P:IES Alain Buffard ( France )
(Not) a Love Song
UK Premiere

Friday 19 October
8pm
Sandfield Theatre
£9.00 / £7.00 Conc.
Duration: 60min

In an immaculate white space, three charismatic performers, dressed from head to toe in Chanel and Christian Lacroix, strike a pose. The musical genre is explored and subverted as two female ‘actors' on a slow decline into obscurity, accompanied on stage by a male ‘supporting actor', give us untold pleasure as they astound us with their skills as chanteurs. You may recognise many moments of inspiration in the creation of this piece, including – Wilder's Sunset Boulevard and Fassbinder's Veronika Vossr . With a soundscore performed live on stage, taking us from Massenet to Lou Reed via some Nina Simone, this is certainly not a musical in the traditional sense but it has the sensibility, charm and longing of many a love song...

“One has to acknowledge in Buffard a talent for directing that compares to none in France today. (Not) a Love Song, both scholarly and tragic, looks like this dream juke-box of our YouTube years.”
Les Inrockuptibles (France)

Co-production : Festival Montpellier Danse 2007, Festival d'Automne – Paris, Les Spectacles vivants - Centre Pompidou, Paris, Centre chorégraphique national de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon – programme ReRc, Centre de Développement Chorégraphique de Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées (accueil studio), L'échangeur – Fère en Tardenois , Tanzquartier – Vienna.

With the support of la Ménagerie de Verre / Studiolab (Paris) Bonlieu / scène nationale d'Annecy, Pôle Sud à Strasbourg, the French Embassy in London (UK) and Cultures France.
PI:ES is subsidized by the Ministry of Culture in France

nottdance is supported by the Institut Français du Royaume – Uni, London (French Cultural Institute in the UK ) and Cultures France

Alain Buffard

“For several years now I have dreamed of taking on the difficult genre of the musical. My reference was of course the giant Hollywood productions, but the rampant use of clichéd, overly conventional plot devices bored me, they were so bland, so predictable, so dime-store novel. With this project I intended to contaminate the musical and dramatic codes of the genre, using my own resources and sources, my personal mix of music and emotional and aesthetic nuance. (Not) a Love Song is our exploration of a new cinematic material (channeling Wilder's Sunset Boulevard and Fassbinder's Veronika Vossr), where the memory of the poses, the lighting, the voices, the gestures, the whole camp scene in which the artifice coalesces into a new genre: the musical tragedy.

So the songs will in part support the plot as well as the three characters who will be emerging from our collective cinematographic memories. Relationships, sadistic, co-dependent, passionate, develop in this drama dealing with the loss of the object of one's love and the loss of identity. The actresses' ageing cannot be confused with the loss of another object of love only because their own identities flicker slightly as they are reflected in what has been their profession, their art, in a multiple series of reflections. These are the themes feeding cinema, powering show business, serving as a metaphor for our condition, where a fascination with one's own double unfolds more freely and openly than in the real world. The rollicking interchanging of identities reinforces the derealising spiral of the piece. This is why I was compelled to find artistically rich, complex, versatile, polymorphic performers for this work.

At Danspace in New York , performing Mauvais genre, I met Miguel Gutierrez, whose presence and strength as an actor made him an obvious choice for this project. He breaks and twists the dancer's codes with a brilliant nonchalance and impertinence and his talent as a singer (he is also a backup singer for Anthony and the Johnsons) will add much to the piece.

We know Vera Mantero as both a choreographer and a talented improvisational artist, but she is also an excellent singer. Her covers of songs by Caetano Veloso and various jazz standards have been received with great success. The flowing elastic mobility of her face and body will silence any niggling questions of genre which may come up in reference to this piece.

Claudia Triozzi is a performance artist as well as an incomparable singer whose technique allows her to leap through the most complex vocal hoops. Her exuberant, adventurous approach is exactly right for a project both Doris Day and Annie Cordy would have turned down. And of course to work together again gives us the opportunity not to look back at our past but to again risk throwing the dice of our future.

The qualities and particularities of each of these performers will contribute greatly to the development of the story – rather than following the structure of a specific film, we will be inspired by certain scenes we have pre-selected. One of them will be the impressive face off between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in Whatever happened to Baby Jane? or the scene from Robert Aldrich's The Killing of Sister George, in which Beryl Reid tells her girlfriend that her character in a BBC soap opera is going to be killed off in the next episode. (Not) a Love Song will take on the ideas and feelings from these and other losses”.

Alain Buffard
Paris, September 2006
www.alainbuffard.eu