Relâche

1924 was a particularly wonderful year for the man who declared: “I have always loved playing seriously.” Francis Picabia (1879- 1953), the indefatigable artist, writer and enthusiastic letter writer, was working on 391, an avant-garde Paris revue, using it that year to fight on two separate fronts: the academisation of Dada, which he dismissed with one of his polemical, brutally funny texts, and the pretentions of the nascent surrealism of André Breton, which he suspected was only a pathetic means of seizing power in the Parisian art world. He drew, he painted, he chatted with his co-conspirators Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray and between the laughter and the tears, found the time to work on Relâche or on editing his one novel, Caravansérail, which was both autobiographical and lost for a long time, it was only finally published after his death. With devastating cynicism, incomparable lucidity and humour, this Satyricon of modern times is that of an actor and spectator who sends up, sends off and records with jubilation the day’s current inventions and disorders, settling scores, denouncing fakes, blow-hards and pretenders. An ode to movement and to moments of everyday life, between dinners at Prunier and unbridled delights, jazz bands and the new dances, roulette at Monte-Carlo, exhibitions and visits, opium, car races or spiritualism seances at his home on the rue Fontaine, Picabia intertwines the art scene and the Parisian nightlife of the 20’s, mocking André Breton, costing out Eros and blasting the fake values of the artists sucking up to the powers that be. Caravansérail is a literary gem, and Relâche would be the same thing onstage. Both the novel and the dance work show us what it was like at that time, when all of Paris was a party, as Hemingway wrote. This was the time, set during the period between the two World Wars, at the exact moment when the conventions of bourgeois humanism inherited from the 19th century were collapsing, precipitated by the events of 1914- 18 and by the arrival of European fascism and the Nazis, at the end of the international economic debacle which came about after the crash of 1929. Walking on this tightrope strung between two eras, when the dreams of the new Man were flourishing with the art happening all over Europe, from France to Germany, from Italy to Hungary, from Holland to Russia, between Dada, Bauhaus and Constructivism, the renewal of these art forms resonated for Picabia and his friends with the renewal of certain forms of life.

Relegating old forms of blackmail to what he termed “eternal beauty,” to “noble or overly solemn subjects,” it was with ferocity and humour that the man who declared that he preferred “a chair at the Paris Casino to one at the Académie Française,” attacked the art that had become a mere accessory or a piece of bourgeois furniture – a lie which could be bought, a conveyor of conventions, whose declared romanticism or rebellion against command would set off corrosive yet always joyful salvos.

As for Relâche, it was with the complicity of his elder in salutary insolences, Erik Satie, that Picabia conceived it, along with the young, elegant René Clair, an art critic and writer in a sleeping Paris, a director who was an intact breath of freshness, whom he asked to direct the Entr’acte cinématographique which he had sketched out. And Jean Börlin, the dancer and official Swedish choreographer – was assigned the task of translating onto the bodies a part of the choreography of the piece, which was otherwise taken care of by the overwhelming kineticism of the scenographic art object he conceived of as a set, somewhere between blinding sculpture and flashing luminous tableau. He was asked to speak three of the most familiar languages spoken by audiences in certain dark Parisian theatres of the time – music hall, circus and ballet – to twist them into a sort of braid in which quotes and puns and insinuations of a deliberate casualness would undo the normal hierarchies and communicate his enigmas. Between collage and montage and these newer procedures of the art of that time, the curtain went up on a fiction. And while the “bride” of art, once “stripped naked by its bachelors,” gets dressed in order to later undress them – it is to the audience that Picabia asks this question: what is the Entr’acte (something taking place between two acts) for those who are on Relâche (in French the word means a day of no performance, or that the theatre is closed)?

Christophe Wavelet

Credits

An instantaneous ballet in two acts, a cinematographic entracte and The Dog’s TailConception 1924 : Francis PicabiaMusic : Erik SatieChoreography : Jean BörlinFilm : René Clair

Reenactment – 2014

Choreography : Petter Jacobsson and Thomas CaleyHistorical research and dramaturgy : Christophe WaveletSet design : Annie TolleterLighting : Eric WurtzHistoriacal research about the 1920s: Carole BoulbèsCostumes : Costume department of CCN – Ballet de Lorraine