logo

But then the French take these things seriously

Posted by admin   ·     ·   Jump to comments

But then, the French take these things seriously.Decoufle makes films Decoufle makes dance. Decoufle went to circus school, and he's got a thing about 1950s superhero comics. In , he scoops all these elements into a jumbly heap, and throws in a bit of cinema history for good measure. This stands for Danse Compagnie d'Art - a rather po-faced name for an outfit that draws its themes from circus and cartoon culture. Switch on either of the state-owned TV channels and you see him in rubber- limbed dance mode pretty well once an hour. Each time the adverts come on, so does Decoufle - in tiny vignettes of choreography performed by him or the dancers who form his company, DCA. Shazam! Theater Carre, Amsterdam TrabouleHighbury Fields, LondonThe name Philippe Decoufle may not ring any bells here, but in France, the film-maker-dancer-director is known to every couch potato.

He says he can pierce the outer skin of a water- melon with a playing card Well, naturally, that's his job. Only once did I glimpse the shadow of a card moving across the back of his palm.Ricky Jay and his director David Mamet are well aware that we expect everything to go right They keep pretending its going wrong Jay takes a dozen throws at the melon Card after card ricochets into the audience He looks exhausted. We are enthralled.`': Bush W12 (0181 743 3388) to Sat; `The Tower Project': Euston Tower, NW1 (0171 638 8891) ends today; `Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants': Old Vic, SE1 (0171 928 7616) to 17 July. The audience realises that here is a man who can pluck any card that they are thinking of out of any place on the set. We surrender ourselves to the fact that we are in the presence of omnipotence.The guy says he can throw a card 90 yards Well, of course he can, we think, he's Ricky Jay.

Pretty quickly, his extraordinary level of skill becomes the norm. The experience is eerie and powerful.In Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants the world's master sleight-of-hand artist gives himself a small problem. To give away only one example: a fax machine sits in the middle of an empty room spewing out a roll of paper into an ever increasing heap. You examine the writing and see that it's the text of Paradise Lost. You move at your own pace from one room to the next (some people take 20 minutes, some take two hours); as you do so, you piece together the clues that Warner has laid. After you've travelled up 30 floors, you're not surprised to see terrific views when you get there.But it's the juxtaposition of what you expect to see in the deserted offices - desks, swivel chairs, old filing cabinets - with the sudden, sometimes surreal creations that Warner has introduced that gives the project its uniqueness.

readers comments

Comments are closed.

NBA

NBA

MLB

MLB

NFL

NFL

NHL

NHL

WWE

WWE

Your sideblock text goes here