PARIS QUARTIER D’ETE
JULY 22-29, 2009

Everyone knows that Paris shuts down in the summer – especially in August but even July can be fairly bleak with boulangeries, charcuteries et restaurants fermées. Twenty years ago, it was decided that a festival in and around Paris would wake its citizens out of the torpor of summer. Thus was Paris quartier d’été (the neighborhood of summer) born.

The multi-disciplinary festival always includes a lot of music in addition to a bit of circus, theatre and dance. Outdoor venues are used as much as possible. For this year’s anniversary edition, several significant older works were presented and succeeded in meeting the festival’s goal of offering work that you hadn’t even realized you’d been waiting to see. In past years, I’ve seen Merce Cunningham (who sadly passed away while I was in Paris) and Elizabeth Streb on a fantastic stage constructed in the courtyard of the Palais Royal. This year, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Ook, created in association with Theater Stap and Nienke Reehorst, took to this stage on a night when it had been raining up until five minutes prior to curtain time. Theater Stap is a Belgian company comprised of actors who are mentally disabled. Ook, which means “also” in Flemish, encompasses the philosophy behind this company. The images created by Larbi and Reehorst were beautiful and universal. The sight of ten performers riding bicycles around the stage was especially resonant given the diversion yet inter-dependence of their paths.

Compagnie Retouramont (pictured above) presented Vide Accordé (a hard one to translate, something about a Valuable Void?) in several sites, both urban and less so.  I journeyed via RER to Bagneaux where folding chairs were set up in a semicircle around a green park at the end of a small cul de sac (part of the adventure of the festival is finding the performance locations!).  The 30-minute performance consisted of a trio of incredibly virtuosic women climbing, crossing and spinning on the wires rigged simply via a large crane.  The local audience of all ages was enthralled.

Carlotta Sagna’s Tourlourou, a tough solo set on a small square miked stage, took place in the garden of a library in Saint-Ouen (as well as at two other locations).  Satchie Noro’s point shoes stabbed and pounded the wooden floor; the amplified echo seemed to shake the trees.

Josef Nadj, born in the former Yugoslavia, is the prolific Artistic Director of the National Choreographic Center in Orléans.  His work, Le Temps du Repli, was seen in the 2004 International Dance Festival Ireland (now Dublin Dance Festival).  Within Paris quartier d’été, he was given a special residence at the Maison des Métallos at which he showed two performance pieces and exhibited a series of drawings.  Les Corbeaux is a work created in collaboration with composer/musician Akosh Szelevényi. Without giving it away, the transformation from man to crow was fascinating.  Petit psaume du matin, created in 2001, is a duet with Dominique Mercy (a long-time member of Pina Bausch’s company).  Consisting of a series of somewhat surreal vignettes, the impact of the piece is heightened by the power of the two men commandeering the stage.  You don’t want it to end.

And, of course, one wishes that a week in Paris would, likewise, never end…………