le Festival d'Avignon

We are staying at an elementary school.

That’s right, a school. We sleep in the classrooms, which have been outfitted with hospital beds. The classrooms snake around in a square to form a big courtyard where we hang out and eat together.

Bathrooms (= a row of sinks, another of toilets, another of showers) are on the other side of the courtyard. Let me just go ahead and say that the water heater doesn’t last very long for 50 plus people, and that….is…some….coooold… water…in…those…showers.

My little corner

When we got here, the first thing we did was to play a few games to get to know each other. First, we drew a giant world map in chalk in the courtyard and everyone stood on their countries. Next, we partnered with our fellow countrymen to perform a little skit/ tagline to represent out country in some way. The other American (Brendan) and I put our heads together and quickly decided to be "obese monolinguals. "

Brendan and I, doing our country proud

The Greeks, who attempted to resume all of Greek history up to the present financial crises in about 60 seconds

We eat really well here; we have an entrée, a plat, and a dessert for each meal (so three courses, plus bread and sometimes cheese).

Sample meal: they called this a “barbeque”, a term which they apply to anything that came off the grill (I say there’s green in the picture, so it’s not likely to be BBQ.) Sausage, salade with mustard-based vinaigrette, marinated tomatoes, cucumbers + mint, boiled potatoes + crème fraiche (kind of like sour cream).

So the city of Avignon hosts this theatre festival each year. More than 800 shows are being performed each day around the city. Most of the theatres are tiny and seat only 50-100 people. I’ve seen two on my own and really enjoyed both. An aspect of the summer theatre-going that is not quite so enjoyable is the lack of air-conditioning. But you can’t have it all, right?

Our first show to see all together was Spartacus. If you aren’t familiar with the movie/ story: Roman slave turned gladiator rises up against his captors, escapes, creates army of former slaves to escape Italy, wins tons of battles against the Romans, starts to become legend, gets betrayed by pirates, has to march on Rome, loses, is supported by his men to the end, is crucified. However, wife and son survive and are free.

The theatre was a little bitty coliseum that they had built for the show outside. When you walked in, it was to the sound of a gladiator fight, as if you were the crowd in Rome a thousand years ago. The arena floor was quite small, so I was wondering how they were going to give the impression of grandeur, show all the action, etc. Well… they did this by constructing hundreds of iron machine props that had joints and hinges and moves realistically that they wheeled in and out of the arena.

GIANT ELEPHANT!!

Click here to see a little video clip with the props (it's in French, but it doesn't matter, you get the idea of how intricate everything is)

Last night we went together to see Richard II in the Court of Honor in the Palais des Papes. Remember, it looks like this:

So we were all eagerly anticipating this big show, but guess what…. it was an unqualified disaster! How can I even explain? I’ll make a list:

- Most of the characters were clad in period clothes, but there was a random dude wandering around in a patchwork skirt and pink jacket. Yeah.

- There was some sort of life-size puppet, maybe a wax doll or something, that just sat in a chair on stage the whole time. Sometimes a character would walk over there and whisper in its ear or pat its head. ??

- This drove me crazy: Many of the characters stayed on stage most of the time (even though they weren’t in the scene) and wandered around. Yes, they just wandered. They would stand somewhere random, then, inexplicably, just move somewhere else. Among the cardinal rules of theatre is that you don’t move without a reason. You don’t just plow through your blocking without any purpose. WHY, wanderers, WHY?

- And the absolute worst: at each scene change, we were BLASTED, and I mean BLASTED with sudden music that was literally SO LOUD that it hurt. When Richard would say, “Hark, hear the trumpets?” that was the cue to plug your ears fast because, you might go deaf otherwise. At the change of each act, there was this horrid, earsplitting, screeching crow call. You might think it was some kind of technical malfunction, but one of the guys with the team that organizes our stay for us said that no, he went two days ago, and it was just like that… so much that a lady literally had a break down and fainted because of the sound, and that the paramedics came. ?!?!? Another cardinal rule of theatre: don’t hurt your audience!

So literally, it was so bad that each time one of those bloodcurdling shrieks came on, rows of people got up and left the show. I loved being in the space and definitely was glad to be able to go, but we all agreed afterward… it was a disaster!

On an unrelated but awesome note, I went to buy some children's books yesterday and ended up getting a huge pile of them for free, because there had been a sudden rainstorm and some of them were wet. But I dried them out, so now it's cool.

More to come...