In a fifth wall-breaking exercise, a French theatrical show staged at the Alliance Francaise on the weekend, blurred the lines between the virtual and the real, the satirical and the instructive, and the ludicrous and the logical.
The experimental play, “Our Daily Performance”, the brainchild of Guiseppe Chico and Barbara Matijevic, co-founders of the Paris-based theatre company Premier Stratageme, featured an ensemble cast of actors, dancers, acrobats, and musicians who actualised on stage a world drawn from an assortment of YouTube “Do-It-Yourself” tutorials.
From fitness tips for couples to stay in shape featuring a Valentine’s Day workout routine, shadow-boxing your way to fitness and mental alertness — optionally using bubble-wrap rolls or a table as exercise props — to activating those parts of the primitive brain to stoke the survival instinct in a calamity.
There was this low-down on how to write your own hip-hop song from lines set in iambic pentameter if you looked at the right places — that could be a Shakespearean sonnet from Richard-III, or any famous lines, say for example...“We hold these truths to be self-evident”... from the US Declaration of Independence, or just about any randomly banal personal outpourings on X (erstwhile Twitter) provided they fit the metre.
Silos of real-life utility and value also shone through the satire and spoofs as in a self-defence tutorial to thwart a potential rapist during the over hour-long show.
Spanning wide-ranging content drawn from the digital expanse of YouTube “DIY” tutorials, the play (bilingual in English and French) wove a tale that presented animated and novel perspectives on navigating the complexities of modern life.
Playful and witty, contemplative and constructive in value in turns, the show blended elements of entertainment with introspection and energetic performance with insights on human oddities, especially the tendency to wander down the rabbit-hole.
Barbara Matijevic, co-founder of French theatre group Premier Stratageme at the Alliance Francaise in Puducherry. | Photo Credit: M. Dinesh Varma
“While we work with irony and humour, our intention is not to ridicule the people whose traits are adopted for theatre,” said Barbara Matijevic, whose work has extensively explored the impact of digital culture on storytelling through the forms of auto-fictional performances.
“People are funny, obsessive and see the world through different lenses and they can go very far in the direction of a certain obsession. This is what makes theatre for us”, she said.
The avant-garde show, which was one of the high points of the Avignon Theatre Festival, 2022 — the legendary summer festival for performing arts in South of France — has garnered widespread critical acclaim across France.
The shows also throw up a range of perspectives on contemporary concerns such as solitude, anxiety, and death. For instance, a tutorial on avoiding serious injury in a fall (the bathroom is the most dangerous place in the world, as an actor remarks) holds up a mirror to society. Behind the practical information, lies some sociological pointers to the solitude faced by an ageing population and a host of existential issues, Barbara said.
French theatre group Premier Stratageme presented an experimental show, “Our Daily Performance” at the Alliance Francaise in Puducherry recently. | Photo Credit: M Dinesh Varma
Since 2008, Premier Stratageme has been fascinated by what is happening on the web, proliferation of online communities, and the relationships and exchanges that are shaping up the digital landscape. This was the third experimental show based on YouTube content, where virtual tutorials relating to the body transform into an actual stage setting, and the display is experienced collectively by an audience, not consumed by an individual staring at a screen.
Much of the heavy lifting for the project was during the initial phase that involved countless hours of wading through the cluttered digital landscape on a popular platform like YouTube. The material was then rearranged, categorised and rewritten for a how-to-do things format of presentation — the exploration of ideas and concepts would be anchored in body movement. In fact, where the language, or text, is dry and procedural, the body is the vehicle for poetry.
