ARIANNE MNOUCHKINE: EPHEMERAL GESTURES

July 11, 2009

Park Avenue Armory,

New York City.

The audience walks into a cavernous space of parallel steeply racked seats.  In the center is a large but compact open arena spacious to carry to large rotating wheels of actors.  On either side of this empty space is a raised platform.  On one side of the raised platform sits the Sound and Light Operator.  On the other sits Jean -Jacques Lemaitre, Arianne Mnouchkine's composer of many years, surrounded by an entourage of wooden instruments of unusual shapes and heights.

Arianne Mnouchkine's Les Ephemeres is an expedition into the deepest recesses of the human psyche.  Watching Les Ephemeres the week following Pina Bausch's death cannot but influence the viewing a seven hour performance on loss, aging, death, memory, childhood, melancholia and birth.  Les Ephemeres is about little gestures and thick memories: a slice of pie, chocolate cake, a goldfish, are conduits to former lives, forgotten pasts.

Les Ephemeres is a gigantic memory box of stories, vignettes, snapshots, fading photographs.  We are drawn to the peripheries of daily lives, and sucked into the vortex of incomplete stories.  The threads of all these myriad tales interlock into a web like network of narratives, of histories, and ultimately of interdependent fates.  We are all connected and need each other.  This is the simple message borne out of war and dispersal, fear and alienation.  What connects humanity is the myriad spheres of social interaction- miniscules of gestures that bear the baggage of contact.