Author: MCphoenix

Theatre Contemporain

by MCphoenix

Grand Magasin

Playing with description and fiction

–

Interview by Clyde Chabot

 

You

When and how did you meet?

Pascale Murtin: Pascale and Francois in 1982, after both abandoning their short pasts as dancers which had allowed them to meet the year before. We met at Phoenix last century and decided to spend the 21st century together.

Francois Hiffler: Pascale Murtin met Francois Hiffler in 1981. That exact same year, Francois Hiffler met Pascale Murtin. This happy combination of circumstances encouraged them to found Grand Magasin in 1982. Eighteen years later, they met Phoenix Atala, who around the same time, made their acquaintance. This new coincidence forced them, in 2001, to march forward together.

Phoenix Atala: Pascale and Francois already knew each other when I met them, since Grand Magasin began in 1982. At that time I was actively preparing for entry into 1st grade. I therefore met Grand Magasin in 1995 and all three of started working us in 2000.

How have you been able to keep your artistic relationship alive for so long?

F.H.: It’s mainly because time passes quickly.

P.A.: It was not so long ago.

P.M.: We won’t risk asking the question for fear of abridging it. We’ve asked ourselves that question from the beginning, which has allowed us to continue asking it every year.

What do you feel you’ve broken with?

P.A.: I do not feel I’ve broken with anything.

P.M.: Do we have to name names? In generaI, people who offer up stunning images charged with understated references that the audience recognizes despite him/herself and the great emotion that overwhelms him/her.

What motivates you?
PA.: The possibility of making shows exactly how we think of them or how we’d love to see them. Since the result is always right at the limit of satisfaction, it makes you want to continue. It motivates you.
P.M.: Sometimes finding a way of saying things that changes our way of seeing, sometimes seeing a way of doing things that changes our way of saying things, sometimes laughter.
Why do you get up in the morning?
F.H.: The morning light, the sound of the alarm clock, the desire to drink coffee, street noises, an important appointment, etc.
P.A.: For breakfast generally.
P.M.: For the butter.

Text

How do you develop the text of your shows? Before or during rehearsals?
P.M.: At our table, with a sheet of paper, a pen and lots of Liquid Paper, where flies come and get stuck: on the sheet, and very rarely on the floor.
P.A.: The shows are written entirely beforehand, and are written in great detail. They are not the result of improvisations. Everything happens around a table. We discuss, first, then we jot down the ideas that seem most sensible, funny, interesting. Finally, after several hours, days and months in this situation, the show begins to take shape.
Of course, little by little, we also think of our ideas spatially, but the basic actions are so simple (sit, stand, go right, go left…) that there’s no real need to rehearse them, since they are actions that everyone, including us, practice every day.
F.H.: We first write the texts, scores with words and actions, and then try to execute them in time and, space. During these tests, it generally appears that modifications are needed. We make corrections, we try it again a few times and so on, until we are more or less satisfied.
What is the nature of your writing?
P.M.: There have been moments in the past where we have written sketches in the countryside of an urban character.
F.H.: I do not understand the nature of this question.
What inspires you?
F.H.: A sentence overheard, daylight, the sound of the alarm clock, the desire to drink coffee, street noises, an important appointment, a paragraph I’ve read, an annoying show in a theatre.
P.A.: Everything that happens within eye or earshot is a source of inspiration: a newspaper lying on the ground, a construction site at the end of the street, our neighbors’ music. The fact that we perceive all these things and how we perceive them is also a source of inspiration. It is the amount of time you spend being attentive to something that makes it inspiring.
P.M.: Our mother tongue, its misunderstandings, the repercussions it has in life, the homonym synonyms that one day gave us synhomonymes, its paradoxes as well as its tautologies.

What degree of permeability do current events have for you?
P.M.: Our own permeability, the fact that we are obliged to be contemporary.
F.H.: Our permeability to current events is so strong that it passes through us without any leaving residue behind. Curiously, however, most of our concerns are sooner or later relayed by the press, publishing, advertising.
In what way is your writing current?
P.M.: Insofar as it is not apocryphal.
P.A.: Because we are writing right now.
F.H.: The postmark on our manuscript proves it.
What is your most complete text and why?
P.M.: Laurel and Hardy at School because it saw itself as a Socratic dialogue on hostility or rebellion against the elements that surround us and the difficult, though comic, adaptation of the human race to its environment.
What is the function of text in your shows?
P.M.: The language is powerful. Its evocative power is such that it allows us to describe what we do or not do to explain what we should have done. It allows us, to act in total contradiction with what we are saying or even to refrain from doing anything. It helps us to present, to represent ourselves, to represent us, to the point that it can replace us. Fortunately, it still needs us to express itself.
P.A.: The text often comes in to nullify or confirm an action. It allows us to direct the viewer’s attention to what I’m doing, what my neighbor is doing as I speak, or what I’m not doing. For example, if I close a toolbox, I can say: I’m closing a toolbox, but I can also just as well say: I’m not opening this toolbox, nor sitting, nor getting up, nor reading the newspaper. All these formulations are true, they nevertheless do not seem to describe the same event.
F.H.: The text, on the one hand, has a musical role and, on the other, of criticism – to confirm or contradict – what is being shown. Without this constant sanctioning by the text, our shows would probably be of no interest. The purely visual aspect of our services, while polished and pleasant, remains very poor. We try to separate the scenic tableau, the scenographic image, and try to attain a paradoxical form of invisible spectacle in which, under surroundings that are nevertheless colorful, it principally calls out to the spectator’s imagination and intellect. Language has this power: it is known.

Shows

What is the nature of your stage work?
P.M.: Matching the gesture with words by sometimes putting the cart between two horses.
How much do doubt and incertitude play in your creation?
F.H.: A lot. With only very few skills in the various sectors mentioned (music, dance, writing and pronunciation of a text, etc.), We need to start again from scratch every time with only our sole ambition as our weapon.
P.M.: It’s the point of departure of our projects. If we were certain we would reach the goals that we set for ourselves, we wouldn’t even try.
Is there an element of improvisation in your shows?
P.M.: Very little, unless randomness is the main theme.
F.H.: The amount of improvisation is virtually nil. However, there have been occasions where we give ourselves several formulations of a sentence in advance, for example, with the flexibility to choose the moment when we will pronounce it.
We have also instituted, for the “5e forum international du cinema d’entreprise,” (5th International Forum of Corporate Films) the GAME OF PROFESSIONS, which consists of players taking turns and freely articulating a list of occupations that are not their own.
P.A.: It is reduced to a minimum, for example, in the 5FIDCE, where the only improvised scene is the game of professions where the rules are so simple that the improvisation is relaxed: it’s a matter of enumerating all the trades we do not practice. I am not a baker, I don’t work on railroads, I am not glazier … It’s a way of evoking realities that are more or less distant and exotic while still remaining in the realm of self-description.
What are you looking to achieve? Do you sometimes achieve it?
F.H.: We seek to create shows that we would like to watch. Perhaps sometimes we reach that.
P.A.: We often like to say that we’d make an invisible show. There is a scene in 5FIDCE where we say that we haven’t always made the best choices, that there must probably be an ideal situation in which we would not be there, in the process of saying these words, and each of us begins to describe everything he/she is not doing while doing this very action. I give a folder, and I say: I will not give this folder. I give a second one, I say: this one neither. I think denying what we do at each step makes the scene disappear at the same time people are sitting there, watching it.
P.M.: Thinking out loud. Finding logics that we never suspected existed. Discovering mysteries in obvious facts, and delighting in it.
What has been your most complete show? Why?
P.M.: Every new show. The last show always leads to the next one.
Could one of your goals be achieving the most radical reduction in terms of representation?
P.A.: Yes.
F.H.: The word Representation has numerous accepted meanings. It is often used and rarely defined. If Representation means “evocation by various means of a thing, a state or an event which is not truly present here and now,” it’s true that this is an issue which we constantly return to. We constantly oscillate between the feeling that it would be impossible or vain to talk about something other than what is happening right here and now, in this precise moment, and the desire to tell stories, to string scenarios together. Therefore, back and forth between the joys of pure description of the present and the allure of fiction.
What is the nature of the relationship you offer your viewers?
P.M.: If we are succinct enough in our presentations to make them resemble demonstrations or instruction booklets, the viewer can practice a bit of mental gymnastics with us which is rather pleasant and funny, and even informative.
P.A.: It is difficult to assume what the viewer thinks, or how he/she is reacting. But the shows are designed so that the viewer’s attention is always active, so that he/she will create the links between such and such a scene with us. A bit of an effort in terms of memory and prediction are asked of them.
The principle behind the shows is to start off where the viewer’s knowledge is equal to ours, and to use whatever we have on hand to build a plot, a speech, a demonstration. This is why we do not refer to books or films that the audience might have seen to understand our message. That is also why we often resort to repeating certain passages, or even looping (in order to create a communal memory) as well as self-referencing.
F.H.: A privileged relationship.
What is the function of theater?
P.M.: To enable minds.
What is the most accurate piece of feedback anyone has ever given you on your work?
F.H.: (Feed)Back to square one.
P.M.: The death of the subject.

Movement / Future

What have you not yet written?
P.A.: I don’t think I have ever written this particular sentence. But, I guess I have now.
P.M.: A play.
What will be the subject of your next creation?
F.H.: I’ll tell my life from A to Z in order to probably realize that, at the end, I haven’t said anything at all.
P.M.: Retrieve memories that are so forgotten that they could belong to someone else.
P.A.: As for me, I’m writing a movie on the theme of incoherence.
P. A. / F. H. / P.M. / C.C.

Objectif Cinema

by MCphoenix

Season 1 episode 2

 Phoenix Atala

by Nicolas VILLODRE
Year after year, Sophie Herbin, the very charming and pleasant woman in charge of the dance section of the Conservatoire Olivier Messiaen de Champigny, programs in this isle of tranquility, located 4 rue Proudhon, right in the heart of the “leafy projects” of a Communist suburb – which is at the pinnacle all things contemporary and incredibly audacious in the urbandance or in avant-garde, modern, or multi-genre performances, caring little for pleasing everybody, obtaining high audience numbers, and disappointing people – and yet, we’re all here. April 1st – a date full of meaning for an operation like the one we will discuss, more or less relevant, whether we want to or not, either a joke or a trap – Phoenix Atala, partner, disciple, spiritual daughter of the mythical duo of French actionists Grand Magasin (Pascale Murtin and François Hiffler), presented his first personal work here, an “enlarged” film with a title that sounds like an American TV series: SEASON 1 EPISODE 2.

After an unexpected “Rumba du pinceau”, a song written and sung by Bourvil in 1947, danced by four visual arts students and choreographed by Marie-Laure Tétaud, a sort of apéritif to the evening, with its connotations of “amateur night”, the projection could finally begin in its meta-filmic version, i.e., in an old-fashioned-style presentation, with many people participating in the spirit of Le Film est déjà commencé?, debates, and all.
As is generally the case with Grand Magasin, whose excellent work has always enchanted us, insofar as it is both poetic and spiritual – in our hierarchy of values, these two criteria define what is most difficult to achieve in art – with (faux) naïveté, malice and finesse, Phoenix Atala’s film questions language. It is no longer a question here of the French language, as is habitually the case, but what could best be called “cinematic writing”, perfected by Griffith and accepted as a given by spectators. “Where is the cameraman? When will the shot change? Was this shot filmed in chronological order? How many takes were necessary before getting the desired shot? These are the questions that the characters of the film ask out loud…” This is the pitch of the show where, at any moment, from anywhere, the characters can walk out of the screen like Sherlock Jr. to appear in 3D, flesh and bones to participate in the performance. They are: Pascale Murtin, Christophe Salengro, Aurélia Petit, Virginie Petit, Danièle Colomine, Joseph Dahan, Christophe Arrot, Marc Bruckert, Etienne Charry, François Hiffler.

The film is also a documentary on the suburbs, on the banks of the Seine and Marne Rivers, which have kept none of the idyllic aura they once had in the populist cinema of Marcel Carné (Nogent, Eldorado du dimanche, 1929) or Jean Dréville (cf. À la Varenne, 1933, a sort of music video juxtaposing a java sung by the “Bayonnais” André Perchicot to images of “guinguettes”) or that of Julien Duvivier (La Belle équipe, 1936). […]
Phoenix allows himself a few visual flourishes: a split screen that could have been straight out of The Thomas Crown Affair (a photo of the film poster with a housewife in a red tartan shirt ironing a red-checkered tablecloth with the same tint, or doing the dishes in a tiled kitchen with the same pattern; the appearance of a message that would terrify all the wannabe editors in the room: “Media offline”; location of the subtitles, announced by the actors themselves; a few unapologetic blurry shots; an anamorphic image; several martial arts scenes no doubt inspired by the proximity of the Chinese center, Chinagora…

But the value and flavor of the project is dependent on the constant to-and-fro between the interventions of the “live performers” and the actions of the conference that were decided upon last August, in the outskirts of Alfortville, once and for all and, we would be tempted to say, for all eternity or posterity, on the skin of the tiny HDV tape strip. And, naturally, on the effects of concordance (cf. the two examples of live post-synchronization of one sequence that was allegedly defective) and of discordance (jump cuts, a character embodied by different actors, like in post-Brechtian theatre, incongruous inserts in the spirit of Hellzapoppin’, traditional Serbian dancers, etc.). Although the film and “play” are not really narrative, the young filmmaker seems fascinated by storytelling and by the panoply of means that the dominant – aka “classical” – cinema needs. As a result, we will not unveil the end of the show, which is in no way a resolution of the problem that has been posed, but which is given to us as a bonus to the film.

Mouvement

by MCphoenix

Performance put to the test by images

The Irregulars at the Ménagerie de Verre

Cinematographies

During the commentary-driven projection of Atala’s film Saison 1, épisode 2, the room became a movie house. Standing in front of the screen barring the stage, the filmmaker dissected filmic procedures (montage, rehearsal, continuity) systematically, to the point of exhaustion. Cinema and performance were intertwined but remained impermeable to each other. That is, until… a miracle! The Real, in the form of traditional dancers seen earlier in the film, burst into the room, “exploding through the screen”: like in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, fiction met reality, with no possible return back, in a sort of epiphany, a miraculous incarnation. We were dumbfounded by this appearance, to the point where it obliterated the memory of the film that had just been presented along with its conceptual and funny deconstruction of cinema.




Telerama

by MCphoenix

Saison 1 épisode 2

By Phoenix Atala – Grand Magasin Collective

At this stage in the game/By now, we’re starting to think that Grand Magasin will always be Grand Magasin. After twenty years as a collective, you can recognize its members right from their first line. They’re always half-pop, half-kitsch, in skirts, t-shirts, or pants that are too short and fluorescent-coloured. And they can still astonish with new gestures, umpteen raspberries to be taken literally, new tiny phrases that are as absurd as they are obvious. An inseparable band of serious oddballs.
Initially, there was Pascale Murtin and François Hiffler, defectors from the world of dance in 1982. The thirty-year-old Phoenix Atala who joined up in 2000 is a perfect match. Season 1 Episode 2 is his brainchild, a film made without any prior technical knowledge, and that is what makes it so good. As a director-in-training, Phoenix asks questions from his spot on the stage about this marvelous world where someone can instantly go from the 1st to the 31st floor in an elevator. With him, a missing shot can be filled in with sequences of Serbian folk dancing… Unless it’s not your style of humor, you’ll very quickly be smiling out of delightful disbelief. Because, when you think about it, there are a thousand and one ways of seeing things, a thousand and one scales of measurement, a thousand and one wonderful incongruities that ostensibly puncture reality… even though we had tried so hard not to see them.

Cathy Blisson

Telerama n° 3042 – 03 mai 2008

Cahier du Cinema

by MCphoenix

Season 1, Episode 2

Grand Magasin: Phoenix Atala, François Hiffler, Pascale Murtin, between 40 and 60 min.

No, you haven’t missed the previous episode. For over twenty-five years, Grand Magasin have stripped themselves of all technical savoir-faire (theatrical and choreographic, two of the members were originally dancers) to spread panic: to tell the truth, the 5e Forum du cinéma d’entreprise (5th Forum on Corporate Films) and 0 tâche(s) sur 1 ont été effectuée(s) correctement (0 out of 1 task(s) have been carried out successfully) are the names of their shows. As for this video, with a title that sounds more like the DVD of an American TV series, it is a mockery of the conventions of cinematic mimesis in which the actors are also the editors. The three troublemakers not only empty their characters of any psychology, but also of any identity. The absenteeism fuelled by government-funded vacations oblige: be it a man or woman, whoever wears the same t-shirt plays the same character. It doesn’t matter because there’s no story…

A series of sketches take inventory of the perfect little filmmaker’s textbook: “When both doors shut, the shot changes.” Or, “At the third pylon, the shot changes.” Cinematic conventions like shot-reverse shot, slick continuity, shooting out of chronological order (“I take the helmet off Saturday” / “And I put my foot down on Friday”), each step of the direction is both the object of a joke and derision – and, more covertly, of learning. Grand Magasin nestle into the splice, name the cut before we see it, points at the cameraman perched on a bridge, waiting for the next backwards tracking shot. Season 1 Episode 2 gives a new meaning to the expression “in-camera editing”. And, they invent a feminist use of the split screen, one of digital cinema’s hidden virtues: did you know, ladies, that by splitting the screen in four places, you will now be able to do the dishes, the windows, vacuum, and iron, all at the same time?

Ch. G.