Le cerf se voyant dans l'eau

Recorded at the CND 9 December 2006

[The stag who sees himself in the water]
This piece, the result of a commission by Annie Sellem, director of the production company La Petite Fabrique, as part of a programme entitled “Les Fables à La Fontaine”, devoted to the staging of the “Fables” by Jean de La Fontaine. 

Boyzie Cekwana transposes this fable into an African context to make it “a panoramic tale of the savannah”, replacing the stag with a Thomson’s gazelle and the bloodhound with the cheetah. He builds his choreography around the “precise moment which reveals the heart of the story”, as he explains in the statement of intent which introduces his proposal. According to him, the final moral resonates very clearly with “all those who tread on African soil”: “the fight between teeth and flesh is determined by an animal’s disregard for a simple rule of survival” [1].

Programmed in the “Les belles étrangères” (The beautiful foreigners) part of the project, the piece was created in February 2005 at the Theatre Jean Lurçat in Aubusson and toured throughout France.

[1] B. Cekwana, statement of intent for “Le cerf se voyant dans l’eau” (“The stag who sees himself in the water”), 2005

The stag who sees himself in the water

A stag, by crystal-running brook-
Stopping to have himself a look
At his reflection – gazed, gave thanks
For antlers full and fair, but took
Great umbrage at his spindly shanks,
Whose image, ill rewarding his inspection,
Shimmered below. “Ah me! What imperfection!
Such difference, head to toe! My brow can touch
The topmost branches, but my hooves are much
The worst that ever were!” As thus
He wailed his woe in accents dolorous,
A hound came bounding. Stag, in fright,
Trying to flee into the wood
As best he could,
Turned to take flight.
And though his hooves performed quite as they should,
His antlers, tangling in each bough and limb,
Would prove to be the death of him.
Damning his yearly growth, the beast, resigned,
Suffered a rather sudden change of mind.
Like stag, who cursed his hooves though quick to bless
The antlers that, at length, were his undoing,
We mortals prize the beautiful, eschewing
What serves us better, and what harms us less.

Jean de La Fontaine, Book VI – Fable 9, 1678

(Fifty Fables of La Fontaine, translated by Norman R. Shapiro, University of Illinois Press, 1997)

Statement of intent 

“This fable embodies a moral, powerful and tangible prototype which leaves a great deal of room for creative exploration. It is not often that one can work along such a clear narrative line; this prospect is therefore intimidating. In this piece, I want to look at La Fontaine’s traditional fable from an “African” perspective: to weave a panoramic tale of the savannah, to make the forest a plain and the stag a Thomson’s gazelle.

I’m interested in the search for one moment: the precise moment which reveals the heart of the story. In the wild, the cheetah is my favourite animal. Thanks to my fascination for this elegant and nimble wild cat, I have witnessed its perilous relationship with the Thomson’s gazelle. The goal, nevertheless, is to tell the story of a gazelle who makes a bad decision in an environment of constant threat and danger. While the gazelle is concerned with its own beauty and prowess, it loses sight of the key elements which ensure its survival: vigilance and distance. In its self-importance, it lets its predator get too close and it loses the critical moments it needs to escape.

While moving away from the true character of the wild cat, our cheetah adopts superficial and particular qualities. It, for example, is strangely obsessed by its tail, or strangely sure of itself. Thus, I try to soften the moral of the fable, by proposing a humorous, beautiful and tragic vision all at the same time. In the end, the final moral remains similar: “the fight between teeth and flesh is determined by an animal’s disregard for a simple rule of survival”. It is a rule which resonates instinctively with all those who tread on African soil.”

Boyzie Cekwana 

Updating: December 2013