DTF review | Corps Diplomatique: a good gag that takes light years to land

Corps Diplomatique

Project Arts Centre

***

Selected to undertake a deep-space mission lasting several hundred thousand years, the team charged with developing and performing a show for distant life forms beyond our galaxy might not be especially well qualified for the job, but they are willing to improvise.

As a curious journalist (Arnaud Boulogne) inspects the Jean Villar module, a cluttered white capsule of blinking devices that opens out conveniently into a multipurpose performance space, he finds a contentedly amateur crew ready to slip the surly bonds of theatrical history in order to evolve bold new forms. This they will achieve with digital display banners, a crash course in Lincos, some queasy sound effects, a flute and a huge reverberant gong. Naturally, the journalist decides to join them.

Halory Goerger’s satirical sci-fi is a decidedly in-jokey affair. As Boulogne marvels at the sturdy artificial gravity of the module, the ship captain (Goerger) responds, “Weightlessness doesn’t work well with the performing arts.” As his show progresses, light as gossamer, it becomes hard to disagree. A set up of needlessly elaborate detail cedes eventually – and quite amusingly – to a dejected crew having abandoned all interest in the mission before they’ve even reached Mars. The bright utopian vision and radical impulse to discover new forms for an audience better disposed to alternative performance is undone by the base instincts of human nature: to get wasted.

With the meanders of a work developed through lengthy improvisation, Goerger’s production has some spryly engaging moments, such as the surly protest of Dominique Gilliot’s teenage clone complaining, “You’re not my stem!” But it has as many torpid stretches that make the enterprise itself seem just as adrift. When the crew dismiss all record of human culture, relying instead on “just our brains, slated to evolve”, Goerger may be indicting the hubris of both philistines and revolutionaries (the names of theatrical path breakers adorning the ship, from Brecht to Chéreau to Wilson, are all quickly forgotten). But it’s hard to know what else we should expect from sending goofballs into space. Salvaged by a ludic performance of distorted religious ritual, the production’s one sustaining joke is that theatre’s end point could well resemble its beginning. It’s a clever gag, but it takes several thousand light years to get there.

Until October 3rd