home, introduction (français), program, acteurs, actors, crew, équipe, article: Comme un poisson hors de l'eau, un peu d'histoire, a little history, Arts First-Harvard Arts Festival 2005, Festival d'Avignon, article sur Avignon, poster, "Actualité de l'Echange", Claudel Society
Fifty years after the death of Claudel and a little more than a hundred years after his play L'Echange was written in New York and in Boston, it will be performed in the USA once again. It is an important event for poetry, for theatre and for the everlasting ties that exist between France and the United States. Claudel was 25. He had just started working in Foreign Affairs, and the United States was his first position outside of France. During his long career, he then got to know the Far East, Central Europe, as well as North and South America. At the time, the young diplomat was an eager, tormented author, who had already written three plays filled with sound and fury, back in Europe.
Radical changes in the style of the playwright were brought about by the discovery of a new world&emdash;the United States in full swing, by his ambition to represent its relationship with Europe, and by the desire to include the intimate rushes of his own self in his work. This time he focused on a quartet of characters who find themselves locked up in an outdoor setting. The title is very telling. There is trading everywhere in the play: between the two couples, between France and the United States, but also between the world of banking and the ever so fading one of Native Americans, between nature and the city, woman and man, common sense and imagination, cynical calculation and hopeless dreaming. Each character is striving with his contradictory values, and is destroying himself while destroying others. Eventually, the play reaches a very striking ending, where the two initial couples have split up, and we can catch glimpses of a new one&emdash;the American banker and the young French woman. The two deluded characters&emdash;the actress and the half-breed Indian&emdash;having disappeared, it is a painful coming of age of two nations that appears across the threshold.
Monsieur Michel Autrand
Professeur émérite à l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV)
Our aesthetic goal was to show the relentless mechanism of this four-person tragedy. In the purest classical tradition, Claudel gradually undoes the threads he has woven between the faces to rebuild another, a patchwork face, a multicultural futuristic one.
Considering the esteem in which Claudel held the composer Darius Milhaud, it is fitting that we pay musical homage to him for the opening...
G.C. KESSOUS, Director
http://www.paul-claudel.net/oeuvre/english.html
http://www.paul-claudel.net/homme/diplomate.html
home, introduction (français), program, acteurs, actors, crew, équipe, article: Comme un poisson hors de l'eau, un peu d'histoire, a little history, Arts First-Harvard Arts Festival 2005, Festival d'Avignon, article sur Avignon, poster, "Actualité de l'Echange", Claudel Society