom) were reduced to the predominating dimension of predation (a): front-back, head-tail, mouth-anus, whose two other (b) (c), were subsidiary. In summary, the pre-hominoid animality is rostral, better still, caudal - rostral….Yet, when he stands, particularly when his arms and legs are spread apart, the body of Homo, the upright primate, spreads and first spreads a stable transversal plan. This vertical-lateral plan is stabilized from instant to instant by gravitation, whose field of force exerts and planes along the thin, upright volume of the trunk. Simultaneously, the dimensions of aggressiveness (back-front) and of intimacy (dorsal-ventral) confound, establishing a second plan perpendicular to the transversal plan used as reference.” Henri Van de Lier
Instead Juliet says to Romeo unravelling all those 99% structures the 1% need to see go:
O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name; And finally instead to live love as an echo-World (a world of connected “consciousnesses” not just between two but between many), not just as something reduced to itself, limited to itself. Perhaps Niel’s and Gaudet’s Juliet and Romeo are trying to make that contemporary journey (with much of the pain of letting go of the ancestral rigidity) to another plane of love or maybe some other form of relation.
Clara Furey seems to be moving towards a goal in each performance, each sequence of the performance truly having a beginning, middle, and end. As audience members, we are almost frightened to look directly into Furey’s (kryptonite) glare as she works through “something” chthonic, “something” bright-dark, “something” on the brink of “something” we just cannot put our hands on. We watch Furey, ride with her motions, and hope to somehow get a look into understanding something we have not seen before. Ducharme, as her regular collaborator, begun to enter into that “fourth stage”; Ducharme’s screams heralded something coming, something gone, something we would rather not glimpse in the chasm between both Romeo and Juliet’s mouth clasped (suction -cupped) one to the other for dear life, for dear death. One only has to look at the recently discussed overlooked gem of the Museum of Modern Art - The Impossible by the Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins (1946) to truly get a certain glimpse into Romeo, my Romeo, and Juliet, especially as it has come down the pipe to us, 400 years later, right here in how we continue to live it in our respective Hotel Californias. After Niels and Gaudet’s La Tres Excellente et Lamentable Tragédie de Romeo Et Juliette we all must look back at all our own Hotel California one night’s and long term tethering to others we want to be our Romeo and Juliet’s and think longer and harder (on our mistakes, transgressions, regrets) but yet realize (coming out the other side) - Yes we will (must) continue to make that dive (into love each time) or forever hold our peace. These are the grand “houles” of our contemporary civilization, as Edouard Glissant would have no doubt intoned. The shakings, “tremblements” which allow something near to change, “something near to something not yet understood, not yet seen” which might even give the glimpse of change.