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a2sparis · 6 years ago

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CLAIRE DITERZI

THÉÂTRE. Claire Diterzi à l’affiche de deux spectacles à Paris

Viennent d’être présentés à Paris, coup sur coup, deux spectacles de Claire Diterzi, artiste française aux multiples talents, tout à la fois chanteuse, comédienne, guitariste, auteur et compositrice de musique (pour le cinéma, le théâtre et la danse, notamment pour le chorégraphe Philippe Decouflé). Sur l’un de ces deux spectacles, «L’Arbre en poche», Claire Diterzi est l’auteur des textes et partage la responsabilité à la fois de la composition musicale (avec Francesco Filidei), de la mise en scène (avec Fred Hocké) et de l’interprétation (notamment avec le contre-ténor Serge Kakudji). Pour ce spectacle de théâtre musical, comportant une douzaine de chansons, Claire Diterzi s’est inspirée du merveilleux roman d’Italo Calvino «Le Baron perché» (1957), titre dont, d’ailleurs, «L’Arbre en poche» est l’anagramme. La pièce raconte l’histoire - non plus en Italie, mais au Congo - d’un jeune homme qui, comme le Baron perché, décide de vivre dans les arbres sans plus jamais en redescendre et qui, tout aussi généreux que le Baron, se bat contre la destruction des forêts de son pays. Quant à l’autre spectacle, «Je garde le chien», il s’agit de ce que l’on appelle en France, en bon français, un «stand-up», c’est-à-dire un spectacle où un(e) comique seul(e) en scène - Claire Diterzi en l’occurrence - s'adresse directement au public. Claire Diterzi y intervient, non seulement comme comédienne, mais aussi comme chanteuse, auteure, compositrice et metteuse en scène. Dans ce spectacle, où elle démontre aussi un vrai tempérament de clown, elle alterne textes parlés et chansons de sa composition, chantant (fort joliment) soit a capella soit en s’accompagnant ironiquement d’un ukulélé (alors que son instrument de prédilection est plutôt la guitare électrique !).

Spectacle autobiographique plein d’humour

Humoristique et autobiographique, le spectacle s’inspire d’un journal intime que Claire Diterzi avait tenu à l’occasion d’un de ses précédents spectacles, «69 battements par minute», écrit en 2014 et créé en 2015. Sur la scène du théâtre, très dépouillée, se dresse un écran sur lequel sont projetés des clips vidéo, des dessins, des photomontages et des notes diverses et variées de Claire Diterzi. Au cours de ce «one woman show», l’artiste parle tout à la fois de Jésus et du catéchisme de son enfance, ou encore du chanteur Johnny Hallyday, icône d’une certaine sous-culture française, dont elle se moque en étalant des tee-shirts à son effigie sur la scène. Elle évoque aussi, longuement, photos à l’appui, les papiers peints démodés du logement où elle a grandi. Plus généralement, elle raconte un peu sa vie, mais sans trop entrer dans les détails ; elle parle, notamment, de son enfance dans une cité HLM de l’agglomération de Tours, ainsi que de son père, Abdel, qui a abandonné le foyer familial - c’est-à-dire la mère de Claire et ses quatre filles. Claire Diterzi ajoute que, pour sa part, elle-même a deux filles. Elle confie également qu’elle suit une psychothérapie cognitive et comportementale depuis plusieurs années et que, par ailleurs, elle a eu une assez longue relation (apparemment amoureuse) avec un homme impuissant.

CLAIRE DITERZI est née en 1971 à Tours, de mère tourangelle et de père kabyle. Elle a étudié le chant au Conservatoire de Tours et les arts graphiques à l’École technique de l’image de communication de Blois. Elle a fait partie, dans sa jeunesse, de groupes de musique punk rock. Elle a obtenu en France le Grand Prix du disque de l'Académie Charles-Cros et le Prix du meilleur compositeur de musique de scène (du Syndicat de la critique). Elle a été décorée du plus haut grade dans l’Ordre français des Arts et Lettres, celui de commandeur.

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nofomoartworld · 7 years ago

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Hyperallergic: A Dance Crosses Borders, from the Congo to the Stars

Moya Michael, left, and Faustin Linyekula in Banataba [new work] at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The 11th edition of French Institute/Alliance Française’s Crossing the Line Festival in New York took its name seriously, presenting work that traversed cultural and national borders and toured the cosmos.

The Special Artist Focus for this edition is on Congolese performer and choreographer Faustin Linyekula, whose pieces, shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the NYU Skirball Center, narrate their own creation. Linyekula is an easygoing, warm stage presence who projects assurance and calm. As Linyekula explained during the performance at the Met, Banataba [new work] began with his commission for the festival. Linyekula started by investigating the Met’s collection of Congolese art, and this in turn led him back to his mother’s village, which he had not visited since 1974. The commission resulted in a sculpture of a man that can be assembled from its wooden parts.

Faustin Linyekula in Banataba [new work] at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The audio track for Banataba alternated between recorded segments and the artist singing or talking into his body mike. Linyekula and the one other performer used pieces of the sculpture as rhythm instruments, striking them together or against the floor. They both wore black and draped themselves with large swaths of black fabric at certain points. The black costumes and white marble environment curiously cooled the live presence in contrast with the colorful settings of the Congo pictured in the video segments. The performance started with a slow procession by the two, while a video shot in the Congo was projected onto the plinth of a statue, wrapped in white fabric; at the end, video portraits of individuals from the Congo were projected onto the upper level of the courtyard in which the performance took place.

Linyekula’s story about the representation of his culture persuades forcefully in the context of the Metropolitan Museum, which is dominated by occidental art from the Greeks and Romans through the American Century. It was almost as if the building itself resisted the story. The cold acoustics of the two-story 16th-century Vélez Blanco courtyard at the Met, with its marble walls and floors, muddled Linyekula’s softly accented English. The base of the plinth onto which the first videos were projected was at floor level and could not be seen by anyone sitting past the front row. At the end, the two performers tried to assemble the sculpture to stand for a final tableau in the spotlight, but the figure fell apart several times before they got it to hold. Several attempts to insert its penis failed, and Linyekula was forced to hold it through the end of the performance.

Faustin Linyekula in In Search of Dinozord (photo by Agathe Poupeney)

In Search of Dinozord (Sur les traces de Dinozord), Linyekula’s piece at the Skirball Center, also reflects on the frustrating process of creating a performance. Linyekula wanted to go back to his village for the burial of a friend, but one of their circle of friends was unable to attend because he was in exile. His exile implicated the bloody history of the Congo.

Just as in Banataba, the black and white costumes were stark, as was the set. A red stripe running from the ceiling to the floor, a few thin strips of tape, and lines of light projected on the stage asserted the barest suggestion of a space, like the axes of the Cartesian coordinate system.

Papy Ebotani in In Search of Dinozord (photo by Agathe Poupeney)

The soundtrack through the early part of the show was the sometimes painful screech of voices sped up to the point of unintelligibility, along with other acoustic interference. Mozart’s Requiem and various recordings by Arvo Pärt and Jimi Hendrix provided music, as well as the lovely live voice of countertenor Serge Kakudji. Four actor-dancers completed Linyekula’s ensemble.

The meta-performance narrative, though often submerged or lost, led nonetheless to presenting Linyekula’s exiled friend, Antoine Vumilia Muhindo, by live video. A surprisingly cheerful man, he told his story, after a brief sketch of the successive brutal dictatorships in the Congo over the last fifty years. He was arrested in connection with one of the coups d’état and imprisoned for years, until he managed to escape. His story was unbearable to hear: torture, deprivation, and exile. Like the history of the Congo, its pain was unrelenting.

Annie Dorsen’s The Great Outdoors, at Florence Gould Hall, takes quite a different approach to storytelling. A computer program generates the text anew for each performance of the piece, pulling posted comments from a designated set of web sites. “A virtual landscape made of language” is how she describes the script.

Despite the machine-produced script, the piece was performed in a cozy campground setting, with pillows arranged on the floor in two circles around a projector. All of this was inside an inflated dome on the stage. Kaija Matiss, who has a perfect radio voice, read from a laptop screen while seated in the outer circle. At the performance I attended, the text began with many decontextualized monosyllabic utterances and evolved into longer speeches. The body, sexuality, politics, relationships, and mathematical formulas were recurring motifs.

The highlight was the projections, by Ryan Holsopple, on the dome overhead. At the start they seemed to be a co-mingling of the desert and a bayou landscape. As Matiss began to read, the sky darkened gradually, and “stars” emerged — the non-twinkling lights in fact more resembled planets than stars. The view of the heavens drifted through space, around what might have been the Milky Way in 3-D modeling, with stars clustered in dense purplish clouds. The space inverted from sky to earth, and flipped again.

A whirring musical background, like insects in a lower pitch, wove through the performance, sometimes overwhelming the spoken word, which proved less interesting than the visuals. With reality in the United States at a bizarre extreme, I welcomed Dorsen’s chance to escape Earth and voyage through the stars.

The post A Dance Crosses Borders, from the Congo to the Stars appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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