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TRAGÉDIE. By Olivier Dubois. Compagnie Olivier Dubois. Le Festival d'Avignon. Cloître des Carmes, Avignon. 28 July 2012.
DIE KONTRAKTE DES KAUFMANNS: EINE WIRSTSCHAFTSKOMÖDIE. By Elfriede Jelinek. Directed by Nicolas Stemann. Le Festival d'Avignon. Cour du Lycée Saint- Joseph, Avignon. 23 July 2012.
The productions of the sixty-sixth Festival d'Avignon had a lot of space to fill, scenically, physi- cally, and emotionally. The venues of the festival are typically large outdoor spaces, medieval court- yards of former convents and monasteries that al- low the eye and mind to wander easily across the stunning architecture and history of the physical space. Designers and directors face the dilemma of how to work with the inherent openness of the spaces without diminishing the human performers onstage. Two pieces successfully solved this chal- lenge by placing the human body and its frailty at the center of the work. Olivier Dubois premiered his dance theatre piece Tragédie, and Nicolas Stemann presented the French premiere of Elfriede Jelinek's Die Kontrakte des Kaufmanns: Eine Wirstschaftskomödie (The Merchant's Contracts: An Economic Comedy). Du- bois and Stemann presented complex ideas with simple theatrics and grand violence, respectively, even as they emphasized the intimate spectacle of the human body to comment on human nature's vulnerability when faced with itself.
Using simple structural tools of repetition, focus, and tempo, Dubois's Tragédie offered a powerful re- consideration of the nature of tragedy and how it might be recreated today. Divided into three parts- Parodos, Episode, and Catharsis-Tragédie both quoted Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (specifically, the power of song and dance to entrance humankind and transcend daily life) and evoked the structural elements of Greek tragedy. Dubois thus positioned his work at the intersection of classical tragedy and contemporary dance. His triadic concept alluded to Aristotelian structure, but it also played out like a textbook diagram of climatic structure-or per- haps more accurately, crisis structure. There was an implied late point of attack, and almost all of the ninety minutes escalated the tension and narrative to a sublime climax, which was followed by a brief though powerful denouement.
In the first section, Parodos, dancers walked on the sixteenth note of the pulsing drum on a down- stage/upstage axis. Often, there was only one body onstage, and nearly every...