“Aurelias oratorio”. Company “The Little Clock”... - text for correction (proofreading) from user nadiauho (original) (raw)
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“Aurelia's oratorio”. Company “The Little Clock”. Paris. Director Victoria Thierree Chaplin.
CHAPLIN’S PATCHWORK QUILT
Precision and entirety. A sand-glass and Aurelia’s shreds.
The performance “Aurelia's oratorio” is placed in the space like an electronic cloud around the atom. Its geographical localization or rather its absence is precisely a defining characteristic of the circus art that Chaplin’s granddaughter Aurelia has been devoted to since her childhood. Her greatest work keeps traveling around the world; one can see it in New York, Paris, Cambridge, London - depending on the season. In May, 2009 the performance is being played in Moscow and in July – back in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Internally this production as is free – its director Thierree Chaplin (“Le Cirque Invisible”) works with time in the first place – the time of women’s life.
Based on the French and Canadian theater techniques, the show is focused on a character’s life rather than acrobatics and tricks. That circus, getting into a dialogue with the pantomime, clownery, the Puppet Theater, tricks, dancing and air acrobatics in such an igneous way is called a new circus. Such a synthetical form immediately involves the audience into chaos of illusion and disappointment where nonetheless, a spectator’s rational thought still manages to catch the semantics of actor’s transformation, but only until their mind gives way to the unconscious, and fantasy takes over the reality like a flitting bird.
The red curtains with secret “pockets”, theatrically raising, dropping or drawing apart, revealing long slits serving as the entries for the actress, look like a real character in the performance. Those curtains live in the space with the dynamic of the lightest fabric, transforming the performance images from one metaphor to another, stitching them together into a patch-work quilt in the audience’s imagination. That blanket will shelter you from your fears, get you warmed or will be served as a tablecloth for a picnic. Later it will turn into a screen concealing a charming world of a little box full of surrealistic images.
Aurelia Thierree Chaplin’s mother, Victoria Chaplin is an American actress, Charlie Chaplin and Oona Chaplin O’Neill’s daughter and Eugene O'Neill’s granddaughter. She was born in Santa Monica, California in 1951. She played in a film by Federico Fellini «I Clowns» along with her husband Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée.
Victoria Chaplin and Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée organized «Le cirque bonjour», then «Le cirque imaginaire», and after that «Le cirque invisible». Those modern traveling circuses, somehow anticipated «Cirque du Soleil». Their daughter traveled with her parents, performing on the circus stage along with her brother, today an outstanding clown James Thiérrée ( 2008 Otto Griebling Award for Solo Clown).
The Chaplins’ genealogy starts with grandfather Charley and the adventures of his "Little Tramp", happening to join a traveling circus in the film “The Circus” (1928).
Mother Victoria (maiden name Chaplin) was going to become a ballet dancer but ended up in a circus out of love to her father Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée in 1969. Together they invented a new kind of circus which was showed at one of the most important drama festivals in Avignon in 1971.
Aurelia, Victoria’s daughter and Charlie’s granddaughter, grown up in the circus, along with her mother directs a performance where the world is defined through the theatre, and reality is divided between stage and backstage.
In the beginning a big wooden chest of drawers is brought onto the downstage. One of the drawers gets pulled out and we can see a puff of smoke rising out of it. Then there goes another drawer revealing a slim woman’s leg. An arm, with a red shoe in its hand, comes up out of the next drawer and puts the shoe onto the leg’s foot. Then it moves to an emerging woman’s head with wide open eyes to caress it lightly. The drawers get pulled out and back so quickly that the locker reminds us of a mechanical instrument playing with objects instead of tons.
Suddenly a girl in a black French dress jumps out of the locker and easily climbs up the red curtain. Up there under the strip lights, she wraps herself in this curtain, turning it into a cradle and starts swinging it back and forth like a naughty child. In “Corteo”, a performance of another “new circus” “Cirque Du Soleil”, they also tell us a story about a man’s life in a reverse order, but Aurelia’s production is more intimate, individual. That chamber action reveals the happy sadness of our life till the very end, where a woman turns into a sand-glass. A train horn honks – the same as in the beginning, but it is not a metaphor of the life now but a symbol of its end – and a toy train races along the roundabout lines, passing through the tunnel in the woman’s body.
Between the beginning and the end there lies Aurelia’s life like continual jogging in which everything she does happens not “due to” but “contrary to”: ice cream that she likes burns her, the washed bed sheets are about to be watered from a watering can, shoes hang on a coat’s peck. The coat represents something more than just a warm thing. It takes a living form and starts its own life apart from its mistress.
That surreal girl is clearly followed by a man (Jaime Martinez, Julio Monge) but manages to slip away all along. Joining him in a dance just for a moment, she gets herself free and hides herself behind the curtain screen. Once alone, the man starts dancing with the girl’s shoes and clothes. The play with the objects gets more and more vigorous - in his chase of the girl his clothes tries to get in the way, starting a fight.
In this rash flow a quick change of time and the seasons is suddenly cut in by a dream. Emerging monsters are so dangerous that they can even bite your leg off, but in the dream you can easily knit a new one with white treads and brings the world back to the harmony – like in the shop window of a Brussels lace shop.
Who are the characters of this performance? Both people and puppets or rather some sort of hybrids like a wooden boy by Carlo Collodi? In one of the scenes-variations a woman puppeteer performs before the puppets, sitting in front of her like spectators. She is holding a male puppet that, being in love with the woman, tries to seduce her. When turned down, the puppet begins tormenting the woman. Tied up and exhausted she is lying on the dump ground like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Collecting herself, she manages to get up and starts running but gets caught again in the man’s lasso. Their coordinated movements remind us of both a dance and corrida.
The color range in the performance is based on the contrast of white, red and black. Those are the permanent trio in symbolism of color, associated with the four main elements in a lot of ancient cultures. The musical score, based on Astor Piazzolla and Jacques Martin’s composition from «Tiger Lillies», whose circus Victoria Thierree Chaplin performed in 2 tricks, also produces metaphorical associations. Those tricks were the first shreds to make the framework of the performance. The “shred” principle remained in “Aurelia's oratorio”, stitched up tight by both the character and actress’s history.
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