Ariane Mnouchkine

Judith Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351174886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Drama
• Index: Literature

Over the last forty years, French director Ariane Mnouchkine and her theater collective, Le Théâtre du Soleil, have devised a form of research and creation that is both engaged with contemporary history and committed to reinvigorating theater by focusing on the actor. Now revised and reissued, this volume combines:

? an overview of Mnouchkine's life, work and theatrical influences

? an exploration of her key ideas on theater and the creative process

? analysis of key productions, including her early and groundbreaking environmental political piece, 1789, and the later Asian-inspired play penned by Hélène Cixous, Drums on the Dam.

? practical exercises, including tips on mask work.

As a first step toward critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners offer unbeatable value for today's student.

1
Intellectual and Artistic Biography

Nomad of the imagination

Ariane Mnouchkine cultivates obvious paradoxes. Too many women are mixed up in her: the leader of a theatre company who founds with her student pals from the Sorbonne in 1964 the workers’ cooperative of the Théâtre du Soleil and the writer-poet of sweet and luminous phrases; the flamboyant filmmaker of Molière and the meticulous caretaker of the Cartoucherie who can’t delegate anything; the visionary director and the actors’ nurse-confessor; the educator and the gourmande; the general and the little girl; the militant and the hedonist; the saint and the adventuress. [. . .] a character out of the ordinary for a company out of the normal! An out-of-the-ordinary story.

(Pascaud 2005: 211–12)

Fabianne Pascaud’s robust description of French director Ariane Mnouchkine sums up not only the paradoxes Mnouchkine herself cultivates but also hints at the contradictions through which she has lived. For the last half of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first have seen both the heights of entrepreneurial artistic possibilities combined with utopian social dreams, and the dizzying multiplication of military aggression, internecine warfare, political exile, and genocide. In the especially sensitive way of most artists, Mnouchkine has resonated with all these historical moments, demonstrating, moreover, in her work with the Théâtre du Soleil a dedication to engaging with history that has never wavered. She has also evinced an extreme vulnerability and the potential for rough and tumble leadership, a selfless commitment to political militancy, and a desire for complete immersion in the creative realm. What has been constant is her unassailable practice of theater as an act of faith in humanity, gifting audience and actors with something “so incredibly rare” (Féral 1998: 159) that she has become France’s most celebrated contemporary director. Given the exceptionally male-dominated milieu of French theater, the story of her success is all the more compelling.

A part of the generation that was born into the Second World War, Mnouchkine began her life with the defeat of France by German forces and in the moral quagmire which ensued when Germany occupied the country. She came into adulthood, however, in the midst of “Les trente glorieuses,” or the greatest stretch of prosperity and growth in French history. This halcyon period also came with attendant anxieties, notably the complications of transforming a mostly rural France into a suburban nation. She saw the decline of France as a world power with the end of French colonization and the ugliness of two colonial wars in the 1950s (Indochina and Algeria). But she also saw France become a key player in the European Union, striving toward European independence from American economic and cultural hegemony.

To come to grips with Mnouchkine’s interconnected creative genius and political activism, it is crucial to examine her life, the life of her split centuries, and the theatrical currents within which she has situated and distinguished herself, becoming with the Théâtre du Soleil what critic Denis Bablet already saw in 1979, “the most important adventure in French theatre since Jean Vilar and his Théâtre National Populaire” (Bablet 1979: 88). In the following sections, we will endeavor to capture the way in which familial, political, and intellectual contexts have acted upon Mnouchkine, the artist, while sketching how she has also acted both upon and with her times.

Beginnings

Her Father's Daughter

Ariane Mnouchkine came into the world and into a cosmopolitan and artistic household on March 3, 1939. Her father, Alexandre Mnouchkine, who was born in Russia and exiled with his family to Paris in 1925 as a consequence of the Russian Revolution, was to become one of France’s most important post-war film producers. Her mother, the actor Jane Hannen, hailed from a British family of diplomats and performers, her own father having acted at the Old Vic with Lawrence Olivier. Although Mnouchkine speaks rarely of her mother, she credits her with great storytelling skills, fueling the young Ariane’s imagination by her ability to conjure up a perfectly credible fantasy world of Celtic spirits. Her father, on the other hand, clearly holds pride of place in her personal development: “At every moment of my life the only thing of which I was entirely certain was that my father loved me” (Pascaud 2005: 26–7).

The mainstay of her life until his death in 1993, Alexandre Mnouchkine, with his production partner Georges Dancigers, helped finance the beginning efforts of the Théâtre du Soleil, produced the filmed version of the Soleil’s first international theatrical triumph, 1789 (1974), and contributed the last necessary funding for the expressionistic Molière (1976) – Ariane Mnouchkine’s only feature-length fiction film and one that can be read as a meditation on the glory of a theater company’s itinerant life and the inevitable intensity of a creative community. Alexandre Mnouchkine did far more, however, than support her efforts financially. He placed her at the heart of his own work by naming his company, “Les films Ariane,” gave her a role in several of his ventures, including asking her to collaborate on the screenplay for The Man from Rio (1964), and became her best friend and most cantankerous sparring partner.

From her first contact as an adolescent with her father’s colorfully melodramatic and adventure-filled film work, a case in point being the swashbuckling Fanfan la Tulipe with Gérard Philippe (1952), it would seem that Mnouchkine developed an affinity for larger than life gestures and sumptuous and physically arresting images. She, herself, tells the family story that has haunted her since childhood and imprinted her aesthetic with her father’s experience. In 1919 and 1920, her father and his sister Galina spent two years endlessly zigzagging across Russia’s great north in an attempt to escape the ravages of the Russian Revolution. One night, from the window of the train in which they were riding, the two children saw an entire army frozen to death but still moving. Wrapped in the splendid golden vestments they had pillaged from a monastery, the dead soldiers advanced on small horses that would not stop trotting. Mnouchkine comments, “I think that that vision inscribed itself in [my father] and then in me forever. Revolution. War. Apocalypse. The mystery of those Asian faces” (Pascaud 2005: 45). In her assessment of the importance of this story, already filtered through her father’s imagination, we see how Mnouchkine thinks in images, how the visual world captures the emotions and concepts she holds dearest and most wishes to communicate.

Mnouchkine also inherited from her father the courage to innovate and switch gears, as he did when he moved from producing surrealist fantasies (Cocteau’s The Eagle Has Two Heads, 1948) to crowd-pleasers (Cartouche, 1962) to the New Wave-affiliated films of Claude Lelouche, Live for Life, 1967. Like her father, Mnouchkine has been able to push the limits of what she knows about her art, in her case, recalibrating space, form, and time, without agonizing over whether or not the work will “sell.” Like him, Mnouchkine discovered from her work with film technicians how much she loved laboring over details, becoming expert in all aspects of production, and working tirelessly wherever needed. Alexandre Mnouchkine’s world of writers, poets, arts’ entrepreneurs, creative and gutsy performers, and thinkers became hers forever. Indeed, the film director Claude Lelouche, whose films Alexandre Mnouchkine also distributed, joined Ariane Mnouchkine as partner in forming in 1979 the pressure group AIDA (l’Association Internationale des Droits d’Artistes) to call attention to dissident and radical artists silenced or jailed by repressive political regimes.

Although her parents divorced when she was thirteen, Mnouchkine recalls a spirited and united young family defying the powers of destruction all around them. Hiding out in the early 1940s in Bordeaux from the German occupying forces, father, mother, and children watched from their yard the spectacle of falling bombs, rather than cowering in their basement. Destruction, nevertheless, engulfed her Jewish grandparents still living in Paris. Denounced by their concierge, they were deported and gassed, their story emblematic of some 83,000 Jews living in France at the time, victims of the Holocaust. Their fate haunts many of Mnouchkine’s later productions, either overtly – as in her only authored play, Méphisto (1979), adapted from Klaus Mann’s novel castigating the rise of Nazism in Hamburg in the 1930s, and in Les Éphémères (2006), a semi-autobiographical study of family memory and history – or covertly – as in the melancholic and eerie cemetery setting of Hélène Cixous’ AIDS-play The Perjured City (1994), or in the

Figure 1.1 Les Éphémères (2006): A German SS soldier, part of the occupying forces during World War II, arrives unannounced in the guesthouse in Brittany where a Jewish family is hiding. The cook tires of avoiding his sexual advances and his snooping around.

focus on other genocidal situations in productions such as The Terrible But Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia (Cixous 1985), l’Indiade (Cixous 1987), and Le Dernier Caravansérail (2003). Of her own Jewishness, Mnouchkine allows that she was never educated in a Jewish tradition, a lack of structure she found liberating. Yet, she also identifies with being Jewish: “I didn’t and still don’t have any Jewish culture. But the only problem is I feel Jewish every time a Jew does something terrible or when someone does something terrible to a Jew. That means almost all of the time” (Pascaud 2005: 38). Her frustration is yet another indication of her deep empathy for victims of discrimination, political violence, and marginalization, a sensitivity that manifests itself both in the subjects of her plays and in her activism. More concretely, she finds herself evoking her Jewishness since the late 1990s, along with her support of Palestinian rights, as a response to the meanness contaminating the social field in France over the Israeli–Palestinian situation.

Theater as a Calling

As much as being involved in the cinema work of her father helped educate and form her tastes, the compromises necessary to realizing a film repulsed her. She had, however, long thrilled to the richness of the international theater productions she had experienced as a girl in the late 1950s at Paris’ Théâtre des Nations. She indeed went there to see Giorgio Strehler’s version of Pirandello’s Giants of the Mountain eleven times, as well as to have her first taste of kathakali theater. Strehler’s precision choreography and luscious color sense and the physical mastery of the kathakali performers she had seen had already begun to have an impact on her own aesthetic when the choice of theater as a vocation hit her as a veritable coup de foudre during a study-abroad year at Oxford University. Working on several productions in 1957, under the direction of fellow students Ken Loach and John McGrath (later, a fervent partisan of theThéâtre du Soleil), convinced her that a life in the theater could provide the focus for her burgeoning desire to define creativity as a collective effort and to use this creativity to affect some kind of change in the world.

To these ends and while still a student of psychology at the Sorbonne, she founded ATEP (l’Association Théâtrale des Etudiants Parisiens) in 1959, under the patronage of Roger Planchon. A rival theater group to the much longer established student association for classical theater (Le Théâtre Antique de la Sorbonne), Mnouchkine’s group, which would later form the core of Le Théâtre du Soleil, sought to explore the contemporary rapport between theater and society. In the thick of the Algerian War, ATEP sponsored incendiary lectures by Jean-Paul Sartre and on Jean Genet’s dramas. It produced, in 1961 in the Arènes de Lutèce, Genghis Khan written by Mnouchkine’s early mentor Henri Bauchau. This was Mnouchkine’s first and untutored attempt at a grand scale historical epic with outsized historical figures.

Of this period, the most significant and unquestionably life-changing experience was Mnouchkine’s decision at age twenty-three to take a year off and explore Asia. What she saw in 1962–3 would orient, especially after 1980, her approach to theatrical form. Hélène Cixous, company author and principle collaborator, thinks that Mnouchkine’s trip “was an initiatory voyage, [which] stayed with her as a book of images” (Prenowitz 2004: 19). The trip, the first of many in years to come – improvised, serendipitous, sometimes frightening, always stimulating – brought her in contact with what she has come to believe are the roots of true theater: powerful iconic visual imagery, physical acumen based on intensive training and imitation of master players, joyous and direct contact with an audience for whom the experience of theater is as necessary to life as water. Traveling alone most of the time, she took some astonishing photos of people and performers in Japan, India, Pakistan, Cambodia, Taiwan, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Iran. She would meet up occasionally with her friend Martine Franck, who was to become a lifelong artistic partner and the official photographer of Le Théâtre du Soleil. Perhaps their aesthetic complementarity – Mnouchkine’s opulent costuming and vibrant colors and Franck’s chiaroscuro lighting effects and dramatic framing – derives from that time.

The Rising of the Théâtre du Soleil

Like many other European theater companies emerging in the 1960s, the Théâtre du Soleil was created in reaction to what was felt to be a hyper-commercialization of theater and thus a loss of theater’s ability to move and instruct audiences. Many youthful artists believed that theater had become, on the whole, just another object of consumption: “Theatre can’t make up its mind what it is. It’s boring. It has nothing more to say. It’s lost the audience” (Carré 1985: 147). However, unlike most of its sister companies in France, the Soleil set out not only to shake up the themes but also to revolutionize the institutional and creative aspects of French theater. The members were indeed laughed at when explaining what they wanted to do, even charged by the actors’ union with amateurism. Nevertheless, in 1964 they forged ahead with plans to establish a workers’ cooperative and to create texts adhering to the actors’ real-life engagement with society and politics.

Formed as a cooperative by the original nine members, with each member contributing 900 francs, the Soleil practiced (and still practices) the same salary for each member – in 2017, 2,000 euros a month – regardless of the kind of work done, with apprentices making 1,650 euros. In the first phase of their creative research during the summer of 1964, they traveled to the rural Ardèche region of France to raise sheep and do theater, experimenting with a Stanislavskian approach to characterization. They returned to Paris for their first production, Gorki’s The Petty Bourgeoisie (1964–5), a kind of exorcism of what they might have become had they hewed to the expectations of their social class. Moving toward championing a collective approach to creating texts, they turned to Gautier’s Captain Fracasse in 1966, with Mnouchkine and company member Philippe Léotard writing scenes based on improvisations culled from specific moments in the novel. Life was still stressful. Despite the success of the boldly performed, cabaret-like Fracasse, actors and technicians had to have day jobs to survive. They could only rehearse at night.

Nevertheless, given the French government’s exceptional interest in theater in the 1960s, it was relatively easy in terms of bureaucracy for the Soleil to get launched. The climate created by Culture Minister André Malraux, who encouraged the arts as crucial to national prestige, meant that there was a cadre of professional experts ready to see all new young companies’ work and promote it. If deemed worthy, as was the Soleil, a young company was modestly subsidized. The Soleil thus received enough money from the government in 1967 to pay for sets and costumes, and eventually in 1970 a leg up when the time came to find a permanent home. Mnouchkine and the Soleil also benefited in their first years from generous godfathers, most of whom would later appear in cameo roles in her film Molière. Seasoned theater men who believed in the company and helped with moral support, theater space, and advice (Jean Vilar, Jean-Louis Barrault, Paolo Grassi of Milan’s Piccolo Theater, Roger Planchon, and theater critic Alfred Simon, among others) remained unw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of fiqures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 INTELLECTUAL AND ARTISTIC BIOGRAPHY: NOMAD OF THE IMAGINATION
• 2 IDEAS ON THEATER: THEATER AS COLLECTIVE HISTORY AND THE QUEST FOR FORM
• 3 FOUR KEY PRODUCTIONS: MNOUCHKINES "FANATICALLY THEATRICAL"
• 4 PRACTICAL EXERCISES
• A glossary of terms and names
• Bibliography
• Index