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"Solo: Le doute m'habité"
Philippe Decouflé
Joyce Theater
New York, NY
March 7, 2007

For many years, Philippe Decouflé has been France's go-to guy for elaborate, multi-media presentations. His success with the opening and closing ceremonies for the 1992 Albertville Winter Olympics led to other spectaculars such as the Cannes Film Festival's fiftieth anniversary celebration and a (now-aborted) project for Cirque du Soleil. For his own company, he made large-scale, fantastical works — such as the imaginative, circus-like "Tricodex," which Lyon Opera Ballet brought to New York in 2004 — in which dance was one element within a vast spectacle.

So he deserves credit for shifting gears and attempting to see what he could develop by thinking smaller and venturing into unfamiliar territory with this solo work — in which he is not often truly alone onstage, thanks to a good deal of sophisticated video techniques. But "Le doute m'habite" often felt unintegrated theatrically and uncertain in tone. There were some dazzling sections, but also a rather meek and unconvincing plea for the audience's indulgence at the start, and Decouflé's attempts at directly relating his personal history stalled rather than advanced the hour-long work.

Decouflé played with amplified, distorted, and multiple images of himself — in full figure or, on occasion, only his hands or feet — as projected and creatively altered and enhanced through imaginative videography by Olivier Somola. While much of what we saw was entertaining and sometimes mildly psychedelic in its imagery and colors, there was little that did not have the sense of being a re-tread. In the past, Decouflé's work has often revealed a debt to Alwin Nikolais, with whom he studied as a young dancer. Here, one was more often reminded of either Pilobolus, or Momix — in particular "E.C.," its evolving 1980s work that involved rambunctious shadowplay on dual screens. When, during his bows, "credits" appeared on the screen in the form of bodies moving through high-speed positions to spell out letters, one could not help think of the animated forms that Pilobolus contributed just days earlier to the Academy Awards.

After some introductory trompe l'oeil hand and arm effects from behind a small screen, Decouflé's full figure became decipherable behind a larger one that was suspended about two feet above the stage. After the amusing image of a giant foot seeming to "squash" him, he rolled out form beneath the screen to appear in front of us, a lean, still rather boyish figure in black. "I introduce you my solo," he said. We then heard his recorded voice go on to specify his aim to "reveal aspects of myself," continuing with some unfortunate self-deprecating musings: "I find it difficult to interpret myself. It is an interesting challenge, even if it is in vain." This was followed by a rather wan plea for the audience to be supportive.

As the recorded narrator told us that the "solo is inherently autobiographical," Decouflé sat at a table at stage left and placed a series of childhood his sweetly simple but rather dull accompanying explanations, were not well integrated into the rest of the evening.

Most of that consisted of Decouflé moving through clear, uncomplicated shapes alongside — or one could say in contrast to — altered and amplified images on the screen, some of them magical and dazzling. One could see an unobtrusive man with a video camera shifting positions just below the stage, so presumably some, if not all, the video material was being generated at the moment. When he introduced what he described as a tribute to Busby Berkeley, dozens of silhouettes moved behind him, rippling endlessly back into infinity. For a few minutes, the visuals and their disorienting magic created a complete theatrical event.

But too often, the evening proceeded with an awkward abruptness and lacked a throughline. Decouflé made simple costume changes (from black to white, at times wearing trunks, then back to pants) offstage, but at one point opted for an assisted costume change onstage, smiling somewhat apologetically. One sensed a subdued charm that did not fully emerge in performance, and a touch of uneasiness about the venture as a whole. But perhaps that is all part of the autobiographic picture he was presenting to us. For years, he had preferred to be the mastermind behind the scene, while others embodied his visions on stage.

Seated unobtrusively at stage right, Joachim Latarjet provided intriguing sounds on trombone and what sounded like mandolin. Recorded material was interspersed with the live sounds, ranging form what seemed to be dialog from French films to Billie Holiday singing "In My Solitude." Decouflé's ambiguity about his own not-quite-solitude on stage — the word "doubt" in his title, after all — came through clearly.

Photos are by Arnold Groeschel.

Volume 5, No. 11
March 19, 2007
copyright ©2007 by Susan Reiter
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