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by Nicolas VILLODRE
Year after year, Sophie Herbin, the very charming and pleasant woman in charge of the dance section of the Conservatoire Olivier Messiaen de Champigny, programs in this isle of tranquility, located 4 rue Proudhon, right in the heart of the “leafy projects” of a Communist suburb – which is at the pinnacle all things contemporary and incredibly audacious in the urban dance or in avant-garde, modern, or multi-genre performances, caring little for pleasing everybody, obtaining high audience numbers, and disappointing people – and yet, we’re all here. April 1st – a date full of meaning for an operation like the one we will discuss, more or less relevant, whether we want to or not, either a joke or a trap – Phoenix Atala, partner, disciple, spiritual daughter of the mythical duo of French actionists Grand Magasin (Pascale Murtin and François Hiffler), presented his first personal work here, an “enlarged” film with a title that sounds like an American TV series: SEASON 1 EPISODE 2.
After an unexpected “Rumba du pinceau”, a song written and sung by Bourvil in 1947, danced by four visual arts students and choreographed by Marie-Laure Tétaud, a sort of apéritif to the evening, with its connotations of “amateur night”, the projection could finally begin in its meta-filmic version, i.e., in an old-fashioned-style presentation, with many people participating in the spirit of Le Film est déjà commencé?, debates, and all.
As is generally the case with Grand Magasin, whose excellent work has always enchanted us, insofar as it is both poetic and spiritual – in our hierarchy of values, these two criteria define what is most difficult to achieve in art – with (faux) naïveté, malice and finesse, Phoenix Atala’s film questions language. It is no longer a question here of the French language, as is habitually the case, but what could best be called “cinematic writing”, perfected by Griffith and accepted as a given by spectators. “Where is the cameraman? When will the shot change? Was this shot filmed in chronological order? How many takes were necessary before getting the desired shot? These are the questions that the characters of the film ask out loud…” This is the pitch of the show where, at any moment, from anywhere, the characters can walk out of the screen like Sherlock Jr. to appear in 3D, flesh and bones to participate in the performance. They are: Pascale Murtin, Christophe Salengro, Aurélia Petit, Virginie Petit, Danièle Colomine, Joseph Dahan, Christophe Arrot, Marc Bruckert, Etienne Charry, François Hiffler.
The film is also a documentary on the suburbs, on the banks of the Seine and Marne Rivers, which have kept none of the idyllic aura they once had in the populist cinema of Marcel Carné (Nogent, Eldorado du dimanche, 1929) or Jean Dréville (cf. À la Varenne, 1933, a sort of music video juxtaposing a java sung by the “Bayonnais” André Perchicot to images of “guinguettes”) or that of Julien Duvivier (La Belle équipe, 1936). […]
Phoenix allows himself a few visual flourishes: a split screen that could have been straight out of The Thomas Crown Affair (a photo of the film poster with a housewife in a red tartan shirt ironing a red-checkered tablecloth with the same tint, or doing the dishes in a tiled kitchen with the same pattern; the appearance of a message that would terrify all the wannabe editors in the room: “Media offline”; location of the subtitles, announced by the actors themselves; a few unapologetic blurry shots; an anamorphic image; several martial arts scenes no doubt inspired by the proximity of the Chinese center, Chinagora…
But the value and flavor of the project is dependent on the constant to-and-fro between the interventions of the “live performers” and the actions of the conference that were decided upon last August, in the outskirts of Alfortville, once and for all and, we would be tempted to say, for all eternity or posterity, on the skin of the tiny HDV tape strip. And, naturally, on the effects of concordance (cf. the two examples of live post-synchronization of one sequence that was allegedly defective) and of discordance (jump cuts, a character embodied by different actors, like in post-Brechtian theatre, incongruous inserts in the spirit of Hellzapoppin’, traditional Serbian dancers, etc.). Although the film and “play” are not really narrative, the young filmmaker seems fascinated by storytelling and by the panoply of means that the dominant – aka “classical” – cinema needs. As a result, we will not unveil the end of the show, which is in no way a resolution of the problem that has been posed, but which is given to us as a bonus to the film.[/one_half_last]
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Cinematographies
During the commentary-driven projection of Bettina Atala’s film Saison 1, épisode 2, the room became a movie house. Standing in front of the screen barring the stage, the filmmaker dissected filmic procedures (montage, rehearsal, continuity) systematically, to the point of exhaustion. Cinema and performance were intertwined but remained impermeable to each other. That is, until… a miracle! The Real, in the form of traditional dancers seen earlier in the film, burst into the room, “exploding through the screen”: like in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, fiction met reality, with no possible return back, in a sort of epiphany, a miraculous incarnation. We were dumbfounded by this appearance, to the point where it obliterated the memory of the film that had just been presented along with its conceptual and funny deconstruction of cinema.[/one_half_last]
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(newspaper – French)
Shelf life.
In the absurd department, the three oddballs making up Grand Magasin know one aisle particularly well (cf. yesterday’s La Marseillaise). This week, they are the “very special” guests of La Minoterie theatre. Since yesterday, and continuing today, they’ve been applying their sense of the absurd to a symbolic place for their hosts, since the restaurant Dock of the Bay – which opens Monday, and is already showing its own pretty, off-kilter architecture – overlooks the terrain where the “minotiers” (i.e., “millers”) will be located, between the Silo, Besson’s cinema, and chic boutiques, in 2012.
But, this isn’t the subject of Panorama commenté, which troublemakers Bettina Atala, François Hiffler and Pascale Murtin have offered as an avant-goût of their show Les déplacements du probleme – displacements which will be analyzed on stage as of Thursday. However, in their desire to reveal the “secret geography” of a view that is necessarily disturbed by 1,001 micro events, between a highway on-ramp and construction site, clods of earth and asphalt, they lay the foundation for a poetry which, over time, reveals itself to be more and more necessary in this emerging financial district. In disarray and disorder, after a first experiment indoors on a still-experimental digital table, these mad scientists will end up counting the pylons on the construction site, the orange caps and waving flags, or even spot a lost gymnast or an abandoned chair. Funny, poetic, tender, like a film by Tati or a sketch by Devos.
D.B.
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(newspaper – France)
Since 1982, the collective, Grand Magasin, combine absurdity and irony in their off-kilter artistic activities. Founded by Pascale Murtin and François Hiffler, and later joined by Bettina Atala, the project returns once again to Marseilles at the Minoterie, a long-time supporter. This week, the reunion happens twice in the neighborhood of la Joliette. The public is still invited to show up today at 1 and 6 pm at the “Dock of the Bay”, a restaurant in the final stages of being built – it will open next Monday – just next to the “Suite Hotel” on Boulevard de Dunkerque. With Panorama commenté, the threesome offers the keys to a human and digital experiment, an encoding of the landscape directly illustrated on the current construction site underneath it (where the future Minoterie will be located). An exquisite taste of things to come that lasts thirty minutes, heralding their show, Les déplacements du probleme – which is on stage from 22 to 24 October at 8pm…
Patrick Merle[/one_half_last]
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Problems solved Grand Magasin-style
Jubilatory, as always, the new show performed at La Minoterie by Grand Magasin, the company which, since 1982, has enjoyed mixing absurdity and science, object theatre and grand sociological concepts. Zaniness that makes you think while entertaining you at the same time.
Les déplacements du problème – the name of the show – does not break with tradition. This time they are playing with the problems of communication between human beings: technical problems, linguistic misunderstandings, a prankster echoing microphone, abstraction… Any excuse is good for 75 minutes of rather short sketches on a scattered stage cluttered with microphones, a ladder, podiums, and a white table.
Let us not forget the sound-absorbent rug and the rather regular and untimely eruption of a jackhammer.
All this is done with a real-fake detachment on behalf of Pascale Murtin, François Hiffler, Bettina Atala, their new recruit (and the help of Manuel Coursin, as the visible sound engineer), the show is not exactly interactive, even if the audience is sometimes led to think with the actor-lecturers about the notions of listening, of comprehension and of interest. By the end, you might even be able to remember a few disco-metaphysical dance moves which will soon be all the rage in nightclubs.
Patrick Merle
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Performance / humour. At La Minoterie, the trio Grand Magasin rants and derails, leaping from contempt to confusion.
Didn’t hear much, couldn’t understand much, but laughed a lot…
There are moments where you’re plagued by doubt for no reason and, conversely, that second where you think you’ve understood everything when, suddenly, everything falls apart. Looking for a street, an object that’s been carefully hidden, a message you thought you’d left, signals you thought you’d understood… Since Thursday, the troublemakers of Grand Magasin (Bettina Atala, François Hiffler and Pascale Murtin, accompanied by the omnipresent sound engineer Manuel Coursin) have delighted in dissecting all these “bugs” in human communication in Les déplacements du problème, presented on the stage of the Minoterie, now transformed into a zone of experiments that are each increasingly funnier and more absurd as the show progresses.
By testing the Ircam’s very serious tools of high-tech sound creation, they themselves create their own static in which the spectator, in spite of a few slow moments, wallows in delight, jolted by an incongruous plan to a negative echo microphone, a “hesitation machine” – which multiplies the speaker’s “uhh…s” – a doubt emitter with 3 pedals – but I’ll have to check on that – or, even, a rug that absorbs sounds. All of this ending in a hilarious final choreography. It’s as if 2be3, coached by les Deschiens, had decided to bring Deleuze to the stage. Or not.
D.B.
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Theatre
Grand Magasin
Since the 1980s, the hypermarket has become the metonymy of post-modern life: everything is available all the time. It’s no accident that Grand Magasin (lit. “Department Store”) was founded during this period, in 1982, and that the Grenoble-based company’s performances are based on contemporary vocabulary: IT-based exchange, marketing, science that is dedicated less to progress and more to comfort and productivity… Free from the constraints of drama and narrative in theatre and dance, the authors and actors Pascale Murtin, François Hiffler and Bettina Atala have alternated between their strange conferences in a basic decor, comic sketches, and behavioural experiments. Their shows have always been playful and falsely naïve, like the two performances given in Marseilles: “Panorama commenté” (a play that takes place outdoors) and the more structured – but no less crazy – Les déplacements du probleme. For this show, Grand Magasin uses the stage as a lab for sensorial experiments: the actor-demonstrators present a series of devices which are supposed to facilitate communication but end up disturbing the presentation. It makes us realize, while making us laugh, how subordinated we are, like useless commodities or negligible guinea pigs, to social manipulation, and to a truncated perception of reality. But, in the end, we continue to be human and adapt despite it all.
“Panorama commenté” 19 and 20 October at 8pm.
“Les déplacements du probleme” 22 and 24 October at 8pm.
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For over twenty years Pascale Murtin, Bettina Atala and François Hiffler, aka Grand Magasin, have brought their performances to national and international stages, “in spite of and thanks to a quasi-total ignorance of theatre, of music, and of dance,” so they claim. If their journey has taken them to Paris’ Centre Pompidou, to the Escales Improbables in Montreal or Ghent, to the “French Institute” in New York, it has also brought them to Marseilles – often in cooperation with Marseille Objectif Danse – to venues like the Montevideo or the Minoterie.
Landscape, nothing random here
This week, we find these extravagant handyman and women near Joliette, as they “play with logic, meaning and obvious facts”, as the Minoterie presented them in a restaurant on the Boulevard de Dunkerque […]
Still obsessed with “the world, its ambient and background noises”, these enthusiasts of the absurd will disturb the landscape, mysteriously provoking, via a large electronic board with coloured boxes, a certain symmetry in the disordered and necessarily random sequence of the outdoor events…
The trio will then return to the stage of the Minoterie to continue their dissections – often hilarious – of different processes of communication. With Les déplacements du probleme, they have transformed into Tupperware party-style “demonstrators”, using highly serious sound creation tools lent by the Ircam. But the clarity of the presentation is disturbed by the acoustic effect of the said devices. From this “telephone static” created by a microphone with variable coherence, a “hesitation machine” which multiplies one’s “uhh…s”, or a rug that absorbs sounds, they can finally have some fun with a final certitude: talking does not always mean you’ll be understood.
DENIS BONNEVILLE
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(weekly magazine – France)
In two shows, Panorama commenté and Les déplacements du probleme, Grand Magasin won the public over with their wacky inventions, unveiling and responding to daily disorder. Ambitious and delicious.
The power of habit is so strong that, when it really comes down to it, we only find a single, formal meaning to daily existence. Thankfully, for the dormant utopians in all of us, the fake door-to-door salesmen/women known as Grand Magasin are here to reinvent the meaning of the objects that surround us.
Invited by the Théâtre de la Minoterie, these sales reps of the absurd have put down their suitcases at the Joliette. The choice of a neighborhood in full-on urban renewal is highly symbolic for a company that tries to make a construction site out of the future.
The jubilatory solutions are therefore offered up to simplify life. They bring a problem to the fore through roundabout means (Les déplacements du probleme) or by responding to it (Panorama commenté). In the first case, sonic obstacles to communication are illustrated via atypical inventions (doubt emitters, contradicting microphone…). In the second, the hidden geometry of a disorderly nature (a blinking beacon, a man exercising…) is unveiled to us through fake electronic devices.
Beyond the abrasive humor of these ingenious clownish inventers, it is truly the circuit of human understanding that is disturbed: to best understand, one mustn’t necessarily hear everything – and that doesn’t necessarily imply that one might even be interested. In this way, the geometrical decoding of daily disorder can appear to be futile to some, but we understand the logic. Similarly, the sound of a jackhammer will certainly stop us from hearing a conversation, but not necessarily from interpreting it.
The presentations follow one another and get a kick out of shaking this circuit up in every which way – to the point where the illustration and circumvention of the obstacles to communication become themselves sources of confusion… delightful and playful.
Somewhere between a bizarre showroom, theatrical performance, and the circus, the trio behind Grand Magasin utilizes the codes of spectacle and distill a veritable interaction with the audience. When can we finally buy their inventions?
GUILLAUME ARIAS
Panorama commenté was presented the 19 & 20 October on the premises of the future restaurant Dock of the Bay
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(cultural magazine – France)
Paris 19th – Le Plateau (art gallery)
By Nicolas Villodre
The duo, now a trio, takes humor very seriously; it blows the dust off the cabaret routines of yesteryear! Those of knife throwers, singers, clumsy magicians, self-taught musicians, ventriloquists a with puckered lips… Grand Magasin doesn’t do Lac des singes but an art of the absurd that is, let’s say, in the tradition of Jonathan Swift, Stuart Sherman, via Princess Sappho, Alfred Jarry, Richard Huelsenbeck, Maurice Lemaitre, Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée, Joe Pass, etc., etc…[/one_half_last]
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Part of the Festival Agora, at l’Ircam. And 9 and 10 July as part of the festival Paris Calling in London.
“Unless there’s been a mistake”, “Or not”, “At least, that’s what I understood…” Sometimes very little is necessary for communication to be scrambled or to become hazy. A word, an interjection, an exterior sound, and the meaning is suddenly deformed, or even becomes its opposite. The three expressions listed above are doubt emitters. By stepping on a pedal, Pascale Murtin, Bettina Atala and François Hiffler, punctuate their remarks with these short interjections. The effect is guaranteed hilarity. Try it yourself, and you’ll see – “or not.”
With this new show, the brilliant Grand Magasin use their subtle humor and their art of the combinatorial to compose an amusing journey, punctuated with misunderstandings. Using techniques of transformation and emitting sound lent to them by the Ircam, they create a human geography that is rich in disturbances. Thankfully, every problem has its solution.
To neutralize the sound of a vacuum cleaner, for example, there is the absorbing rug which absorbs sound. Other inventions right out of the “Concours Lepine”(a French contest for inventors) are also presented, like the contradicting machine, which says the exact opposite of what you’re saying. Let us also mention the “bubble of distraction”, a space where the person who crosses it forgets what they were just saying or doing. Or, the “negative echo”, which can be heard before you speak…
Tenacious and consistent in their method, our three crafty performers multiply the number of occasions to misunderstand each other or to lose their trains of thought. Like, for instance, the moment when one of the characters begins a soapbox-rant who, if we weren’t paying attention, could sound like a politician, except… not at all.
Jumping from misinterpretation to confusion, this hilarious show goes on its merry way with increasing perplexity. An ironic reflection of a world saturated with new technology in which we evolve, “or not…” A success which, from time to time, evokes the world of Jacques Tati. “At least, that’s what I understood…”
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At this stage in the game/By now, we’re starting to think that Grand Magasin will always be Grand Magasin. After twenty years as a collective, you can recognize its members right from their first line. They’re always half-pop, half-kitsch, in skirts, t-shirts, or pants that are too short and fluorescent-coloured. And they can still astonish with new gestures, umpteen raspberries to be taken literally, new tiny phrases that are as absurd as they are obvious. An inseparable band of serious oddballs.
Initially, there was Pascale Murtin and François Hiffler, defectors from the world of dance in 1982. The thirty-year-old Bettina Atala who joined up in 2000 is a perfect match. Season 1 Episode 2 is her brainchild, a film made without any prior technical knowledge, and that is what makes it so good. As a director-in-training, Bettina asks questions from her spot on the stage about this marvelous world where someone can instantly go from the 1st to the 31st floor in an elevator. With her, a missing shot can be filled in with sequences of Serbian folk dancing… Unless it’s not your style of humor, you’ll very quickly be smiling out of delightful disbelief. Because, when you think about it, there are a thousand and one ways of seeing things, a thousand and one scales of measurement, a thousand and one wonderful incongruities that ostensibly puncture reality… even though we had tried so hard not to see them.[/one_half_last]
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No, you haven’t missed the previous episode. For over twenty-five years, Grand Magasin have stripped themselves of all technical savoir-faire (theatrical and choreographic, two of the members were originally dancers) to spread panic: to tell the truth, the 5e Forum du cinéma d’entreprise (5th Forum on Corporate Films) and 0 tâche(s) sur 1 ont été effectuée(s) correctement (0 out of 1 task(s) have been carried out successfully) are the names of their shows. As for this video, with a title that sounds more like the DVD of an American TV series, it is a mockery of the conventions of cinematic mimesis in which the actors are also the editors. The three troublemakers not only empty their characters of any psychology, but also of any identity. The absenteeism fuelled by government-funded vacations oblige: be it a man or woman, whoever wears the same t-shirt plays the same character. It doesn’t matter because there’s no story…
A series of sketches take inventory of the perfect little filmmaker’s textbook: “When both doors shut, the shot changes.” Or, “At the third pylon, the shot changes.” Cinematic conventions like shot-reverse shot, slick continuity, shooting out of chronological order (“I take the helmet off Saturday” / “And I put my foot down on Friday”), each step of the direction is both the object of a joke and derision – and, more covertly, of learning. Grand Magasin nestle into the splice, name the cut before we see it, points at the cameraman perched on a bridge, waiting for the next backwards tracking shot. Season 1 Episode 2 gives a new meaning to the expression “in-camera editing”. And, they invent a feminist use of the split screen, one of digital cinema’s hidden virtues: did you know, ladies, that by splitting the screen in four places, you will now be able to do the dishes, the windows, vacuum, and iron, all at the same time?
Ch. G.[/one_half_last]