Returns to the roots

Sometimes, to think about how a project was born sheds more light than what is said of it afterwards…

It is past midnight under the starry Singapore sky. For the past few days already, while in a residency working on our poetic karaoke and with the Lasalle College of the Arts’s students, Jean and I have also been taking the opportunity to chat – about our projects, the state of theatre, French language, poetry, cooking. We have just seen a show. We talk about it. We thought it was totally vain (in what it said, the language it used, its aesthetics), quite typical of the type of anecdotic and naturalistic theatre that, alongside post-dramatic work, is seen as artistic theatre, here in Singapore as well as in France. It is so far away from our own ambitions and what we aspire to. Suddenly, as if it was the logical conclusion of our conversation, Jean exclaimed: we have to stage The Song of Roland!

What is the connection? Why did our conversations crystallise in this way, in this lightning-like intuition, about a text that is as well-known as it is little known?

The invigorating power of medieval theatre is something I know well: I translated and staged farces, joyous sermons, and a proto-mystery. To go back to theatre as it was before classical theatre, to the roots of our practice, notwithstanding the denials and the big lie that our performing arts experienced a renaissance after a thousand years long catalepsy – I have found rejuvenating. But I immediately sensed something else in Jean’s sudden inspiration. It didn’t take long to find out what: the challenge was not to just revive the poetic power of this foundational medieval text. It was also to amplify it by colliding it with the contemporary clown who already played Lucky, Richard III and Don Juan.

That text and the clown are polar opposite, in a way. On the one hand, chanson de geste, the form that epic poetry took in medieval France, and on the other, the white clown: an elegant buffoon, specifically as Jean re-shaped him. Two polar opposite that, from the start, suggested they would generate an important forcefield.

Let me explain.
As we know - and academics have emphasised how decisive this was - both Iliad and Odyssey belong to an oral tradition and originally came from a performative practice. The fact they were then transcribed, attributed to an author, and later read in a low voice, are little betrayals. It is difficult to really measure how much this has led to epic poetry being misrepresented. We also know that medieval poetry was sung, shared, personified by troubadours and other minstrels. Chansons de geste were, like the epic poetry of Antiquity, living word: when it is read on school benches, it is dead and goes unheeded. Jean’s clown is a poet – as we can see in all the Calentures. He can make his way through the repertoire (Shakespeare, Molière, Beckett), but in the Calentures, poetry makes its way through him. Some of his more recent Calentures, Car Coeur sur la bouche (Calenture 69) for instance, revive the link made of flesh and blood that used to weld poetic words with the lyric poet. This is why Jean’s clown can reanimate the contagious power of epic poetry and remove it from the dusty and mummified envelope of classical books.

Why does this matter? Why do we think it is essential? First, because we think our world lacks inspiring words. The power of epic poetry, which finds echoes in Racine’s writing, in Théramène’s famous speech, is that it takes us back to a primordial and collective experience that the twists and turns of literary and theatre history took too far away from us. It is an experience that we think is now lacking, and that we should experience again. We aspire to a dishevelled and inebriated feast.

We aren’t talking about archaeological excavations here, far from it. Our aim is not to recreate a hypothetical original version which, in the end, would leave us indifferent. By activating this forcefield, we intend to give The Song of Roland its original vitality, the incomparable power of epic poetry when it is alive and shared. Of course, this implies that we will work on the text to ensure it retains its dynamics and poetry. We will also filter some archaic words or phrases that obscure meaning, narrative and emotion. Jean and I will work on this. Lorenzo Malaguerra will then join us for he knows so well how to steer Jean’s clown. This will allow him to fully embody chanson de geste’s outrageous and epic dimension.

 Another thing.
I think the three of us believe that big statements on how art must speak to people are nonsense. Not only because, very often, they are uttered with an elitist condescension that poorly conceals its contempt and at times its cynicism. More deeply, we think it is nonsense because to say that theatre must meet its audience suggests that it is removed from them, by default or in essence. This, I believe, comes precisely from the Classical era’s (aesthetic, legal) condemnation of medieval theatre. This started a division that haunts modern times, rots it from the inside and always comes back (in the division between public and private theatre for instance), to empty it of its substance. Art without roots (or, dialectically: art that is anecdotal) is irremediably sterile.

The Song of Roland, similarly to epic poetry in Ancient Greece, is fundamentally accessible. Instead of never-endingly wondering about these poems’ different versions, sources or authors, we should highlight how they are anchored in oral transmission, in heroic legends. This is where folk genius is at work: anonymously, in the language, desires, fears and myths it uses, with a simplicity that is neither superficial nor immediate but that digs deeper over time, constantly working with its audience, imperceptibly polishing the poem like a glacier polishes its moraines. In this respect, it is a creative process astonishingly similar to the one of a clown’s entrances: appropriated and adapted from generation to generation, standing the test of the audience and going towards them, thus doubly collective, with no possible copyright or genealogies. This is why, from the start, it seemed evident to us that The Song of Roland could go through and inhabit the body, the voice, the soul of Jean’s furious clown – to root itself in it, grow from a cutting and blossom again. We invite you to a poetic and popular feast.

 Marc Goldberg, Singapore, September 2017