The French Ministry of Culture and France's Bicentennial Commission apparently felt that choreographer Maguy Marin, who had earned an international reputation for her 1985 Cinderella, danced entirely in masks, was just the person to create a ballet inspired by the events of 1789.
The resulting work, Eh, Qu'est-ce que ca m'fait a moi!? (Hey, What's All This?), was premiered by Marin's company at the prestigious Avignon Festival in July. Now playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's New Wave Festival in November, it has been contracted for performances throughout Europe in coming months.
The quirky title comes from a popular song of the revolutionary period, reflecting what the petites gens thought about the newly proclaimed Rights of Man and its effect on their lives. Marin, working with Denis Mariotte, a musician and designer, incorporated ideas from Antonin Artaud's Theatre de l'Absurde and the black humor of the late Boris Vian with their own inspirations, putting a rather tired liberal slant, not to say bias, on the whole work.
Broad Caricature
They chose to concentrate on broad caricature, using twelve dancers to conjure up the revolutionary masses. Basically, the dancing was limited to heavily counter pointing the simplistic lyrics.
The actual performance at first seemed rather like some old television variety show. The stage was covered with dirty gray building blocks of every conceivable size, being pushed around by white-coated workmen. They take a lunch break, and eight musicians pop out of the boxes to sing about how awful it is for people to pay taxes. The workmen move about like automatons.
A parody of a political leader makes his appearance. He has eight long arms with huge baseball mitts of hands. He delivers a speech in mock Italian, telling the crowd to be "calmo." An actor planted in the audience shouts in protest, calling for an end to this nonsense. The leader tries to joke, as yet another man in the house joins in to protest.
When the crowd fearfully runs offstage into the audience, the leader calls upon his henchmen to bring them in line. Meat cleavers in hand, they attack the crowd. Soon blood covers the stage, remaining there throughout the performance.
Beaming and Bouncing
In reward for their excellent work, the leader gives his followers new clothes, which they promptly don. One becomes a judge, another a priest, others a general, a regal dandy, and a scholar: a microcosm of society. The members of the crowd bounce back to life, beaming with heavy scarves draped over military-style jumpsuits, ready to do their master's bidding.
With the memory of the butchery still hanging in the air, the mood shifts from savage to satirical. The priest blesses the dead he himself has just killed, then rapes a little girl at the funeral in a burst of old-fashioned, ever popular French anticlericalism. The great names of the French Revolution--Danton, Robespierre, Marat, Louis XVI--are shown as irritable, incontinent
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