Massimo Furlan / Numero23Prod.

Le Banquet

A project by Massimo Furlan, Numero23Prod.
Performance created on April 5th 2014 for Abstract Space in Lausanne, with the Numero23Prod. performers.

Scenario
The performance lasted five hours. There was no audience. Bastien Genoux filmed it using an over-the-shoulder camera as well as a series of cameras fixed on headsets and harnesses, and others, which performers could use during the performance, were mounted in various other spots.
An edited version of the video footage of this performance, which happened behind closed doors, was presented to the public in the aftermath of the party.

Décor
In the centre, a long table with a white tablecloth seemingly decorated for a banquet or a reception. The decoration is festive. Around it, musical instruments, three guitars, an electric piano, a microphone and its stand.
On the wall hang a bunch of mottled and mismatched costumes from different eras: There is no unity of style or colour. A big piece of furniture sits on the stage. It contains 24 wigs. To its side, a small make-up table.

Rules
Before the beginning of the performance, the performers are given a few rules:
– They each have to make up characters with the accessories available.
– They are invited to eat, drink, move around and interact with each other, but without talking. However, they can sing to each other if they so desire.
– They have to work over time, going into a trance and impersonating a character underlying the many transformations they will undergo. They have to get into the spirit of a corporate event where relationships are exacerbated and people reveal their true selves.

Party – invert – revert
The performance focuses on the question of parties, ritual celebrations and carnivals. Here, it is a theatre company party which brings together performers who pretend to party until they get caught up in the party.
What is a party? It is a gathering of individuals, made up of specificities pertaining to food sharing, friendliness and dancing. And yet a party is also a moment that inverts daily life, provoking change, like some sort of revolution. It is an opportunity to go out, and to perform extra-ordinary actions. Partying is illicit, in as much as it transgresses the rules of normality, i.e. of decency, intimacy, self-control and temperance. In the margins of daily life, parties build their own closed space – unique moments that translate into powerful experiences. On an anthropological level, parties rhyme with excess and spending. They revert power politics and are closer to the Melanesian potlatch ritual described in the texts of Marcel Mauss.

Trance
In the ritual of the party, partygoers enter a state of near trance. Under the combined influence of tiredness, loud music, drinking and dressing-up, partygoers enter a different frame of mind: amazement, transformation of emotional states such as anxiety, sadness, laughter and wellbeing.
Performers seek to attain this state of trance to become the character they are playing and through which, thanks to their costumes, they alter their own selves. Appearances change, with costumes, wigs and make-up. Everyone is unrecognisable. Individuals become a sequence of characters, interacting, changing again, returning with new ideas, and enjoying themselves while creating.

Duration
In the end, the main focus is time, duration and fatigue. Actions are not written or determined. They are unpredictable and improvised. It is a long space continuum in which sequences of actions lasting a few seconds or a few hours come together. The duration of the action is drawn out: it is hard to say when it begins (probably when the camera begins shooting, even if the action probably started earlier). It ends when the cameraman is too tired to bear the weight of his camera, thereby creating a final scene. But the action could go on, and it does carry on off-camera, touching on the idea that actions have no limit and may potentially last forever in a daily life devoid of archives – a utopian artistic realm, which is nothing other than the realm of the living. To be continued…