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♦ The Théâtre du Flamboyant from Aimé Césaire to Carole Frechette:
Constructing a professional theatre in Martinique
In many ways, the history of Lucette Salibur’s ‘Théâtre du Flamboyant’ is an exemplary illustration of the evolution of professional theatre in this French overseas department where influences from Europe played and still play a vital role in local theatre practices as well as the financing and the promotion of touring, a necessary activity to sustain the lives of these companies whose audiences on the island are limited. The particular trajectory of this theatre, (first known as the ‘Compagnie Nowtéat’), has taken it through many stages of development. It has gone from a group activity focused on transforming troubled young people into professional actors, to developing children’s theatre as well producing sophisticated theatre in Creole inspired by the contemporary repertoire (La, ka espéré Godot / Waiting for Godot by Beckett, 2003) as well as by the pantheon of spirits from Martinican folktales (Mamiwata, 1999). It later moved towards a contemporary performance aesthetic, all the while casting its creative gaze on international collaborations such as theatre festivals in Venezuela, Limoges, and Avignon, and ultimately staging texts from other francophone areas, such as the Le Collier d’Hélène by Quebec playwright Carole Fréchette. This study will take into account the founding moments that characterize the initial period of ‘Nowtéat’ and the later ‘Théâtre du Flamboyant’ period where the meeting between the Quebec playwright and Lucette Salibur in Montréal at the C.E.A.D. (Centre des auteurs dramatiques) was a culminating moment in this theatrical quest.
Firstly however, it is important to map the history of the company, given the fact that much of its trajectory remains unpublished, available only in the personal archives of its founder Lucette Salibur and in the memory of those practitioners who were involved in the ‘Flamboyant’ experience, from the late 1970s to the present day.
Historical context
Lucette Salibur, the artistic director and founder of the ‘Théâtre du Flamboyant’ was a product of the first generation of professional practitioners who benefitted from Aimé Césaire’s desire to have the local population participate in some form of Martinican cultural activity while professionalizing the theatre milieu. His work in this area, is inspired by his own anti colonial reading of the Marxist class struggle, where he has injected categories of race, ethnicity and cultural affirmation, to defy the presence of Euro France in all areas of island life while rejecting political independence. In 1946, the island voted against autonomy, in favor of a departmental status. Nevertheless, the resistance continued until the end of the 1960’s, inflamed by the violent interventions of French troops sent in from Paris to quell political confrontations between the unions and the police, and by the overseas colonial wars, which ended in 1962 with the 'Accords d’Évian', marking the independence of Algeria. It was precisely against this background, that some of the founding texts of the new Martinican theatrical canon emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. These works, rarely published at that period, and even more rarely performed, proved to what extent writing for the theatre was at last becoming an autonomous and meaningful experience in Martinique, in relation to the dramaturgy of France. For example, Daniel Boukman had produced his plays in Arabic, L’histoire de Hourya / The Story of Hourya (Daniel Boukman, unpublished) [1] and Orphée nègre / Black Orpheus (Daniel Boukman, 1967), with his students in Algeria, after defecting from the French army, and remaining in the country after its independence in 1963 (Ruprecht, 2000: 71) ; Henri Melon who founded his own company, ‘Le théâtre populaire martiniquais’ (TPM ) in 1968, was producing and writing plays in Creole for his company, most of which have not yet been published (Melon, Interview, 2007). [2] Georges Mauvois produced Agenor Cacoul, in 1968; Vincent Placoly, later to become the first playwright from Martinique to win the prestigious Cuban Casa de las Americas prize for theatre (Dessalines ou la passion de l’indépendance / Desssalines or the passion for independence , 1983), wrote his first play La fin douleureuse d’André Aliker / The Painful end of André Aliker in 1969. It was never published because of its controversial content about the mysterious assassination of journalist, and militant communist André Aliker, but recently, the story became a film, Aliker, (2009) based on a script by Patrick Chamoiseau, directed by Guy Deslauriers, starring Stomy Bugsy in the title role. We can only surmise that Chamoiseau is indebted to Placoly for portions of his scenario, even though the name of Placoly never appears in the film credits.
However, much of the impetus towards the later creation of a professional theatre community emerged at the beginning of the 1970s, when the plays by Aimé Césaire, also written in the 1960s, had already caught the eye of French director Jean-Marie Serreau. (Ruprecht, 1999: 124). At a moment of political crisis when the French colonies of the African continent had finally become independent and with the end of the Algerian war, Jean-Marie Serreau’s artistic gaze shifted from the Metropole to the theatres of the former colonies and the overseas departments, as he became interested not only in the plays of Aimé Césaire but also in the works of Algerian writers Kateb Yacine and Boudjema Bouhada. [3]
The historical intertwining of writing for the theatre of the Caribbean and the general movement of French cultural history merits a serious study but these remarks suffice to set the stage for the situation in Martinique which prepared a whole community of potential professionals to take advantage of a new cultural infrastructure that was about to appear. The close friendship between Aimé Césaire and Jean-Marie Serreau, which developed while they were working on Césaire’s plays, resulted in an invitation to Serreau and his Paris based company, ‘Le Théâtre de la tempête’ (established in the Cartoucherie de Vincennes) to present Brecht’s Exception et la règle / The Exception and the Rule, in Fort-de-France, in 1970. The play was produced in Martinique using professional actors from Serreau’s company as well as local non professional actors, as a favour to Césaire, to show what these young Caribbean artists could accomplish with no formal training. This was the first time the Serreau team had ever appeared in the country. (Grand-Madison, 1990-91: 3-4) It included Yvan Labéjof and Akonio Dolo (both were actors and directors who become a constant presence in the country); also involved was Serreau’s wife Danielle Van Bercheyke who documented much of her husband’s work. Together, they helped Césaire realize one of his most fervent dreams: offer a free theatrical event of great quality to the population of Fort-de-France and it was a great succes. In 1971, Yvan Labéjof staged Césaire’s Une Tempête / A Tempest,, while Serreau’s theatre prepared another performance in France, based on a play written and directed by Algerian author Boudjema Bouhada, La Terre Battue / The Battered Earth. Along with the Algerian play, Césaire’s play and a new production of Brecht’s, Homme pour homme / Man Equals Man, the company returned to Fort de France in July 1972, to present all three works, and this triple bill officially became the first edition of the Festival Culturel de Fort-de-France. The Cultural Festival of Fort-de-France, presented at the Hall des Sports du Stade Louis Achilles. (Grand-Maison, 1990: 3-4)
At its outset, the Festival which is still a regular event in July, gave the young population, a taste for live performance and a desire to devote their energies to creating works inspired by their own culture, something which had rarely been encouraged in the country. [4] As well, the Cultural Festival, under the banner of 'La Negritude', became, in its earlier years, an afro-centric consciousness raising event closely related to the ideas of the Francophone Negritude movement that had never been explicitly adopted by French language theatre before Césaire’s plays. [5] The various themes of each Festival year attest to this fact. In 1976, the Festival was dedicated to ‘The Victory of the Angolan People’; in 1977, it hailed ‘The Liberation of the Peoples of South Africa’; in 1979 it recognized ‘The Struggle of Afro-Americans’; in 1980 the Festival recognized ‘The Black People of Latin America’ and in 1981, it called attention to the ‘Black Diaspora’. The festival attracted companies from the Afro-American, Afro-Caribbean and Afro-French spaces. Guadeloupian director and playwright Arthur Lérus and his company Siklon working exclusively in Creole, became regular guests of Aimé Césaire, as did Haitian writer and actor Syto Cavé and his colleagues from the company ‘ Kouidor’ who had been living in exile in New York since the end of the 1960s. Other Francophone / Créolophone artists who had gone to live in France because there was no outlet for their work at home, also began converging on Fort de France, usually invited by Césaire : in 1976, Martinican director Benjamin Jules Rosette who had established his ‘Théâtre noir’/ ‘Black Theatre’ in Paris , presented his production of Zoulou by Congolese playwright Tchicaya U’Tamsi; Guyanese writer Eli Stephenson, came to the Festival with a production of his play Un rien de pays, by the Troupe Angela Davis from Guyane. Thus, by 1977-78, the Festival was reversing the B.U.M.I.D.O.M. dynamic, by bringing artists back to Martinique. Voted in 1963, the law called B.U.M.I.D.O.M (Bureau pour la migration et le développement de l’immigration des departments d’outre-mer / Office for Migration and Development of Immigration from the Overseas Departments, or the D.O.M) strongly encouraged the insertion of people from the island work force into the work force of Metropolitan France. The law had devastating political, economic and cultural consequences on Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyana. It appeared then, that Aimé Césaire’s cultural initiative was an important act of defiance because it brought the artists of the French Caribbean home, by feeding their deepest need to express their anger and inner turmoil against French institutions, through the act of performance.
In 1976, four years after the creation of the Festival in 1972, the resulting effervescence also brought about the creation of the Service municipal d’action culturelle de la ville de Fort-de-France (S.E.R.M.A.C), a municipal cultural initiative, when Jean Paul Césaire and Aimé Césaire, contacted Annick Justin-Joseph, preparing a degree in French literature in Paris, and asked her to think about opening a theatre workshop within that new structure which also offered classes in all the performing and visual arts (Justin-Joseph, Interview 1998). Mme Justin-Joseph returned in 1977 and the workshop became a reality under her direction in collaboration with Roger Robinel.
Among the other Martinicans who came home in 1977 because of the Festival and the new possibilities of theatre training, were Lucette Salibur (Salibur, Interview 2008) and Joby Bernabé, actor, director, story teller, creator of a new style of spoken word poetry, and founder, in 1973, of his own Parisian theatre company based on the title of the play that launched the group: Kimafoutésa / Qui m'a foutu ça / Who gave me that crap?, strongly influenced at first by Piscator’s ‘Theatre of Agitation and Propaganda’(Agit-Prop) or ‘Guerilla theatre’ that positioned itself as a critique of the plight of immigrant and Caribbean workers in France. (Bernabé, Interview 1998).
Upon returning home, Lucette Salibur immediately enrolled in a state diploma program offered by ‘Jeunesse et Sports’ / ‘Youth and Sports’, which was later to become the D.R.A.C. (Direction régionale des affaires culturelles de la Martinique/The Régional Office for Cultural Affairs in Martinique ) affiliated with the Ministry of Culture, to obtain professional training as a socio-cultural monitor for young people. Her programme of study involved an optional course in theatre which brought her into the S.E.R.M.A.C. theatre workshop as a student. This theatre program, also set up a parallel network of smaller cultural centers in the outlying areas of the city to bring cultural activity to the whole population, including those who could not come into the city’s centre where the S.E.R.M.A.C. was located. One of these peripheral cultural centers was the new ‘Centre Jean-Marie Serreau’ at the ‘Pitt Dilon’ in remembrance of Césaire’s friend who died in 1973. Thus the S.E.R.M.A.C. was the central structure from which emanated smaller local cultural centers and, according to Salibur, the organizers noted all the young people with special talents as potential leaders, recruiting them as monitors for cultural activities in these Centers. Salibur, because of her diploma and her obvious talent as an actress, found herself at the head of the Cultural Centre ‘Toussaint Louverture’ in Crozanville, a suburb of Fort-de-France.
Given this newly revived interest in theatre activity because of the festival and because of the new S.E.R.M.A.C. training programmes, there was a growing demand for more advanced training and in response to this, a professional programme of study was established. Planned as a five year program (1982-87), the first of its kind in Martinique, it became the founding structure of a possible National Conservatory of Theatre which has never materialized either in Martinique or in Guadeloupe. The students admitted to these five years of professional training at that period, were chosen from the most promising participants of the S.E.R.M.A.C. workshops and Lucette Salibur found herself selected, along with Elie Pennont, José Dalmas, Serge Abatucci, Dorothée Audibert, Monique Nelson, Dany Arthus, Ali Balthazar, Mano Beaudi and Serge Lof . It took place in Martinique under the guidance of professors and directors who were mostly from France : Pierre Vial of the Conservatory of Paris; Pierre Debauche, founder of the “Théâtre des Amandiers’ at Nanterre and of the ‘Théâtre du Jour à Agen,’ a professional company and school of dramatic arts; Robert Angebaud of the Conservatory of Rennes, Alan Boone, director and choreographer, Jean-Marie Winling of the ‘Théâtre national de Chaillot’ in Paris, and Wolé Soyinka, Nigerian playwright, director and Nobel prize winner for literature in 1986. At the same time, Annick Justin-Joseph, herself deeply involved in theatre training at the S.E.R.M.A.C., invited other local specialists to work with the training program: Maura Michalon, a singer of Martinican origin taught vocal technique, and later José Exélis, founder of the ‘Compagnie des enfants de la mer’, taught martial arts. Thus, in 1982, as a result of this new training structure inspired by Aimé Césaire, a group of actors emerged to become the first generation of Aimé Césaire’s professional company ‘Le Théâtre de la soif nouvelle ‘ (T.S.N.). Their first professional production was La Cruche cassée by Heinrich von Kleist, directed by Robert Angebaud, and Annik Justin-Joseph became the company’s first artistic director (1982-89). During that training period, the plays produced under the guidance of the directors from Europe, coincided with the work done by the T.S.N, and all this activity became the basis for the first programme of professional training.
In 1986, as soon as the company had undertaken a sufficient number of professional productions, the T.S.N. became a C.D.R. (‘Centre dramatique regional’), an administrative structure emanating from the Ministry of Culture which housed professional theatre companies on French territory. Thus the status of the T.S.N., as the first professional company on the island was officially confirmed. Mme Justin-Joseph remained at the head of the T.S.N. / C.D.R. until 1989 when Elie Pennont took over the direction in 1990. (Marcelle Pennont, 1999)
Lucette Salibur and the Nowtéat
At the end of the five years training, (1987), a new period in Salibur’s professional life began. She was made co-director, with Ousmane Seck, [6] of the theatre workshop at the S.E.R.M.A.C. where she continued her work with young people while she continued her own professional training in Martinique and in France. She studied with Jean-François Lazaro at the ‘International Institute of Marionettes in Charleville-Mezieres’, she followed a training programe on the art of the African griot at the Cartoucherie de Vincennes under the guidance of Sotiguy Kouyaté, one of Peter Brooks permanent actors at the time; she did a workshop on the ‘Commedia dell’arte’ with Giovanni at the TSN, a workshop on writing for the stage with Jean-Claude Carrière and she also studied directing under Daniel Mesguiche.
Salibur soon noticed that the S.E.R.M.A.C. workshops were attracting the young unemployed who in many cases were deeply troubled because of personal problems or difficult family backgrounds. These classes appeared to have a therapeutic effect by liberating students from the disturbing reality of their daily lives. Thus, in 1989, in order to concentrate more closely on these emotionally fragile young people, she created her own structure, ‘la Compagnie Nowtéat’, a theatre ‘here and now’, which became a tightly knit group, in many ways, echoing the ‘communes’ that had grown out of the anti psychiatry movement in Britain and the American counterculture activities in the 1960s and 1970s. The young people of that era attempted to deal with their own war oriented Western culture by becoming followers of the theories of R.D.Laing, whose rejection of the traditional Western family corresponded to their social and psychic need to change their own American culture. In the case of Martinique, young people were not trying to cure a war mongering society but they were seeking some form of personal healing, related in some way to cultural change in the context of group therapy within a renewed form of ‘family’, represented in this case, by the new ‘Nowtéat’. Salibur provided a pedagogy that functioned as collective therapy through play, similar to the work of Richard Schechner and the ‘ Living Theatre’ in New York, where the participants lived together in communes, created their plays collectively as a background for their own form of political protest strongly inspired by Piscator’s ‘guerilla theatre’. If these students did not constitue communes living together in the same way as the Americans, or if the political orientation of such companies did not concern Salibur’s Nowtéat at all, their collective theatre strategies, as the basis of a healing process certainly did. Salibur constituted her ‘family’ around theatre performances of intense personal involvement, the driving force around which the young people gathered to recover their inner harmony. She began working on collective stagings based on personal memories of each participant. The second production of the company: Harlem First (Kwateh, 1990) was a combined effort by the students to capture the spirit of black American ghettos as a model for their new self awareness as young black people seeking a way to affirm their right to exist, through poetry, dance, graffiti, traditional music and drumming. Salibur also mentions the directing strategies she used in one particular case that helped her understand and eventually explain a young woman’s aggressive behavior. By giving this person the role of a fragile and generous mother in a one act social comedy entitled Il suffit d’y croire/It suffices to believe,( 1991) and by forcing her to assume a character so completely different from her usual angry nature, Salibur hoped to help her ‘hear her own internal music’ at a very deep level. (Salibur, 2009) Eventually, by playing such an atypical character, the actress was forced to push her own emotions to their limit and discover feelings she would have normally repressed and that moment of realization strengthened the bonds within the group.
It soon became obvious, however, that the number of plays available for her particular needs was very limited and so Salibur, who was essentially an actor and a director, began writing as well as investigating new staging techniques. Thus the therapeutic orientation diminished as the creative needs of the director / playwright came to the fore ground. In 1993, she had already performed a stage adaptation by Ina Césaire, of a novel by Haitian writer Jacques Roumain, Gouverneurs de la roséeé / Masters of the Dew, which they had taken to the ‘Festival de Oriente’ in Venezuela. (Kwateh, 1992; Metropolitano, 1993) Salibur also brought to the ‘Nowtéat’, her knowledge of masks acquired during her studies at Charleville-Mezieres. Carïbos, l’enfant perdu / Caraïbos, the Lost Child, was created as the result of a collaboration with Patrick Dubois’ puppet company in Guadeloupe, ‘Moov’art’. Using pottery, painting, and puppet creating techniques, they constructed a musical folktale for adults and young people alike, where actors wearing masks, were transformed into giant puppets . (Rabussier, 1994 ) The period from 1994 to 1997 was a period of change as ‘Nowtéat' slowly transformed itself into a new structure, with broader goals and expectations: the ‘Théâtre du Flamboyant.’ Two of the emblematic productions of this transition period were Traversée, / Crossing ( Xavier Orville, 1995), and Sans nationalité fixe ou la tentation d’exister / No Fixed Nationality or the Temptation of Existence. ( Lucette Salibur, 1997) Lucette affirms that ‘what changed essentially was not so much the level of theatre research as the context in which we worked’ (Lucette Salibur, 2009), however, her theatrical process and her relation with the text produced many new elements in her stage work at that pivotal point in her career. The choice of plays was based on the thematic and aesthetic content of the play as well as the extent to which they found the text challenging. As well, the artistic director of the company was finally free to include some or none of the members of the company in the show, according to the needs of the casting. Their choices were no longer based on the financial needs of the group, but on the needs of the play which meant that all levels of the staging and the performance process became objects of reflexion and research. The professionalization of the company was clearly changing the nature of its work.
The Manifesto and the Coming of the ‘Théâtre du Flamboyant’ ( 1997)
The idea of transforming the company, was first reported by the Martinican daily France Antilles in 1994 where Salibur’s explanations take the form of a Theatre Manifesto. These declarations in the press became a statement of intention attempting to position a theatre poetics in the context of her personal trajectory such as the need to find new artistic horizons and also to locate herself within the general orientation of Martinican theatre at that period. Manifestos in the form of a poétiques / poetics are often found in literary circles in the Caribbean, [7] but they are rare in the area of theatre. No doubt, the most important francophone theatre Manifesto in the region was written by Haitian director and actor Hervé Denis in 1970: Introduction à un manifèste pour un théâtre haïtien / Introduction to a Manifesto for Haitian theatre, presented in New York, to explain and justify the orientation of the new company Kouidor. The text was later published in Nouvelle Optique, 1.1 (1971): 614-616. In his book Le théâtre haïtien, des origines à nos jours / Haitian Theatre from its origins to the present, Robert Cornevin reprints most of the Manifesto, revealing the influence of Brecht's A Short Organum for the Theater (1948) on the theatrical poetics of this Haitian theatre in exile, as essentially one of political protest based on a return to one’s roots.
Lucette Salibur develops her own laws of theatre but instead of focusing her remarks on specific stage practices she speaks more generally of theatre as an expression of personal identity which questions a theatre too close to a recognizable Martinican culture, proning a theatre that speaks to the world:
As an artist, I say to you very humbly that I feel the need to unite my artistic calling with the voices of the world [...] I can only exist in a dynamics of exchange […] I have never been a great admirer of the movement ‘théâtre bô kay’ (théâtre de proximité / théâtre de chez nous/ our own theatre). […] I know I am from Martinique; I don’t have to focus exclusively on that. I know I am black, I don’t have to focus on that either [...] Art exists so that people the world over can speak to each other. Of course we have to create theatre that speaks about Martinique as well, but theatre must speak to Martinique and to the whole world at the same time, because the world does not stop at our borders. (Laurenciene, 1996 : 25). [8]
‘The théâtre du Flamboyant’ officially came into existence in 1997, with the creation of Traversée by Xavier Orville (1996), a play which constituted a radical departure from former productions. Salibur was no longer involved in a collective experience but in an act of artistic self-discovery. She commissioned the play by Orville, hired a director to work with her (Christian Remer), and became the lone artist responsible for interpreting this long complex monologue that referred to the situation of women in her own country and elsewhere. This poetic tale, as defined by the Brochure du Festival international du Limousin, (1996) / Programme of the International Festival of Limoges (1996) , tells of a woman who awakes one morning, ‘terrified to discover that she has been buried alive and is suddenly coming out of her grave.’ [9] This could very well be a metaphor that refers to a legendary figure signifying the awakening of all women, who have been symbolically buried for so many generations and who are suddenly conscious of the oppression they have endured over the centuries. Now, a new era has arrived, and the situation is going to change because the women’s voices can no longer remain silent, a performance that seems to foretell Carole Fréchette’s recurring statement that was going to resonate so strongly with Salibur : ‘On ne peut plus vivre comme ça / We can no longer live this way’. (Fréchette, 2002 : 34-35) Traversée is a mise en abyme created by an actress who carries the evening by evoking the condition of six women caught in a web of despair, crying out for solidarity in this world of misery and exclusion. (Bouriffet, 1996) The critics emphasize the fact that the tableau presents a despairing image of women who are oppressed, mistreated, ignored, and abandoned but that Orville’s intention is to show the public that this misery and exclusion are unacceptable. And in fact, a child invites them to continue their ‘crossing over’ (la ‘Traversée’) so that the play becomes a song of hope and an invitation to discover the world as much as oneself. Salibur’s performance is given much praise and the article also emphasizes the fact that ‘one of the master touches of Traversée was the discrete play of shadow and light which produced an effect of great visual beauty’ / L’un des clouets-maîtres de Traversée est le jeu d’ombres et de lumières sobre, efficace et d’une grande beauté plastique’ thanks to lighting designer Dominique Guesdon (TV Mag, 1996,:17). This particular attention to nuanced stage effects operating beyond, music and corporeal effects produced by the actor, is another indication of the growing aesthetic sophistication that characterize the new ‘Théâtre du Flamboyant’.
The Collier d’Hélène/Helen’s Necklace. (2007-2009)
Playwright Carole Fréchette conceived the play during a workshop organized by the Festival des Francophonies at Limoges (France) in 2000. The nine writers involved spent a month in Lebanon, at a period that corresponded to the eighth year after the end of the 1992 war in Beyrouth, During her stay, Fréchette felt a sense of alienation which she transposed to the stage by focusing on a single object, a necklace, belonging to the protagonist. Hélène appears as a foreigner who has lost a pearl necklace and the play is structured by her encounters with different characters as she searches for her piece of jewellery by retracing her steps in the ruined city. (Pavlovic, 2009) The necklace has no intrinsic value but it becomes a symbol for loss: the death of a close friend, a destroyed home, a city in ruins, a dead child, a life in shreds, loss that is experienced in different ways by different individuals. This compulsive search for a fetishistic object is driven by Hélène’s belief that by finding it, her own emotional loss of a recent relationship, will be healed. The revelation comes when she realizes that those around her are plunged in misery and despair resulting from their own loss which cannot be compared to hers because theirs cannot be recovered. This strong emotional encounter shocks Hélène out of her self centered gaze and for the first time, she is able to see the reality around her. The first sign of alienation is the fact that she cannot understand the language of the inhabitants who are Arabic speaking . Then she sees that they are not interested in her search for an object that has no meaning for them. On the other hand, she is so absorbed by this apparently worthless trinket, she barely perceives those around her, and makes almost no attempt to communicate with anyone except with the taxi driver whose presence is vital for her as she moves back in time searching for her necklace.
From a postcolonial perspective, Hélène could be considered the incarnation of a colonial power relation, the arrogant and egocentric Westerner, oblivious to the suffering around her in a place that could be Beyrouth, a city ravaged by civil war. The play cries out for the audience to recognize the plight of Palestinians, Lebanese and other groups, victimized by the wars in the Middle East. The production by the French company ‘La Barraca’ (staged by Nabil El Azan), [10] chose a blond white French woman to play Hélène opposite a Middle Eastern Arabic speaking cast. These choices fore grounded the power, class and ethnic conflicts that were embedded in the text although Fréchette insists that the play is a purely personal experience that goes no further in her mind. (Pavlovic, 2009)
However, Salibur reads the play another way. Her production opened in 2008 in her small theatre laboratory space Azwell, located at Terreville on the first floor of a shopping centre on the outskirts of Schoelcher (Martinique). It was later seen at the Théâtre Aimé Césaire, the former Théâtre municipal of Fort de France (renamed after the death of Aimé Césaire), and in July 2009 at the Avignon Festival in the ‘Off’ programe at the Chapelle du verbe incarné, invited by Geg Germain and Marie-Pierre Bousquet where the play was filmed for French television, ‘France O’. My remarks are based on the Avignon performance and on the filmed version that M.-P.Bousquet was kind enough to send me. This production represents the most recent manifestation of Salibur’s theatre poetics showing how her appropriation of a theatrical text from another country, does not prevent her from reconnecting with her own artistic choices such as Martinican story telling techniques, while relocating those traditional strategies within a contemporary acting process.
Salibur presents the play on an empty stage. The six characters are represented by four actors: Daniely Francisque plays Hélène, Lucette Salibur appears as the woman who has lost her son and in her disturbing state of denial, her grief provokes hallucinations; Ruddy Sylaire plays three of the four male characters who encounter Hélène: the foreman who carries a bundle of tattered clothes that he spreads out to recreate the cemetery of dead bodies symbolizing the country in question. The articles of clothing also evoke a tradition in Martinique where people used to sleep in their houses or ‘kay’ on old articles of clothing piled up to form a mattress called the ‘rad kabann’ where each piece of clothing symbolized a known figure among the villagers: secondly, there is also the man who has lost his whole family and is living in a refugee camp; the third male character incarnated by Sylaire is the ‘Prowler’, a nervous, stammering fellow who moves about crouching over like an animal, covered in army camouflage material, wearing goggles and a cap, the survivor emerging from the rubble of destruction desperately trying to make money, which includes trying to sell Hélène cheap necklaces to replace her lost one. The fourth male presence is the taxi driver Nabil, played by Patrice Le Namouric, who performs a role similar to the traditional ‘story teller” or even the remnant of a chorus, a figure who returns constantly like a leitmotiv, propelling Hélène forward on her quest. The taxi driver/story teller/chorus, paves the way for the encounters with each character as they emerge out of the shadows, summoned up from the ruins of the city by some mysterious force of memory at work in this atmosphere of death and destruction.
The ‘Flamboyant’ production, very different from the ‘Baracca’ staging, avoids almost all political meaning by erasing all scenery, films or any references to anywhere recognizable – except for the ‘perfume of Lebanon’ suggested by the music says Salibur (Pavlovic, 2009) , and by disrupting the black / white colonial oriented dichotomy to reinforce the symbolic meaning of the necklace itself.
Paradoxically, in order to capture this sense of global humanity, the director makes abundant use of elements from the world of traditional storytelling, the most important of these being the repeated appearance of the circle / spiral (the shape of the necklace itself ) to define the spatial relations between the characters, and to propel them on and off the stage in a non hierarchical and a teleological trajectory that never begins and never concludes, but that suggests an indefinite continuity extending beyond all frontiers , all cultural and geopolitical borders. Also within this continuity, the circle is the traditional space of the story teller in oral-based traditions, the symbol of a cyclical relationship with the world where past and present, visible and invisible, dissolve into a unique moment in time, just as the “spiral’ signifies an ongoing centrifugal force that generates life of all kinds, according to Salibur. [11]
The first scene is emblematic of the way the energy of the circle, and the spiral, are central to her staging. The taxi driver moves around the stage in a clockwise direction, propelling himself in his taxi, represented by a red tire that he pushes forward using two sticks. These props, which also suggest a children’s game in France and in Africa (another reference that links continents and peoples), helps the actor establish a steady, uninterrupted rhythm that determines the general rhythm of the play. It also confirms his role as story teller who assures the cyclical movement of events. There are never more than two characters on stage at any moment and as they enter, each one finds his or her own space in the acting area, where they are choreographed in such a way as to follow their opposing circular paths, sometimes at the periphery, sometimes in concentric circles , sometimes in circular formations simultaneously upstage and downstage . These spaces traced out by the movements of each figure, project the disjunction between the other actors’ bodies and the actress playing Hélène, locating her in a space disconnected from her surroundings.
This appears immediately in the first scene with Nabil. It also appears with the foreman who slowly moves in a broad circle as he spreads his tattered clothes on the floor, constructing the semblance of a cemetery around Hélène so she that she is embedded in the human remains that symbolize the destruction of his life. Circles are constantly being drawn in space, recalling the cyclical movement of history which connects the different characters with the dead, the ancestors or the mythological beings who inhabit the pantheon of the Caribbean folktales, eternally roaming the earth. It also suggests that these figures have emerged from a mysterious force, generated by the circular energy swirling around the stage, incarnated in the texts and in the extremely physical exchanges that take place between Hélène and these almost ghostlike figures who just ‘appear’ and vanish into the shadows, incarnated by various forms that are never quite anchored in reality. Perhaps fabrications of Hélène’s own tormented mind as she tries desperately to reconnect with her own past and a troubled present she cannot understand. In a similar sense, the spiral, which generates life, according to Salibur, is clearly traced in the Sufi movements [12] of the characters during moments of great emotional tension. When the woman searching for her son is swept away in a delirium of pain, she and Hélène are positioned back to back as they wave their arms and gyrate their bodies in a circular movement, appearing to be pinned to each other by the centrifugal force resulting from this rapid turning, the sign that this encounter will perhaps generate a new life for the despairing mother driven mad with grief. An even more intense whirling Sufi movement plays out in the scene with the man who is eventually responsible for Hélène’s transformation, suggesting that the revelation experienced by Hélène is the result of a mystical experience of ‘translumination’ rather than a rational understanding of the social reality she encounters around her. After the first meeting with this grieving man, her body appears to take control of its own movements, whirling faster and faster, spinning off into another dimension, drawn into an ecstatic communion with some invisible being. The story teller’s world takes possession of the stage the moment the young woman is confronted by this “suffering survivor” and their encounter produces a deep seated transformation which unfolds concretely on stage as a psychophysiological experience, set off by a violent physical encounter between Hélène and the powerful energy emanating from this angry male figure. The moment of revelation is provoked by a physical shock. Exasperated by her obsession with the necklace, which he belittles in relation to his own loss: ‘Vous avez perdu votre collier […] Moi, j’ai perdu ma place sur la terre. You have lost your necklace, I have lost my place on earth’ (Fréchette, 2002: 33), the man lunges forward, grabs Hélène, hoists her up on his back and yells ‘On ne peut plus vivre comme ça. We can no longer live this way’ while almost throwing her backwards over his shoulder. Terrified by this unexpected gesture, she loses her self assurance as the meaning of those words suddenly becomes clear. From that point on, they become the guiding principle of the play, according to Salibur: ‘On ne peut plus vivre comme ça’ signifies, that the real problem is not based on a black /white conflict. (The use of an all black cast in any case erases the meaning of colour in this production). ‘It refers to the fact that we must think beyond this question of colour. The appearance of a racial problem is only one level of meaning that can be extracted from this play because in her own understanding, it moves beyond any given geopolitical or ideological boundaries. During her interview in Montreal, Salibur mentions the fact that the racial question is only a pretext to hide the divisive politics of those in power who want to take control of economic forces in the country”, (Pavlovic, 2009) but the fact that Salibur frequently repeats Fréchette’s statement ‘on ne peut plus vivre comme ça’, shows how it has become a form of incantation that has transformative powers in the context of its verbal production on stage. It sets in motion the mental transformation of Hélène, a fitting finale for a play that is essentially a ritualized quest, where the young woman experiences an initiation during which her gaze is altered and she enters into a new perception of the world. Her relation with the taxi driver becomes more intimate, even warm and sensual. She suddenly understands him when he speaks. She even wants to name him, and ask him for his protection and in the final moments, the two move off in the ‘taxi’, clinging to each other as the circles unite and draw them into the shadows. If Mme Salibur continues the present orientation of research and discovery of multiple texts that inspire interesting staging strategies, she will no doubt find that by drawing on her past experiences with masks, and various other corporeal traditions (Martinican, Italian, Senegalese) she will continue to revitalize her stage practices and develop a theatrical imagery that will continue to nourish an already rich performance poetics. The ‘Théâtre du Flamboyant’ is one of the important companies in Martinique that presently contributes to the construction of a cultural history of the French and Creole speaking Caribbean.
Acknowledgements
I am greatly indebted to Lucette Salibur for giving me access to her archives and for recording the conversation between her and Carole Fréchette at the CEAD in Montreal on October 29, 2009. I would also like to thank Marie-Pierre Bousquet and Greg Germain for the DVD of the Collier d’Hélène which was filmed at the Chapelle du verbe incarné during the Festival d’Avignon for the French television station, ‘France O’. Many thanks as well to all the other artists mentioned here who have shared their experiences with me over the years: Joby Bernabé, Daniel Boukman, Frankétienne, Ghislaine Gadjard, Marius Gottin, Annick Justin-Joseph, Marcelle Pennont, as well as theatre critics Adams Kwateh,Christian Antourel and Roland Sabra.
Principal productions by Lucette Salibur (‘Nowtéat’ and the ‘Théâtre du Flamboyant’)
1990 Zindziwa et la légende du vieux monde / Zindziwa and the legend of the old world. A poetic folktale based on texts by Aimé Césaire, David Diop, and Veronique Tadjo among others, written and performed by Lucette Salibur. A production of ‘Nowtéat’ first presented at the ‘Théâtre du Marché’, ‘Festival du Marin’, Martinique.
1990 Harlem First, written and directed by Lucette Salibur, a production ‘Nowtéat’ which premiered at the ‘Théâtre Aimé Césaire’.
1991 Boom ... et Aïda rencontra Mutant/ Boom, and Aide met the Mutant, written and directed by Lucette Salibur. A production Nowtéat that premièred at Théâtre Municipal’, during the 20th ‘ Festival culturel de Fort de France’ In 1992, it was invited to the ‘Festival de teatro de Oriente ‘ in Venezuela.
1991 Il suffit d’y croire, All you have to do is believe. A coproduction ‘Nowtéat’ and the ‘Studio théâtre’ du SERMAC. First performed at the Centre André Aliker de Sainte Thérèse. It was later programmed in the Théâtre municipal de Fort de France during the ‘Festival culturel.’
1993 Le rire ... J’en ris / Laugh ... that’s a laugh. Written and directed by Lucette Salibur, produced by ‘ Nowtéat,’ first performed at the Centre culturel Aliker during the ‘Festival culturel de Fort de France’.
1994 Caraïbos, l'enfant perdu , a musical folktale, written, directed by Lucette Salibur who also composed the music. Max Catayée designed the costumes and set. Produced by the ‘Nowtéat’. First performed at the Grand Carbet theatre of the Parc Floral (SERMAC), Fort de France. The play took part in the 19th ‘Theatre Festival de Oriente’ in Venezuela.
1994 Hyménée de Gogol. A co-production of ‘Nowtéat’ (Martinique) with, ‘Dérivaj’ (Guadeloupe) CO ( ?) organized by the CMAC in Martinique, the result of a training session on the Stanislavsky method, offered to these three companies by Russian teachers : Igor Solotovitsky et Serguei Ziemtsov. The play was presented during the 13th edition of ‘Rencontres théâtrales’, organized by the Centre martiniquais d’action culturelle (CMAC) in Fort de France.
1995 Rêve d’Alizée, written and directed by Lucette Salibur, a coproduction of ‘Nowtéat’ and the theatre workshops of the SERMAC, presented at ‘le Grand Carbet’ during the 24th ‘Festival culturel de Fort de France’.
1995 Traversée by Xavier Orville, performed by Lucette Salibur, directed by Christian Remer, commissioned by ‘ Théâtre du Flamboyant’ . in coproduction with the CMAC (scène nationale) the TSN/CDR. . Music by Gwo Van Ka Souflé. Premiered in Martinique in 1995and later (1996) invited to the 13th ‘Festival international des Francophonies en Limousin’ (Limoges)
1996 Hommage à la mer Caraïbe, event created around the works of Caribbean poets, by Lucette Salibur and Joby Bernabé (actor, director, spoken work artist, story teller).
1997 Sans nationalité fixe (SNF), ou la tentation d’exister / No fixed nationality or the temptation of existence. Written and directed by Lucette Salibur. Presented by the students of the SERMAC theatre workshop and performed in the ‘Théâtre municipal de Fort de France’.
1999 Mamiwata, written and performed by Lucette Salibur, directed by Akonio Dolo. A production of the ‘Théâtre du Flamboyant’ which premiered at the Théâtre municipal during the “Festival culturel de Fort de France’. It was also presented at the ‘Festival d’Avignon’ / The ‘Theatre Festival in Avignon’(2000) invited by the ‘Chapelle du verbe incarné’.
2003 La, ka espéré Godot / En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. Adapted and translated into créole by Monchoachi. Directed by Lucette Salibur, a production of the ‘Théâtre du Flamboyant’, presented at the Atrium of the CMAC - la scène nationale de la Martinique.
2003 Le livre d’Abouboudia / The book of Abouboudia written and directed by Lucette Salibur, a production of the ‘Théâtre du Flamboyant’ first performed at the Centre culturel de Basse –Bondeau, Martinique.
2004 Zibouli Ziboula, a folktale adapted for the stage and directed by Lucette Salibur. A production of the ‘Théâtre du Flamboyant’ presented at the Atrium of the CMAC - la scène nationale de la Martinique.
2005 Twa fèy, twa rasin / Two Leaves two roots, based on texts by Aimé Césaire, Fanon et Glissant, directed by Lucette Salibur with choreography by Josiane Antourel and music by Jeff Baillard. A production of the ‘Théâtre du Flamboyant’ which premiered at the Atrium of the CMAC-Scène nationale de la Martinique.
2007 Le Collier d’Hélène / Hélène’s Necklace by Carole Fréchette, directed by Lucette Salibur, a production of the ‘Théâtre du Flamboyant’, premièred at the ‘Théâtre Aimé Césaire’, former Théâtre municipal de Fort de France (2008). Presented at the Festival d’Avignon, at the ‘Chapelle du verbe incarné’. (2009)
References:
Brecht, Bertolt (1963), ‘Petit organon pour le théâtre’, Écrits sur le théâtre,v.1, Paris : l’Arche, pp. 9-52
Bouriffet, Jean-Philippe (1996), ‘L’aventure de la création selon Xavier Orville’, Le Populaire du Centre, 1 octobre.
Cornevin, Robert (1973), Le théâtre haïtien, des origines à nos jours, Ottawa/Montréal : Éditions Léméac.
Fabert, Sandra (1992), « Ils y croient, », France Antilles-Martinique, 16/05
Jones, Bridget (1997), Paradoxes of French Caribbean Theatre. An annotated Checklist of Dramatic Works. Guadeloupe, Guyane, Martinique from 1900.London : Roehampton Institute.
Kwateh, Adams (1993), ‘L’hymne de la fraternité humaine venu d’Haïti’, France Antilles (Martinique), 13/07
Laurenciene, Ronald (1996), ‘Lucette Salibur, contre le théâtre bô kay’, TV Magazine (Martinique) n. 345, 4-10 mai, 24-25.
Pavlovic, Diane (2009), Recorded Discussion of the round table with Carole Fréchette and Lucette Salibur, Centre d’auteurs dramatiques (CEAD), Montréal, 29 Octobre.
Pennont, Marcelle (1999), Archival Document outlining the history of the CDR, (fax), August 17, 5
Piscator, Erwin(1962), Le théâtre politique, Paris :l’Arche éditeur.
Rabussier,Dominique, "C’est le Nowtéat," France Antilles Magazine, 12-19 novembre, 1994
Ruprecht, Alvina (1999), ‘ Devenons flamboyants! Le 28e Festival culturel de Fort-de-France’, Cahiers de théâtre Jeu, 93, 4, pp. 124-128.
Ruprecht, Alvina (2000), ‘Stratégies d’une dramaturgie politique : le théâtre anticolonial de Daniel Boukman’, l’Annuaire théâtral, 28, pp. 59-72
Ruprecht, Alvina (2009), ‘Totolomannwèl : Frankétienne et le jeu ‘ solo’, Typo/Topo/Poethique sur Franketienne, (ed) Jean Jonassaint), Paris : l’Harmattan, pp. 79-96
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http://www.carleton.ca/francotheatres/spectacles_Colier_Helen_2009.html
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Unknown (1993), ‘Nowtéat quiere inducir cambios a través del amor’/The Nowtéat wants to induce changes trough love’ Metropolitano, Barcelona, Venezuela, 23/10/
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Notes:
[1]
Later published under the title La vérédique histoire de Hourya / The True Story of Hourya (Daniel Boukman,2009)
[2]
Interview with Henri Melon (Fort-de-France, 1 novembre 2007). ‘The théâtre populaire martiniquais ‘(T.M.P.) founded in 1968 at a period when writing in créole was not well received and when the plays of Aimé Césaire were considered subversive. The first ‘real’ play they produced was Coup de Coutelas ou l’ami Léon / A Machete Thrust or our friend Leon (1971). It was performed in French and Créole because at that time they did not yet dare to work exclusively in créole.
[3]
Kateb Yacine , Born in Algeria (1929-1989) is best known for his collection of plays that appeared under the title Le Cercle des représailles (1956) which contained Le Cadavre encerclé, La Poudre d’intelligence, Les Ancêtres redoublent de férocité, Le Vautaur. His theatre had a greater influence than that of Aimé Césaire as far as his anti colonial dramaturgy was concerned. Constantly writing in a state of ‘exile’ or ‘errance’, because of the many countries he visited, he eventually returned to Algeria around 1970 where he founded his company l’Action culturelle des travailleurs where he wrote and staged plays in spoken Arabic and Berbere. In 1987, he was awarded the 'Prix National des lettres ' for his play on Nelson Mandela. The theatre of Kateb Yacine had a marked influence on the plays of Daniel Boukman who lived and worked for many years in Algeria at that period.
[4]
The presence of Edouard Glissant and his theatre activity with young people at that period was also extremely important. It is documented in his journal Acoma, which can be consulted at the National Library in Paris (Bibliothéque Mitterand) but his contribution to theatre in Martinique is certainly another one of the formative influences in the country at that period.
[5]
Henri Melon speaks of his afro-oriented conscious in his first works especially in relation to theatre in créole but again, more research is needed to account for the evolution of his Théâtre populaire Martiniquais (T.P.M.).
[6]
An actor who arrived in Martinique with the Daniel Sorano Theatre from Dakar, Sénégal, invited to perform at the Festival Culturel.
[7]
In his introduction to Poétiques et imaginairess, francopolyphonie littéraire des Amériques, Paris, l’Harmattan, 1995, Pierre Laurette investigates the various poetics of Francophone literatures of the Americas. Missing in this study is a poetics related to theatre.
[8]
‘En tant qu’artiste, je le dis très humblement, j’ai besoin d’unir mon chant avec celui du monde […] Je veux être dans une dynamique d’échange […] Je n’ai jamais adhéré au théâtre bô kay […] Je sais que je suis martiniquaise, je n’ai pas besoin de me focaliser là-dessus, Je sais que je suis nègre, je n’ai pas besoin de me focaliser là-dessus […] L’art est fait pour s’ouvrir au monde. Bien sûr, il faut monter un théâtre qui parle de la Martinique mais qui soit lisible à la fois pour la Martinique et pour le monde […] car le monde ne s’arrête pas à nos frontières’ (Original of my translation in the text)
[9]
‘Une femme s’éveille un matin et réalise avec effroi qu’elle est enterrée vivante’ (Original of my translation)
[10]
Pour la production de La Barraca du Collier d’Hélène, voir :
http://theatredublog.unblog.fr/2009/03/07/le-collier-dhelene/
[11]
The concept of ‘spiralisme’ is important in Haitian literature. As seen in Frankétienne’s conception of theatre, it represents an ascending movement of creative energy bringing the artist closer to the ‘light’ or a liberating state of illumination. (Ruprecht, Totolomannwèl, 2009) This explains the links between the Haitian reading of ‘spiralisme’ and Grotowski’s interest in Haitian rituals of possession in his own search for a state of ‘translumination’ through the ‘via negativa’, the initial point of actor training. Although Salibur’s understanding of the Spiral appears to be quite different, a force that generates life, there are possible links in as much as the spiral represents a privileged state of consciousness that is attained through a theatrical performance.
[12]
Sufis, a movement that represents the mystical dimension of Islam. The whirling or turning associated with Sufis is a form of sacred dance performed by the initiated to attain spiritual ascent. The links with ‘spiralisme’ would appear to be meaningful.
Alvina Ruprecht
2009
Article à paraître dans International Journal of Francophone studies. 2009
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