Cri de cœur / Cry of Heart / Hjerteskrik – a theatrical achievement and landmark event.
(Paris): Alan Lucien Øyen’s commission for the Palais Garnier and Paris Opera Ballet – in the city where ballet was established as an art form in 1661 – is a milestone for Norwegian dance art.
With Cri de cœur, Øyen has created a nearly three-hour tribute to the potential of imagination in confrontation with our innate human vulnerability: feelings of inadequacy, experiences of social unease and exclusion, and the fear of illness and death.
Øyen works within the genre of dance theatre, inspired by film aesthetics and direction, with a keen instinct for creating emotionally powerful scenes through melodramatic and sentimental devices that grip us – centered on a fascination with how we present and stage ourselves to others. Øyen uses text as a trigger for the spectator’s own references in encountering the dancers’ movements and the work’s choreography.
In Cri de cœur, these devices are applied to create a production for 34 dancers. The performance follows in the wake of Øyen’s international breakthrough with Bon Voyage, Bob for Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in 2018. Once again, Øyen demonstrates with distinction how the use of moving scenic elements can participate as choreographic co-actors in a production – something the resources of the Paris Opera provide ample opportunity for.
The collaboration with the stage crew is simply an impressive performance in itself. They all ought to have been credited in the program, but were rightly called on stage during the applause. But here I am anticipating events.
The Paris Opera
It is Saturday evening, three days after the premiere, when I see the performance at the Palais Garnier – a place one cannot enter without reflecting on where one is in the world. Already from the outside, the theatre demands attention.
The building, which occupies an entire city block, was begun during the reign of Napoleon III and completed in 1875. Wide staircases lead up to the arched entrance, where the audience must pass through airport-style security to enter a vestibule of neo-baroque pomp and splendor that would embarrass a Lutheran.
The famous grand staircase of white marble, with domed halls, columned arcades, and bronze statues, leads up to the upstairs foyer, dominated by heavy gilded stucco, mirrors, and chandeliers – like a copy of the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles.
In short, the building denies itself nothing; it is a theatre in its own right. Inside the auditorium, Chagall’s figures in the 1962 ceiling painting float above the approximately 2,000 seats, framed by four tiers of balconies.
I sit on the first balcony with a direct view of the 30-meter-wide stage. The bells summoning the audience have long since chimed when the lights dim in the house and a woman in pale yellow trousers emerges through the curtain at the front of the stage.
From auditorium to stage
She speaks directly to us about her situation and asks many questions. I struggle with my school French to follow, but I understand that she is asking for understanding and repeats, “s’il vous plaît” – please.
When the curtain rises, it turns out she is an alter ego for the woman called Marion (Marion Barbeau): the entire back wall of the large, otherwise empty stage is filled with a close-up of Marion. She herself stands a little further inside the stage with a cameraman circling around her, while two others look on – one in the foreground and one diagonally in the rear corner.
I now realize that the text is projected in English translation high above the proscenium. This makes things easier, although its placement proves somewhat exhausting for those of us without fluent French, since it creates a split focus. We hear repeated, “I am sorry. Please, forgive me,” as three white walls descend to frame the stage space and the performers are doubled in a play of shadows.
When the person in the foreground claps their hands, Marion begins to move. She dances like a goddess – plastic, supple, and playfully light, yet precise – as the body can appear when seemingly freed from all earthly limitations. The corps de ballet follows with wave-like formations in movement material reminiscent of voguing, before the white backdrop is lifted, and the video image of a middle-aged mother figure (Héléna Pikon) forms a hovering horizon line above the stage.
This is the first in an endless series of scenic flats rolled into place. As freestanding walls, the flats can be pushed easily and evoke strong associations with a film set and the framing of a film shoot. The first flat is designed as a large picture frame.
It points directly to the central concern of the work: our tendency toward self-staging and the anxieties we may have about how we appear to one another and to ourselves in social situations. The mind goes to the sociologist Erving Goffman and his reflections on everyday life’s dramaturgy in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959).
Within a few minutes we are introduced to all the devices on which the performance builds: from the short monologue at the front of the stage, via live video projection, shadow play and dance, to the use of the film set as frame and the theatre machinery as premise and partner, the performance gradually unfolds. Through the associative power of the text, its open shifts, and the effective use of scenic backdrops, the audience is transported from the everyday into the world of the dream play. The subject is set.
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being” – with the film set as frame
Cri de cœur is constructed through a series of tableaux driven forward by the textual material and the various scenic flats rolled in and out of the stage space, supported in particular by Gunnar Innvær’s sound design and Stine Sjøgren’s costumes. The colour palette of Sjøgren’s costumes recalls hand-tinted photographs, with deep, saturated hues. Aesthetically the staging is reminiscent of Lars von Trier’s film Dancer in the Dark with Björk. As there, everything takes place within the framework of a film set.
The illusions are transparent, yet I find myself becoming attached to the figures that emerge, even though they are changeable and plastic. They have everything, but that is also all they have. I catch myself wondering what Øyen is aiming for when we suddenly find ourselves in a home: in a living room with sofa and television, Christmas tree in the corner and a star in the window, with an adjoining room containing a bed and chest of drawers, where a terrarium with a reptile stands. On the sofa sits Marion. In comes a man. He introduces himself: “I’m No One” – or “Ingen.” No One simply wants to be there with Marion. Like Marion, and like the middle-aged mother figure Héléna, No One becomes a recurring figure in the performance.
Øyen knows theatre. He knows how to trigger emotions, and forty minutes into the performance we are given a dramaturgical wake-up call: three dancers stand behind a large picture frame and put on animal heads. One by one they step out of the frame into the room before being shot with a pistol by Marion, as if the whole thing were a video game. She comments on the killings: “To lose one species is unfortunate. To lose two is carelessness. To lose a third is dumb.”
The scenes succeed one another like subconscious streams of thought, propelled by the text work and a film-aesthetic meta-narrative with active use of Brecht-like reminders of theatre as fiction. For example, by using the auditorium loudspeaker system to paraphrase the daily announcements one can hear on Paris commuter trains: “This scene will soon end. Seek the nearest exit.”
The performance unfolds like an analogue slide show or kaleidoscope where each shift requires physical labour. Yet it is magical to watch the transformations take place. The shifts also take on something ritualistic. No sooner have I thought the thought than the scene has already changed character, and the entire corps, each seated on a chair, forms a large circle in the middle of the stage. A woman in the centre welcomes everyone as if we were at an AA meeting.
One by one they climb up on their chairs to tell the others about their small and great problems: “Good evening, I am Antoine. I am a dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet.” “Good evening, Antoine,” replies the group. The scene depends on a handheld microphone. This situation is used for a sly but well-placed social critique of the highly hierarchical organisation of the company. We are given an apology for the situation, but it is explained that the arrangement is necessary, since only the sujets in the corps have wireless microphones, not the many coryphées and quadrilles of lower rank.
“I wish I wasn’t here,” says Héléna – and I understand the feeling as the entire stage picture changes again, taking the form of a revival meeting directed toward the rear corner of the stage.
Impact and cry of heart
The staging is formally strong and more complex than most productions shown on Norwegian stages. Øyen does not deny himself the big emotions, but neither does he shy away from shattering the very illusions he has just created. He is simply good at producing atmospheres that are ambiguous, yet nonetheless affecting.
And just as I am thinking this, in from the left comes a comical insect-like creature. With wings and bright colours, it moves diagonally with tiny mouse-steps toward the woman now sitting alone in front of a stage image of a sand dune, while something resembling Irish folk music plays. Once it arrives, it kisses the woman on the cheek before retreating in the same way it entered.
The image is sentimental, beautiful, filled with tenderness, and touching — but it can also be experienced as calculated. All in one image. And it works. This scene has greater emotional impact than the physical outbursts the corps demonstrates immediately afterwards.
Gunnar Innvær’s music does exactly what good film music should: it underpins dramaturgy and intensity, roars in the breakers, caresses our vulnerability, and whispers when necessary.
The tableaux that follow one another are dazzlingly beautiful and striking, reminding me of the filmmaker and artist Zineb Sedira, who fills the French pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale with a homage to cinema, linked to the history of Algeria’s liberation.
In Cri de cœur I am less certain what Øyen wishes to convey. At times the subtext appears nihilistic, yet at the same time genuine — about human vulnerability in an age of acceleration, with experiences of death anxiety and the fear of alienation and indifference.
“You are going to lose me,” says Marion in a mobile phone conversation with Héléna, thereby anticipating both my own reservations and the ending of the cry of heart.
From a hidden door in a beautiful landscape backdrop emerges yet another being: a reptile-clad figure, like an enlarged version of the gecko Marion has in her terrarium in the background. It is about heat and fire, and the fact that something must die in order for her to live. The reptile figure dances, and as she finishes en face with a deep plié, the curtain falls and the first act is over. Simply a superb entry to the interval and continuation.
Act Two – the dancers’ hour
Act Two would prove to be the corps’ half. As the curtain rises the stage is filled with smoke and seems empty, lit only by overhead light angled from the back; only one dancer can be glimpsed upstage. He turns out to be a god-gifted dancer, shifting between movement material based on frictionless flow, melting pathways into the floor, sharp and precise lunges, and quick mouse-steps combined with sudden stops, where a listening attention to echoes creates a suspended sense of time and breathing space.
A group of dancers then takes over the stage and the solo’s movement motifs. They are overlapped and replaced by yet another group, which finds its own starting point for a variation of the same. In all, eight groups succeed one another in waves, carrying the movement material forward and taking over the entire stage, before the woman with the gecko performs her variation alone — a deconstructed and fragmentary version of Ibsen’s Nora’s tarantella.
At the beginning of the second act, it is as if a radical gearshift takes place: the number of steps per minute and the significance of movement take the driver’s seat, even if both text and film-set tableaux will later again set the pace of the performance. Øyen’s flair for sharp character sketches and comic-book-like film aesthetics is a good match for a ballet company based on precision and exactitude as cultivated skills.
As Act Two progresses I begin to wonder how to convey an experience of nearly three hours, built on an eye for details and moods with an existential nerve, yet composed of scenes that succeed one another like a stream of consciousness, in dream-logic.
Before the second act is over we are taken into yet another round of tableaux. Among them, a white living room conjuring an abstracted version of Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. We are interrupted by chiming audience bells, encounter expressions of thanksgiving, devotion and loss, and witness revival meetings and the introduction of memory-keepers before Marion and No One reach their end point and the gates of the underworld open. Øyen has much on his mind, and it seems that time ran somewhat short in the second act to get everything fully in place. It becomes a little too long, even if each scene has its point, with several good hints at a conclusion.
I am therefore fatigued when the memory-keeper finally carries Marion out to the upstage as a lifeless Coppélia doll, and the audience, together with the middle-aged mother figure Héléna and the entire ensemble, are made witnesses to a ritual killing in a way that only theatre can embody. Héléna, the middle-aged mother figure, responds to the tragedy with small movements that the ensemble takes up and amplifies, well supported by the sound of strings driving everything forward.
Like flocks of birds in the air, schools of fish in water, or moths around lights in the dark, the ensemble moves with quick, tiny mouse-steps forward, as if they were gliding lightly above the floor. They create thereby a distinct, brisk pulse, and a mood of departure. They find themselves together in new and shifting formations before again spreading out and disappearing from the stage, leaving the middle-aged mother figure Héléna alone, moving slowly upstage as the curtain comes down.
Final reflections
I will never know how the French text spoken on stage is experienced by a native speaker. I can only observe the response in the hall after the curtain falls, from my seat on the first balcony. The reaction is immediate and spontaneous, and the applause warm and heartfelt. The hall seems filled with genuine gratitude for the journey we have shared. It feels as if we have all undertaken a piece of work together, and moved towards something larger than ourselves. A fullness has been created which we now share.
I urge the Cultural Committee of the Norwegian Parliament to make a short trip to the Palais Garnier to see Cri de cœurbefore the final performance on October 13. That way they can witness what a systematic investment in Norwegian stage art can bring forth. Øyen achieves something granted to few, and the Palais Garnier is not for everyone. But neither is good theatre created in Fjaler or in Groruddalen. Politicians and bureaucrats must know that it takes years to build artistic competence. It requires long-term commitment, wisdom, and collaboration to safeguard a rich diversity where different types and phases of artistic practice are given the chance to realize their potential. To achieve this, we must recognize and support efforts that make a contextual difference and move us — whether in the Palais Garnier or in Fjaler.
(Published 03.10.2022)