Pascale Mignon

RENDEZVOUS ON THE PONTS DES ARTS

Lucie and the “Swing-Stick”
That day was different for Lucy. She still wasn’t five. At that time she used to retire to the whitewashed wooden bridge behind their house, and played “swing-stick” on the small river. From one side of the bridge, she threw a stick into water, and then rushed to the other side to see it turn up. The stick danced and tossed and turned to the rhythm and melody of the water. It danced and hopped, and then continued her walk. She was heading toward the mysterious realm that was waiting for her on the other side, beyond the frontier of the unknown, behind the crook lined by poplars and willows.

Sometimes the “swing-stick” did not reach its destination. It crept and entrenched in the reed and rush on one side. Lucie thought the stick may have run away being afraid of having to sail on the back of waves, by itself, or to make sure that it would not have to leave the bridge and the bank. But it also occurred to her that the stick wanted to play hide-and-seek with her.

That day, instead of a stick, Lucie sends off a rose on the water, toward the unknown, a rose she picked in her mother’s garden. But surprise! The flower is being very strange! It isn’t following the course of the river, but stops down there and stares at Lucie. She smiles at the rose and talks to it and shares with it her latest secrets, her dreams of today and those of tomorrow…, as if the would always be there to listen to her. The flower with its glittering wet petals is dancing for Lucie to the tune of the swing-swang.

The next day, when the sun is rising, Lucie is again standing on the whitewashed wooden bridge. The flower doesn’t turn up. Lucie is alone.

At her call, only her moving shape answers from the water reflecting the rising sun, but she is looking for something that will never turn up any more. In the silence, she only hears a silent murmur coming from beneath the bridge, the sound of the hardly visible quivers of the poplars and willows of the mysterious land. In the silence of the river and the wind, she is wandering in her memories. Her imagination is soaring.

She thinks that the flower may have turned into a water pumpkin or a water lily, which she saw on a Monet-painting with her nursery teacher in the Giverny museum.

If the rose had been a water lily, it would have stayed there for ever, and their conversation would have lasted for long.

But the flower ran away, maybe because she had left it alone since she had no real friends and was bored. So Lucie now picks a bunch of blooming roses in the garden of his father and mother, and slowly, one by one, throws them into the water from the top of the bridge. And each flower sets off for the frontiers of the unknown.

What would have happened if the previous day when Lucie threw it into the water, the flower had continued its journey? Or if by the next morning it hadn’t disappeared? Undoubtedly, Lucie would have continued her game until she got bored of it and fancied another.

What made this game so memorable and appealing to this little girl was – beyond the joy of watching the “swing-sticks” disappear and then turn up again – the two breaks in the process of her imaginary game: First, when the flower stopped its journey just in front of her eyes, and secondly, when it disappeared by the next day.

These two interruptions in the course of time opened new spaces for her. The two breaks left their marks in Lucie’s memory, maybe because they appeared to be mysteries for her to which she had no response.

Standing alone on the bridge, she recurred to her imagination to fill the mystery with words and pictures, to invent another game of disappearance and reappearance.

Imagination is the psychic field which reveals when the human being must cope with separation, solitude, or the mysteries of life and death.

Early childhood

A baby child is carried, looked after and spoken to by his mother or another person who occupies that position. The child is impregnated by its mother, her voice, her scent, her nourishing and her words. She leaves her own marks on the baby, from which she builds up herself, which make up her personality. At the same time, also her imagination and desires leave their marks against her will. Like Open sesame!, these marks will open the gate of the future for the child.

This is good because when nourishing the child, the mother gives him other things besides a certain quantity of milk, such as the reading and interpretation of her own emotions. This way, its own feelings will not be unknown to the child. While drinking mother milk, the child is also sucking up his mother’s words and her look. Little by little, he learns how to interpret his feelings and how to create a picture in which he recognizes himself. First, he discovers himself in the look and solicitude and voice and words of his mother, or somebody well-known.

If he could speak, he would say “She’s me and I’m her.” But he would say that because he cannot speak yet.

When the mother talks to her child, calls things by their names, or says something about being, she opens other ways to him, which enables him to detach from her and from her immediacy. While talking to him, looking after him, nourishing him, she lets him know that there is an outside world which has for long been there, but the child does not sense it until his mother shows interest in him. He can see her, feel her gestures, hear her voice: she tells him that he has a father and there is also the entire world outside. She lets him know that she belongs not only to him, she has desires for his father – who has desires for the child, too –, for the man who carries the colours of the world, for the world painted by her feminine instincts.

The words she addresses him link her and the child, but they also separate them.

The mother, who has been so close, starts to retire. The child slowly detaches from her, looks at her, talks to her, goes away to come back later.

The few-month-old baby can thus, in the absence of its mother, without thinking of her, make her fill the void with her imagination, the object of the missing love. The baby starts playing with its hands, its feet, its voice, and discovers its own ways of finding each other.

If the child gets sufficient support from his mother, the separation unveils the scene of imagination. Detaching from the beloved creature is not without anguish and sorrow. The imagination soothes sorrow, and makes anguish bearable for the child.

So the child is able to find himself the ways of meeting when he discovers his body using his imagination, when he plays with his voice and, later, with his mates, but he continues to feed on what the adults offer him, just like Lucie on her swing-stick or Monet’s water lilies. In order to exist, he needs to discover himself and the outside world, he needs to be fed by his imagination. This is the function of theatre and other cultural programmes recommended to children, their parents and professionals who work in the field of early childhood and childhood.

“Mom, I want you!”

That day it was raining on the bank of the Seine. The wind was blowing. A couple of seagulls were crying, and from the distance, a small group of children were coming from school and heading for a barge, the Opera, to attend a performance[1]. As they stepped on board, Arthur, accompanied by his mother, said to the actress who was going on stage: “My feet got soaked!” Outside it’s raining, Arthur is on a barge which is floating gracefully on the water, and his feet got soaked! Outside the wind is blowing, but it is blowing on the stage as well. It turns out the lamps but lights candles instead. Inside and outside, down here and up there, turns them out and on. Frontiers disappear during the same performance! Meeting, fear and surprise. R rejection, acceptance and solitude. Moments, and fragments of moments from which life emerges. Verlaine is present. Sobbing, a missing mother is blown away by the wind. But how is it possible that a mother having so much power over her little child has so little power over the strong wind? And Arthur is getting anxious, he is talking louder and louder. He raises the black velvet curtain that hides the porthole of the Opera Barge, covers the sunlight, but also the close immensity of water. Then he drops it on the floor, interrupting the performance. During the performance, the three-year-old little boy has got upset fearing that he’s losing his mother, taken away by the wind. Behind the black curtain of the Opera’s porthole, he may be looking for his missing mother flown away by the wind. At the end of the performance he cries out: “Mom, I want you!”

Like all the young children in the audience, Arthur cannot necessarily wait until the end of the performance to express his feelings. Young children are not the emotionally most correct spectators…, they may feel the urge to act promptly, to say or to do something, to express their opinions quietly or loudly, to watch the stage or turn their backs to it, to stand up or sit down. The performance inhabits their bodies. The curtain may as well fall ahead of time!

Why doesn’t he speak?

The small theatre hall plunges into darkness. From the darkness to the night, there is one quick step, and the title of the performance expresses that: 1, 2, 3, close your eyes! [2]. The hall gets dark, lights appear on stage. This is a different performance in a different place with the lights of the moon … maybe… There are little children with their fathers and mothers or other relatives. It’s Sunday, eleven o’clock in the morning. The night falls on stage, outside the sun is shining brightly, they are competing with each other. Those who came to the theatre, wanted to see the night in broad daylight, and take a walk on the edge of fiction and reality. Now a mother is on stage with her baby. She is talking to her doll, who is showing off in fancy goggles. She plays with it, sings to it, and talks to it before putting it to sleep. It’s a spectacle of shades and lights, of music and words where all the spectators can meet part of themselves, known or unknown to them, which they will share with others or keep for themselves. One can meet here Boucle d’or, Uncle Bear and his youngest son, a little green mouse and chickens with teeth, a sand-seller girl like Betty Boop, huge, impressing, well-shaped and colourful. The sand-seller girl turns up unexpectedly like desires in our dreams in the middle of the night…, a pannier with dreams on one side and nightmares on the other, each of them drawing from the imagination while also feeding it. And then suddenly, in the darkness of the theatre hall, the voice of a little boy is heard. Out of the blue, Maxime, this little boy asks loudly about the doll with goggles: “Why doesn’t he speak?” The child spectator speaks up about what he finds surprising loudly, then and there. How come that he misses the words of that doll on stage? He, Maxime, who has begun to put his life into words just recently, has heard the silence of the doll. He heard the difference between the mother, who nourishes her baby with earthly food, but also with music, images, impressions and words, and the doll, which expresses its feelings with its body and gestures. But for Maxime, this silence is strange, this world without words! How strange it is not to speak! He is a little boy who can. Now not only his mother is capable of giving names to things and express herself, not only she is capable of interpreting her child’s feelings and putting them into words. His mother doesn’t know each time any more what is going on in him. From now on, she interprets things by listening to what her little child says, even if she sometimes thinks she knows him perfectly. Maxime forgot that once he himself had been a baby who couldn’t speak. No memories, but, undoubtedly, fragments of pictures and some distant echoes. The whole dependence of the doll on the mother, which develops in front of his eyes, upsets him and makes him speak. How come that the little child doesn’t speak? Come on, speak! Tell what you feel! Speak, because your mother won’t always speak up for you! Don’t let her tell everything about you! Speak, show us that you exist! Speak, tell us that the night is not silent… The silence of the doll, the words the mother addresses it, the interpretation she makes of the things it doesn’t have words for, all these make Maxime detach from what he perceived as the world of silence. The mother speaks, the doll doesn’t, and Maxime belongs to the world of those who can speak. He can speak, but at the same time there is always silence inside him.

The performance entitled 1,2,3 close your eyes! presents words, pictures and music, but also silence, unexpectedly, to make the viewer head for the depth of the night and attempt to meet life there.

Words turned into melody

-       Listen!

-        What?

-        Hush!

-        Hell!

-        You’re not listening!

-        I am, but I can’t hear you.

-        If you can’t hear, you hear everything.

Listen!

      This is silence.

-       Silence is too quiet.

Crocus és Fracas[3] are playing with the words, singing and dancing with the words and their bodies. The words are holding on to each other, and then let each other go, by the command of a note or an accent. The words are embracing, twirling and letting each other go. A brother, Fracas, and a sister, Crocus got out of their bed at night: they want to stay up all night. In the darkness of the night, Crocus is listening to the snowfall and watching the roofs which “are smeared with cream”. She is waiting for… waiting for the morning. Fracas is afraid of the silence, he is chasing the Yeti to scare his sister. He wants to know what happens at night, when everyone is sleeping… A brother and a sister are talking on the stage, addressing their words to the young audience. The children are watching them smiling. They are playing too hide-and-seek with the words, with their hands. Only two actors are standing on stage, but their words are so powerful that we can see the cream covered roofs, the polar bear walking on the street, and the penguins sliding down the roofs… We are playing with Fracas, who says that the Yeti is coming soon, and we are trembling for his sister, Crocus, who is scared that the Yeti is going to devour her. Usual and unusual words, turning into a poem, which makes us dream but also think and reflect. Everyone is thinking of their own stories, while watching this other scene and listening to words which are holding on to each other and forming melodies.

We are in the theatre where words turned into songs are swinging, holding to each other and resounding. The joy, the game, the tenderness and the emotions express the meeting with the visitors of the night, the fear of the darkness and the silence, the fear of the noises and the solitude, the fear of desolation and the unknown, the fear of losing love. In the obscurity of the theatre hall, these words are little torches which awake the joy of magic, of finding each other and of the ephemeral world. These words reveal a world we already know, but now the sounds, the colours, the rhythms are different. The new composition illuminates the unknown which is thus less frightening.

Imaginary scenes… and the moments of life

The purpose of artistic performances is putting on stage the imagination and illusions of others. They don’t aim at teaching children and having them learn as many things as possible or making them artists. They are supposed to take children to the bridge of arts. There the children have the opportunity to see their interior world, the moments of their dreams and desires which are inhabited by their culture and society. The child can appropriate the words that are created by others, at the same time sound familiar. He can himself make everything that carries words: the music, the voices, the lights, the shadows, the gestures, a face or a look.

But certain conditions are necessary for this. The little child is not able to cross the bridge by himself. In order to be able to accept the break of time that creates theatre, the little child who is building himself up in the everyday world of the familiar, needs to be accompanied by people who are points of reference for him. The continuity of relations and words needs to be maintained so that he can move securely in the time which has stopped in the theatre. This way he will have the pleasure to discover the unknown undressed by the wind.

When a child is in the crèche or a similar place, or with a babysitter, he is not accompanied only by professionals. The parents are those who introduce the child into culture, so professionals may not ignore them.

Crossing the bridge of arts with them implies other forms of meeting and exchange: emotions, pleasure or displeasure, surprise, unknown reactions. Unusual moments are to be expected, moments that interrupt the everyday and make the child think. Parents do the same, in a little different manner.

The theatre does not undertake to be a dream that covers our real life, but it is rather the experience of meeting, introduction to the words, feelings and dreams which give the taste of life.

Today when the theatre addresses the youngest, the responsibility of the authors is even greater when they invent what to show the children and the adults who accompany them. It sometimes happens that in order to prevent unexpected and disturbing reactions from children, they limit themselves to performances suiting everyone’s taste. The aim is to make the children laugh, to induce easy reactions, reactions that we already know. We know what to expect for. No surprise for the adults! No trouble! The child will react when he is supposed to, and his response will not be new to us. But if the unknown disappears from the performance, what will be the job of the author? How will then art find the words, the pictures, the music, to express the emotions of life? Will there be a place for the emotions of life? The universe would shrink. Life would be smaller. This is the case when children are given sweets at the end of the performance, as if not even the author believed that the performance in itself is sufficient to please the audience. So get the candies! Sweets might help the author, but they also can suppress the inventive capacity of the child spectator.

The child enjoys walking on the bridge of arts which means that he craves for different food, not sweets. He wishes to be fed with imaginary scenes. These imaginary scenes cannot be satisfied by the same scenes each time, they cannot be constructed on the same model. That would be like a motionless horizon without churches, mountains, air. The imaginary scenes cannot satisfy one by being the scenes of everyday life. This would be a world where each page is yellow of boredom, a world where the world does not find the source of food, and writing does not exist in the silence of life.

The spectator, whether a child or an adult, grasps – often involuntarily – moments that refer to his own life. He himself creates, invents and finds these moments through the work of others. He finds himself in a different time in a different place.

The theatre illuminates with a different light the memories of childhood, the fragments of life. These are distant and uncertain, never exactly the same as they once were. They come close and this closeness surprises us, astonishes us, and upsets us. They are different, offering us different ways of inhabiting and travelling the world. The creation of others uncovers moments from our memory and our history, and makes us dream.

Words on stage

From the moment of birth, a little child is surrounded by the world of language, and his encounter with speaking creatures show him the path to his own words. To grow up, live and speak, he has to leave the world of no words where he comes from. Only thus can he express his desires that are not the same as his parents’. This is a kind of escape to the other world, the world of speakers. The theatre shows the world of words, a world that can be travelled. It offers the child spectators words that have power and consistence, even if it speaks about the lightness of snowflakes, or the fears of the sand-seller girl, or the birth of a little brother or sister.

Sometimes, however, words fill even the adults with fear, they are threatening like the darkness of the night. So, we don’t offer little children performances dominated by words. In writing, words are not sophisticated. Polished and refined, they are less dangerous. It should not be forgotten that the child, no matter how old he is, can walk along his own path if he can find his way among the words uttered by others. Words are his food. Maybe he translates them for himself promptly, maybe at a later time.

There are words that don’t echo, and there are others that resound. There are words that break the world apart into levels, and there are others that act as the shadows and lights of life. If the right word or the right way of speaking is found, the words uttered on stage will reach and touch the child spectator. At the end of the performance, he will feel that he knows more about himself than before.

The little child will grow up. He will not only walk, but also speak. Can a live performance be seen as an adventure during which he will be shown the joy of speaking? The path to the rendezvous with the others?

Not long ago, I was walking on Pont des Arts, the Bridge of Arts, and I was watching the Seine flowing, but this time I saw a different scene: the Loire was flowing in front of my eyes. The Loire is a magician, a musician, the great interpreter of the Blue Symphony: bluish-black and bluish-green and greyish-blue, night-blue and sky-blue, Picasso-blue and Matisse-blue and De Staël-blue. The Loire, with its islands of sand, reed and thorn, which hide under the ice in winter, and show off in the light of dawn in winter. They were always present in my dreams, but also in my childhood fears. These islands were always difficult to approach because I was frightened by the anger of the sand. Watching from the Bridge of Arts, they have become smiling places. I must be grateful to them for being here with you today, here in the country of the other great interpreter of the Blue Symphony. Standing on the Chain Bridge I’m watching the chain in the water of the magnificent Danube.

“Only moments bear dreams”, wrote once René Clair.