Paradis - Unfolding Time at the Dance Theater Workshop

Paradis - Unfolding Time, written and directed by Pascal Rambert, at the Dance Theater Workshop from the 7 - 10 Dec 2005. Presented as part of the ACT FRENCH Festival.

To Pascal Rambert, the accumulated expulsions of Mankind, by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud, for starters, have essentially cast humans from the center of everything � from Eden, from Israel, now even from human reproduction. �We think of Paradise as long ago and Hell as present day,� Rambert says. �But the time will come when our kind will be seen as we see the Argonauts, as marvelous gods and giants.� Time is the subject of his Paradis, its raw material and main character.

Rambert seeks a new theatrical vocabulary, what he calls �real time writing,� a challenge to the centrality of text in dramatic presentation. �Paradis - Unfolding Time is an experiment in expelling the text, � he says. �Not eliminating it, but pushing it to the periphery,� just, as he sees it, as in life. Sixty percent of Paradis is written and rehearsed; it is up to the performers to find the rest, a sport requiring strength, agility and fierce concentration. �To bring reality into the theater without falling into realism,� Rambert admits, �that�s hard.�

Three flashes of lightning and the actors emerge from the audience, take the stage (a sort of black-curtained Pandora�s box), summarily undress, and enter into series of inter-dependent movements Rambert calls �tripods� in three-quarter time. Along the edge of a vast, untouchable space, on a carpet beneath a descending galaxy of lights, words, phrases, questions are considered and absorbed, passed from one actor to the next, accumulating meaning, defying narrative. What is theater? Writing? Love? Paradise? � �The beauty of writing lies in the unfolding of life,� Rambert says. �Each word is a world in itself.�