Philippe Jeanty, Mary Underwood. “Interior landscapes”, Philippe Genty company, France, dir.

festival theater

On the stage of the Mossovet Theater began a five-day tour, lasting until June 9, of the next guests of the Chekhov Festival - the Compagnie Philippe Genty Theater with the production of "Internal Landscapes". Tells Olga Fedyanina.

Of all the foreign guests on the Moscow festival stage, Philippe Genty seems to need the least introduction. Firstly, his performances are often and willingly invited to us. Secondly, no matter how much the director himself and his theater of "living pictures" change, both remain true to themselves and are recognizable at first sight. And at the same time they do not get bored at all - the director's fantasy, who will soon turn eighty, does not dry out.

In order for the fantasy to take off, Inner Landscapes needs a kind of kick-off—the protagonist's (Scott Koehler) plastic monologue, his only real solo. The character of Köhler, somewhat reminiscent of the early Barro, Barro-pantomime, is a surprised and melancholy puppet on strings. Only now the puppetry "cross", the frame to which these strings are attached, is in the hands of the puppet itself. The hero first pulls himself by the arms and legs, and then, with growing determination, breaks the threads. The out-of-control limbs begin to move on their own, but the released doll immediately climbs into the cage, and the cage gradually folds, shrinks, and finally turns into a tiny trap.

This is all very inventive and very sad: a person is not only not free, but also completely alone - he even has to pull his own threads on his own. True, sadness passes quickly - under the onslaught of imagination, the cage falls apart effortlessly. The journey through the "inner landscapes" begins: episodes connected not by a plot, but only through the motives of wandering and growing up.

These landscapes most of all resemble animated fragments of paintings by Salvador Dali, they fascinate, and you want to look at them again and again: in every combination of objects and figures on the stage there is a paradox, a secret, a kind of internal trick. Doors allow you to go from nowhere to nowhere, a flat image casts a three-dimensional shadow, flowers sing, people turn into dolls and back before our eyes, multi-colored spaces fold and unfold in an instant. The director himself says that with the help of actors and puppets he is staging his own dreams.

There are no inanimate objects in the world of Philippe Genty, the very idea of ​​inanimateness is alien and uninteresting to him: any plant, object, and even the horizon line in this performance has an active live role, a magical metamorphosis.

Creating his extravaganzas, Genty, unlike his neighbors in the genre, for example, Robert Wilson or Robert Lepage, is not at all interested in the flawlessness of the illusion. He does not completely hide the puppeteer behind the puppet, and the zanni, disguised servants of the proscenium, help the hero unobtrusively, but in such a way that they cannot be overlooked. Objects suspended in the air do not pretend that they are floating without support - the threads are visible, and this is how it is intended. At the Philippe Genty theater, the trick is only made more charming by the fact that you see the cards disappear up the sleeve.

Everything in front of you is a dream, an illusion, a theater, not real. Why the director reminds of this, one can guess from one episode, the motives of which are also found in other performances of Jeanty. Here the main character turned into a doll, into a baby doll in the arms of an actress mother. On the back is an idyllic mountain video panorama with toy houses. But these houses on the screen explode one after another, light up, become a pile of rubble. The picture is autobiographical: during the war, Zhanti lived in such a mountain village, before his eyes it was burned by the Germans, who staged a punitive action in response to the actions of the Resistance fighters.

More than seventy years have passed, and all this time those houses burned in the memory of the grown-up boy. His chance for salvation and a normal life was to turn everything into a dream. In a fantasy that can be controlled, in figures, the strings of which can be pulled at your discretion.

Philippe Genty's "Interior Landscapes" is a theater of dreams that turns even the apocalypse into an extravaganza. In order for the creators and spectators of this theater to be able to survive everything and wake up in the real world - surprised, saddened and happy at the same time.

Yesterday I went to a very interesting and unusual play "Forget Me Not" by French director Philippe Genty. It was shown on June 1 in Pskov as part of the XII International Chekhov Theater Festival. I don't even know how to describe the genre. This is some kind of mixture of plastic and dance performances using spectacular visual effects. For an hour and a half on stage, the actors uttered only a few phrases. The action itself is from the category - understand it as you like .... In some places it’s not even clear at all, but bewitching ...

Here is a short video with fragments from this production.

Under the cut is a story about the performance and its creators, published on the website of our drama theater.

Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, Regional Public Fund for Support of the International Theater Festival. A. P. Chekhov, the Pskov Academic Drama Theater named after A. S. Pushkin, with the support of the St. Petersburg representative office of the French Institute in Russia and the administration of the Pskov region, present: within the framework of the XII International Theater Festival. A. P. Chekhov in Pskov will show the play "Forget Me Not" produced by Philippe Genty (France).

The famous puppeteer Philippe Genty was born in 1938. After graduating from the Paris School of Graphic Arts, he received the specialty of a graphic artist. His first theater troupe was the Philippe Genty Company, which he formed with his wife Marie Underwood in 1967.

Zhanti is a representative of the theatrical direction "new circus". This specific genre became popular in France at the end of the last century. His performances combine drama, pantomime, modern dance, visual arts and circus, and characters and stories are born from the world of fantasy and dreams.

We each have our own passion. We write our dreams. When the process of recording these dreams is in progress, Philippe Genty closes himself in his office and does not let anyone in. After that, work begins on the embodiment of these images on stage, says Mary Underwood.

Zhanti keeps his tricks a secret, saying that he spends much more time on them than on working with actors. The director comes to the troupe with sketches and drawings in order to bring them to life later on stage.

Forget Me Not, one of Philippe Genty's most beautiful productions, was staged in 1992 based on the director's own play and toured the world. In 2012, Jeanty and Underwood created a new version of the original work in collaboration with Norwegian actors - graduates of Nord Trondelag University College de Verdal - who brought the mystical atmosphere and colors of the North to the production. In the play Forget Me Not, Zhanti creates a wonderful world of optical illusions, evoking the stories and legends of the past, plunging the audience into the depths of their own consciousness.

A heartfelt, sincere and at times naive story is played by seven unique artists, each of whom is a mime, actor and dancer at the same time.

Cold Arctic landscapes become the backdrop for a melancholy tale of love and fidelity. The heroes at times resemble huge puppets, they bend in a bizarre, dizzying dance, both sad and funny.

Performance "Don't Forget Me"

Artistic Director - Philippe Genty

Choreographer: Mary Underwood

Composer - Rene Aubry

The performers are graduates of Nord Trondelag University College de Verdal (Norway).

The duration of the performance is 1 hour 30 minutes, without intermission. For viewers over 12 years old.

The text in italics is

The famous French surrealist director Philippe Genty arrived in Moscow for five days. His production of "Inner Landscapes" is a kind of result of his long career. The second title on the poster is "An Odyssey for Actors and Puppets". Philippe Genty once started with a puppet theater, and is now known throughout the world for his magical performances, where he mixes choreography, special effects, music and puppets. At the heart of the show "Inner Landscapes" is a book of memoirs of a director-magician. Details - in the report of Irina Razumovskaya.

The performances of Philippe Genty are always very complex in terms of scenography. Dozens of wardrobe trunks arrived from Paris, full of a variety of fabrics, puppets, dolls. And even an inflatable trampoline, which occupies the entire stage, was also brought with them.

While six puppeteers and dancers are performing on the stage, five more artists are working behind it. Philippe Genty recruits fans of magical and surrealistic theater from all over the world to his troupe. Spaniards, Austrians, Hungarians and Norwegians have fallen under the spell of this former puppeteer, now world-famous Odyssey director.

“At first, of course, it seemed incredible to remember all these movements. For such visual effects, we do almost more tricks behind the scene than on it, ”said artist Simon Rann.

If you try to present the poetry of modernists visually and theatrically, it will look something like this: this is a theater where words are not needed, the main thing here is the image. Surrealism in action. Who is pulling the strings of the hero, and will he be able to do it without a puppeteer? How soon will this cell of human life collapse, where over the years it becomes more and more crowded? And one of the most beautiful and interesting metaphors is a ladder hanging in the air, how to get to the right door - is it the right door ?!

In this stormy fantasy about the whole life of the director, in addition to his dreams and dreams, there are real memories from the childhood of Philippe Genty.

“There is an episode in the play - a meeting of a boy with a soldier. I was six years old then,” recalls Philippe Genty.

“I have to explain to you. After a stroke, Philip has not yet fully restored his speech, so I'm standing here next to him and helping him speak. In the book of his memory, on which this performance is based, the key story is connected with the shock after the death of his father, the bombing of World War II and the fire in their house, ”explained choreographer Mary Underwood.

Mary Underwood is Zhanti's faithful companion throughout her life - in the past a dancer in all his performances, now a co-author. How great and important the image of a woman is for him - the director showed with his inherent comedy.

The magical and spectacular theater by Philippe Genty is like an exotic fruit. Of course, you won't eat it every day. But a couple of times in your life it’s definitely worth trying, especially since in our country this almost never grows.

I remember when Zhanti first arrived - well, that is, for the first time in my memory, he had been in the USSR since the 1970s - it was a surprise on the verge of shock, I tried to get to meetings with the director after the performances, although I usually avoid such events. Over time, of course, a lot of things become boring, Zhanti's technique and style, with all the sophistication and sophistication, with the virtuosity of using techniques, is no exception. But all the same - "Internal landscapes" captivate, amuse, and touch. Their protagonist is a man-doll who has come to life and freed from the control threads, gaining independence. Climbing up the magical ladder to the heavenly door and passing through it, he embarks on a “metaphysical journey” characteristic of all Jeanty’s performances (“an odyssey for actors and puppets” is the genre subtitle of the work) inside his memories and fantasies through the constantly transforming stage space.

Thanks to the knitted hat discovered by the hero near the ramp, a vision from childhood emerges by association, the image of a mother materializes, playing with a snowman, interrupted by explosions of mountain houses; and then the shadow of the father also rises, a silhouette on the screen-back, continued by a piece of black fabric unrolled along the podium. A comrade-double-rival appears, bizarre phyto-, zoo- and anthropomorphic entities replace each other, hollow submachine gunners, electrified starfish, polyps with human heads; as well as grotesque, but still seductive female figures - "siren" - sometimes puffy, especially with regard to giant inflatable hips, then, on the contrary, completely legless, but with one bust capable of captivating the "sea lily"; and, finally, a gang of brutal transvestites!

Of course, Genty's theater is very "pop", it is close to a pop format, to an entertainment show, and the metaphors of the unconscious are sometimes replicated, they pass from one production to another, creating a deja vu effect (the burning house, for example, appeared in Bolilok, it seems) - but the simple thoughts invested in the performance do not lose their wisdom and relevance, and the "picture" does not become less beautiful. In addition, even though Zhanti uses video projection with might and main, allowing you to change the background from a mountain landscape blazing after the bombing to a serene starry sky with northern lights, however, the emphasis is still on the proven rag-plywood-polyethylene hand-made, which makes the spectacle in a good way, old-fashioned pleasant. Genty's fairy tales, played out on a combination of traditional pantomime, the "new European circus" and puppet theater technologies to the invariably melancholic music of Rene Aubry, are simple, but not stupid, sweet, but not vulgar, beautiful, but not sugary, outwardly playful, ironic and even frivolous. , but in fact they are sad, so in the finale on the video you can watch how the balloon falls, taking the hero with his newfound companion into the sky.

There is, however, information that in July the master will give master classes at the Paris Puppet Institute, and in the fall he may turn up with his “Edge of the Earth”, which Muscovites could see at the last Chekhov Festival, in Latin America. But enrollment for Jeanty's classes is already closed, and Latin America is in question. But in the space of torrents and online video resources, his dream performances, having escaped from their creator like puppets in Bolilok, have long been living an independent life.

So it will not be difficult for viewers who are just discovering Zhanti to find on the Internet, for example, samples of his early work. Then Jeanty did puppet revues, composed of separate numbers like stories about dancing ostriches; a boa flirting with a camera, or a rebellious puppet Pierrot, who did not want to obey her master and decided to cut off all the threads connecting the doll and the puppeteer.

It was with this Zhanti - a director-puppeteer, an animator, in whose hands inanimate objects came to life and behaved like homo sapiens - that the Russian public met in the late 1970s. The time when Zhanti traveled almost the whole world with his theater of humanoid objects is defined by the director as an escape from himself. If you believe what Zhanti says, from childhood he suffered from the inability to establish normal contact with people and could only solve this problem in the theater - with the help of inanimate objects, puppets.

After a decade of searching in the field of puppet theater, Jeanty began to consistently distance himself from it.

From 1980 to 1983 with his wife Marie Underwood, Jeanty's form became less and less like a variety show, beginning with two performances - "The Circle as a Cube" and "Parade of Desires" - made in collaboration with his wife Marie Underwood. Puppets gradually gave way to actors, the traditions of the puppet theater were supplanted by the traditions of pantomime and ballet, the world of performances became less objective, more and more reminiscent of dreams.

This was largely a consequence of Jeanty's fascination with the work of Freud and Jung. The result of his quest in the field of psychoanalysis was the 1984 performance of the year with the appropriate name - "The Tricks of Sigmund". The main characters in it were the fingers that the director found in his pocket when he reached there for a word; and the plot-forming motive is a journey through the labyrinths of the subconscious.

In the 1990s, his performances “Forget Me Not” and “Motionless Traveler” did not remind the audience of Zhanti the puppeteer. As a result, from an autistic director who once started with an intimate puppet theater, afraid of people and open spaces, by the end of the 20th century, Zhanti turned into a megalomaniac, easily operating with huge spaces and many actors. In 1997, for the festival in Avignon, Genty staged Daedalus, which daily gathered two thousand spectators in the courtyard of the Papal Palace in the open air. And in 1998, in Lisbon, where Genty was invited to the World Exhibition, he directed Oceans and Utopias, a performance designed for ten thousand spectators, with the participation of two hundred actors, dancers and circus performers.

Now the surrealism of Philippe Genty, who a year ago celebrated the fortieth anniversary of his theater company and his own seventieth, has again become intimate, almost chamber. To fight demons, travel through the labyrinths of the subconscious and demonstrate her dreams to the public with constant success, Zhanti turned out to be enough on the stage of an average theater.

Moreover, in "Edge of the Earth" and "Boliloka" Zhanti even returned dolls to the stage - the very ones that he had so persistently tried to get rid of for the previous two decades.

However, in "Boliloc" these little puppet beasts, like Pierrot once in Jeanty, rebelled again: they refused to obey their creator and, having jumped off the hooks of a dusty theater cabinet, began to run along the corridors of the right and left hemispheres of the brain of their master.

It's just that now this rebellion no longer seems to surprise either Jeanty himself or his audience. But something else is still striking - how a person who at other times would have been threatened by the fire of the Inquisition or the cap of an insane person learned to sublimate his fears and create bewitching theatrical masterpieces from them.