The premiere of the play “Two thousand twenty three” by Magi Maren took place in Paris

At the Les Abbesses theater in Montmartre, the second venue of the Théâtre de la Ville, the Paris premiere of the play “Two Thousand Twenty Three” by Magie Marin took place. Once the first sign of the new dance wave in France, who radically changed the European stage, and now a living legend, at 72 years old, the choreographer finally abandoned dance in favor of political theater. The accusations did not convince Maria Sidelnikova.

On the proscenium there is a blank, impenetrable wall. Each of its bricks is a name. Each name is synonymous with power and money. Arnault, Niel, Bettencourt, Pinault, Safra, Trump, Armani, Deripaska… and the list goes on from Beijing to Moscow. After a few minutes of deathly silence, allotted for reading, the wall will collapse with such fury that the soft pink walls of the theater will tremble, and with them the audience. This evening does not promise them any lyrics or anything abstract. In “Two Thousand Twenty Three” Magi Maren continues to pursue her revolutionary political line. Maren released the first series of an incriminating chronicle of the bourgeois world five years ago (see Kommersant, December 19, 2017). In it, she cursed consumer society and the “golden hundred” that stands behind it. This time, the theme chosen is another staple of capitalism – the media and the same manipulative billionaire bosses.

The wall collapsed. Young people dance in circles on its ruins. This won’t last at all, since they have no time for joy and dancing. Armed with pickaxes and lanterns, they will begin laying personalized bricks so that by the end the stage will turn into a cemetery with black marble slabs. If we discard the ritual appearances of a geisha doll, which has a shaggy animal muzzle instead of a head (the harmful influence of social networks, magazines, etc.), and in its hands a cartoonish fan of banknotes, the active swarming of these guys is the only continuous movement. Another reminder of Magi Maren’s glorious choreographic past is rhythm, which has always been the main nerve of her action. As in “Two Thousand and Seventeen,” it is driven by sounds and onomatopoeia, although they have become even more crude over the past five years. Music is heard only at the end, when the young revolutionaries, with a sense of accomplishment, put down their picks and begin to sing with the guitar.

Magi Maren does not hide the fact that her own body is no longer capable of speaking. But the artist’s duty calls, she considers it impermissible to make entertaining performances in our terrible times, so now she calls for the revolution in words, and not her own and not the most sparkling. The performance is composed of monologues by its performers. There are seven of them, they are from 23 to 30 years old, each wrote their own pamphlet and reads it out, supporting their accusatory speech with quotes from the damned media. They are broadcast by a cassette recorder – no new technology, of course.

The set of topics is standard for the younger generation of left-wing French: ecology, vokism, gender, police brutality, violence against women, etc. Geography – from Paris to Tunisia and Algeria. There are also anti-heroes for every taste – from President Macron and his ministers Sarah El-Airi and Gérald Dermanen to PR technology pioneer Edward Bernays; in the same company are all the media tycoons, from Bernard Arnault to Vincent Bolloré, their pocket journalists and sympathizers. The main characters of the performers are WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and former CIA employee, and now a resident of Russia, Edward Snowden. Today, not everyone and not everywhere can boast of the opportunity to publicly criticize the authorities and the existing order, and even from the stage of the city theater, therefore, as a phenomenon, “Two Thousand Twenty Three” deserves all sorts of praise. As a performance by Magi Maren, alas, no.

The child of refugee parents who fled from Franco’s Spain to Toulouse from the civil war, Magi Maren went through all the stages of classical ballet education – she was even trained by a Russian teacher in Paris, Nina Vyrubova. And in 1970 she entered the newly opened interdisciplinary school of Maurice Bejart Mudra – the most progressive that existed in Europe at that time in terms of dance. From there she joined the Bezharov troupe, and then, together with like-minded wise men, among whom was Dominique Bague, they created a group of theatrical experiments, thereby marking the beginning of a “new wave” of French dance – a powerful, heterogeneous phenomenon that has become smaller over the years. Magi Maren, nevertheless, all this time remained, if not on the crest of this wave, then definitely afloat. Her “May Be”, “Babel”, “Cinderella” became classics of the 20th century, a piercing look at modern man, full of grief and empathy and expressed not even in a unique dance style, but in the ability to turn the body into an image, always critical, apt, witty. The performances of her “golden fund of the 80s”, together with the successes of the new century, for example “Umwelt”, regularly return to European stages and still evoke mixed feelings of disgust and admiration. But never the awkwardness, predictability and boredom that accompanied Two Thousand Twenty-Three and forced the premiere audience – not young people, the French of Maren’s own generation, who grew up with it – to leave the hall in rows.