A LETTER FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR ABOUT FÊTES: A CONVERSATION WITH CHARLES MEE A BRIEF HISTORY OF PARIS SUGGESTED READING ON FÊTES DE LA NUIT A LETTER FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR At the end of every season, Berkeley Rep’s intrepid telemarketers conduct a survey of our patrons to find out why certain members of the Theatre’s audience choose not to re-subscribe. The results are often illuminating. In 2001, for example, we discovered that the second highest reason for not re-subscribing (the first being “lost my job”) was “Tony Taccone’s obsession with nudity.” This finding caused quite a shock within our organization. I must confess, I have never even been to a strip club and believe nude beaches provide the best proof as to why people need to wear clothes. There are times in life, however, when nudity is not only a good but a necessary thing. I won’t list all of those occasions here, leaving such a delightful task to the vagaries and interests of your own imagination. More to the point, while the theatre is no different than life in terms of whatever one’s predisposition may be towards the covering or uncovering of the human form, the fact remains that there are certain plays where nudity is delightfully and shockingly natural. Why do we react so strongly when we see a naked body on stage (or, for that matter, are confronted with any behavior we may regard as inappropriate)? We face images far more violent, erotic and perverse in film and television. But these mediums are not live, and even in their “hottest” form remain somewhat distant from us; we can divorce ourselves from the fact that real people are involved in their creation. The theatre luxuriates in the opposite experience, however. Onstage, everyone is fabulously real and we enjoy a heightened sense of intimacy that allows us to reconnect to what it is human beings really want, what is truly at stake. Chuck Mee’s new play, Fêtes de la Nuit, uses a number of theatrical strategies, including nudity, to examine our never-ending fascination with the mysteries enshrouding romantic love. Through a series of impressions, Mee and his collaborator extraordinaire, Les Waters, have created a living pictograph of how our collective fantasy life intersects with our real lives, how we move like dancing magnets toward and away from each other, how we are in love with love in spite of the evidence that we might be better off leaving well enough alone. In Mee’s world, impulse triumphs over sustained thought, the worst poetry over the best prose, the insatiable heart over the rational head. For this reason, any narrative in the play that is inclined toward easy reasoning or a simple resolution collapses in the face of what remains wonderfully inexplicable. I hope you enjoy it, in all of its resplendent glory! BACK TO TOP ABOUT FÊTES: A CONVERSATION WITH CHARLES MEE This piece was composed with the dramaturgical collaboration of Tom Damrauer. Some texts for the piece were inspired by, or taken from, Michi Barall, Elizabeth Anglin, Edmund White, Georges Bataille, the advertisements for Aubade, Guy Debord, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, Jean-Luc Godard, Phillipe Meyer, Gertrude Stein, Juan Goytisolo, Francois Truffautand the participants in several workshops conducted with the SITI Theatre Company. In the past few years, for one reason or another, I’ve visited Paris quite a lot, and I just love it. I love it for its annoyances and idiosyncrasies and pretensions and arrogance as well as, above all, for the sense that the French know how to enjoy the present moment, how to devote a lot of time to making sure that the simplest events of daily life are filled with pleasure—because, finally, when they die, what they will have had from life, mostly, are the pleasures of daily life. So the bread, the vanishing lines of perspective as you look down the length of a boulevard, the sense of spectacle, of astonishment, that comes from seeing Notre Dame or the Eiffel Tower, making love in the afternoon, a glass of wine, the design of a shoe, the little toy sailboats for rent in a public garden, a walk in the Tuilleries gardens, the accordion player on the sidewalk in front of the Cafe de Flore. And so, doing a piece about Paris was a little like needing to keep a diary or a photograph album so that I won’t forget the pleasures of my own life from the times I’ve been there. And I put it together the way you would put together a collection of snapshots you’ve taken on vacation: some moments, some encounters, some sudden striking images, some music. This is how Paris feels to me. The title for this piece is taken from the Fetes de la Nuit that I saw in the gardens at Versailles several years ago—fêtes that were supposed to recall the sorts of entertainments that Louis XIV staged for his own pleasure at Versailles—full of huntsmen, hunting dogs, courtiers, ballet dancers and fireworks. Needless to say, my Fêtes are very different: they are the modern world, the democratic world, the global world, the world as seen, not through the eyes of a king, but through the eyes of a citizen. …AND TO CARIDAD SVICH ABOUT PLAY-MAKING I appropriate stories (half the time, anyway; the other half I make up). And then to the appropriated stories I add appropriated texts from other sources, so that I make a collage of the materials of the world that we have received, and also of the world we are in the process of making at the moment: this seems to me what people do in their daily lives. I think a story is still vital if it is still being made. I love theater that is made of music and movement and text. When I write, the text never comes first. First I see an event on stage, and, when I’ve begun to see it very clearly and in detail, then it starts speaking. …AND TO ALL OF US ABOUT WHAT HE LIKES (courtesy of charlesmee.org) My own work begins with the belief that human beings are, as Aristotle said, social creatures—that we are the product not just of psychology, but also of history and culture, that we often express our histories and cultures in ways even we are not conscious of, that the culture speaks through us, grabs us and throws us to the ground, cries out, silences us. I like plays that are not too neat, too finished, too presentable. My plays are broken, jagged, filled with sharp edges, filled with things that take sudden turns, careen into each other, smash up, veer off in sickening turns. That feels good to me. It feels like my life. It feels like the world. And then I like to put this—with some sense of struggle remaining—into a classical form, a Greek form, or a beautiful dance theatre piece, or some other effort at civilization. BACK TO TOP A BRIEF HISTORY OF PARIS 3RD CENTURY BC Founded as an island in the Seine River, by a Celtic-Gaullish tribe called the Parisii 52 BC Julius Caesar’s forces establish the town of Lutetia on the island 508 AD Frankish king Clovis makes Paris the center of his Empire 1789 The Bastille is stormed (July 14) and the French Revolution begins 1944 Hitler orders his army to raze the city in retreat; the army refuses to TODAY The City of Paris (population 2.1 million but declining) covers 41 square miles; the area of Greater Paris (population 9 million and growing) covers an area about 89 square miles. Paris is divided in 20 numbered arrondissements, or neighborhoods, each with a distinctive character. They include the following, all of which are referenced or inspiration for segments of Fêtes de la Nuit: 18TH, OR MONTMARTRE An artsy residential village overrun with tourists, featuring more portrait-sketchers per square foot than anywhere else in the world 9TH, OR PIGALLE Includes, notoriously, the Moulin Rouge and the fading Red Light District 4TH, OR MARAIS Includes the oldest parts of Paris, but known largely for its lively “alternative” lifestyles 5TH, OR LATIN QUARTER Home of the Sorbonne, international and student-oriented 6TH, OR ST. GERMAIN A one-time hang-out for bohemians and intellectuals, now highly gentrified but still home of the beautiful Jardin du Luxembourg 1ST The geographical center of Paris, featuring the Louvre and the Jardin des Tuilleries Le Petomane LE PETOMANE Joseph Pujol (born 1857) was a young man in the army when he discovered his singular skill at farting melodically, which led to his nickname Le Petomane (literally, The Fartist). When friends convinced him to pass wind for fun and profit in music-halls, he eventually headed for Paris and convinced the director of the Moulin Rouge to put him on stage, where he was an instant and outrageous sensation. Le Petomane dressed formally for the act, which included farts in imitation of all ages and stations, as well as sound effects (thunder; cannons; a dressmaker ripping two yards of calico); he smoked from his anus; he farted melodies; he blew out gaslamps. Corsetted women in the audience fainted from laughter. Sigmund Freud and the King of Belgium were equally fascinated. After only a few years at the Moulin Rouge, however, Le Petomane left (on bad terms with the management) to start his own club, Theatre Pompadour, which prospered for many years as a kind of home-grown variety show. NIGHT LIFE—WHERE LIFE IS A CABARET The Folies Bergeres opened in 1869, featuring a series of operettas, mimes, songs, acrobatics and comedic sketches. The first vaudeville house in Paris, it was met with indifference by the public and spent several decades struggling to establish its identity. Then in 1890, the merchant Edouard Marchand decided to enhance the repertoire with dancing girls, and the rest is history. Over the ensuing century the nightclub hosted many great dancing divas, most famously, Josephine Baker. Today, the Folies Bergeres is home to musical reviews such as ‘80s Fever and California Dream Men. In 1889 the Moulin Rouge (named for its landmark red windmill) opened to become one of the first cabarets in Paris. In the 1890s it was the home of the first fully-nude striptease; the dancer (supposedly playing Cleopatra) was jailed and students in the Latin Quarter protested furiously. Today the entertainment is reminiscent of Las Vegas nightclubs. BACK TO TOP SUGGESTED READING ON FÊTES DE LA NUIT Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik Americans in Paris edited by Adam Gopnik Paris in Mind edited by Jennifer Lee The Jazz Age in France by Charles A. Riley II Le Petomane by Jean Nohain and F.Caradec Paris France by Gertrude Stein Le Paris de Robert Doisneau et Max-Pol Fouchet by Robert Doisneau The Artists of My Life by Gilberte Brassai The Autochromes of J.H. Lartigue by J.H. Lartigue Paris in Mind by Jennifer Lee The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris by Patricia Wells Paris: The Capital of Europe, From the Revolution to the Belle Epoque by Johannes Willms Marivaux: Three Plays translated and adapted by Stephen Wadsworth * Early Deism in France: From the So-Called ‘Deistes’ of Lyon (1564) to Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques (1734) by C.J. Betts * A Tale of Wonder, From the Ballerinas by Eugene H. Van Dee * We’ll Always Have Paris: American Tourists in France Since 1930 by Harvey Levenstein * The Art of Ballets Russes by Alexander Schouvaloff * Women in the 19th Century: Catergories and Contradictions by Linda Nochlin and Joelle Bolloch * Le Tumulte Noir: Modern Art and Popular Entertainment in the Jazz-Age Paris, 1900–1930 by Jody Blake * Complete Romances of Voltaire (1927) by Voltaire * Moulin Rouge: Paris by Christophe Mirambeau * Nights in the Big City by Joachim Schlör * Candide by Voltaire * Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of the Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 by Jerold Seigel * The Spirit of Montmarte: Cabarats, Humor, and the Avant-Garde, 1875–1905 by Phillip Dennis Cate * Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague, and London: Resistance and Acquiescence in a Democratic Public Sphere by Keith Holz * * These titles are available at the Berkeley Rep Theatre Store, located in the Roda Lobby. Books may also be purchased online from CODY'S BOOKS If you access their site from here, 20% of your purchase will be donated back to Berkeley Rep! BACK TO TOP