La voyageuse

Theatre in the Caribbean
by Alvina Ruprecht

A Caribbean Theatre project, initiated a year ago by Jean-Michel Martial, actor, director and artistic director of the Parisian company l'Autre soufflé, produced a new play at a meeting of the International congress of Caribbean writers in Gosier, Guadeloupe (Nov. 24-28, 2008).

The intention of the organizers of this meeting was to launch an association of Caribbean writers. Playwrights were not included in this initiative, however, the idea of an association of Caribbean playwrights has long been in the works, ever since Jean-Michel set out to build his Repertoire of best plays from the Caribbean, over a year ago, when he asked me to collaborate with him, helping him to put together a group of specialists of Caribbean theatre.

Since then, we have managed to gather a team of writers and critics from four linguistic groups in the area, overseeing the choices of the best writers for the stage from Caribbean countries such as Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Trinidad, Guyana, Barbados, Antigua, Guyana, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Republica Dominicana, Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. During 2008, we have selected a group of 6o plays to be considered by the jury and we have written essays dealing with each play and playwright on the list. The final choice of 26 plays will be made early in the new year, these plays will be translated into French and published in several volumes along with critical analyses of each of the works.

One of the highlights of the writer's meeting in Guadeloupe, was the opening of the play La Voyageuse, directed and rewritten for the stage by Jean-Michel Martial, He presented this event as an example of the kind of theatre that might come out of this new regional collaboration among the artists of the Caribbean basin.

La Voyageuse was based on excerpts from 8 novels and one play written by Guadeloupean novelist and playwright Maryse Condé. Josette Martial chose the written fragments and Jean-Michel, acting as dramaturg, gave this series of prose texts a dramatic form that did work effectively on stage. Using three professional female performers from his own theatre company l'Autre Souffle, and a magnificent stage designer, Eric Plaza-Cochet, the production team created an event that cast much light on the narrative techniques of Mme Condé's prose monologues, on the power of her written word and the extent to which her fiction is very much anchored in a highly theatrical form of spoken dialogue.

Visually this was a beautiful production. Using curtains of wavy iron thread that shimmered in the oblique lighting effects and cast shadows on the walls, the technical prowess of these artists transformed the bodies of the actors into living memories gliding in and out of the past from between the metal strands that dangled in space. This trio of voices fore grounded Condé's language while giving the actresses much opportunity to play with the many voices in the text and incarnate those voices on the stage. One actress became the voice of the author Condé, narrating her own story through her characters that emerged with each dramatic sequence, appearing and disappearing in a seamless continuity.

There was the dialogue with the women from the 18th Century African village of Ségou where the Bambara and the Peule share their fears as the Moslem invaders take over the city and put an end to their own religious traditions. Suddently the curtains part and we are confronted by a laughing young girl bursting with 'joie de vivre" (Le Coeur à rire ou a pleurer) who tells us of her crush on a white classmate, a love that was never meant to be she tells us with a knowing nod to her audience. Suddenly Emma, the haughty actress in Pension les Alizés who refuses to follow her Haitian lover back to his country soon sees her dreams dashed to pieces when she receives a phone call that he has been a victim of the Duvalier régime. The quotes from her novels continue with the author telling us about her African experience when she is confronted with ideological, political and sexual choices in this country on the verge of revolution, as she waits in the antichambre for the Politician who is coming to make love to her. Heremakhanon is without a doubt one of Maryse Condé's most controversial novels.

Then suddenly, one of the actresses takes on the voice of Victoire, the grandmother who tells her life story (Victoire, saveur des mots) bringing together an extreme sensuality and special talent for fine cuisine. The result seems to be a tale that reminds us of the unforgettable Dona flor, created by Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado.

In every case the three actresses exchange characters, share roles, propel the narrative in most fluid and exciting way, with grace and dignity, playfulness and charm, sensuality and troubling malaise, and during these bits of theatre within theatre, One of the actresses incarnates author Condé herself, half hidden in the background behind the metal curtains, bent over the type writer working frantically on her machine to capture every nuance that comes into her mind before the ideas disappear.

The main challenge was to transform the language of prose into a language of performance and by shifting the narrative voices, by creating illusions of a physical movement into the subconscious of the author through these multiple voices, Martial and his artistic team have created a stage event that lifts the words off the written page, giving them a plasticity, a spatial magic that creates an interesting and a beautiful stage event.

Martial, has the delicate ear of a musician. As director, he never forgets the fact that the star of the play is Maryse Condé's language and thus he is able to take into account all the possibilities of the spoken word. The word as produced by the throat, by the lips by the rhythms and the sounds, all the possibilities of the vocal apparatus. His text almost became an oral score, enhanced by a visual and a corporeal choreography that included the movements of the actor's body, the speaking apparatus in fact became an organ of the body that could no longer exist on its own: the perfect blending of the word and the physical means by which it is produced. Thus he transcended the difficulties of the written page destined for solitary reading and brought to the play and to its narrative sources, a level of unsuspecting greatness, it was as if I had rediscovered Condé's novels and the whole experience was extremely moving.

Alvina Ruprecht
CBC, Ottawa

This article appeared for the first time in the Bulletin of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association (February, 2009)