Brad Spurgeon's Blog

PARIS – Performing in front of the Pompidou Center last Sunday afternoon, I had my first taste of dancing in a choreography.  I feel often like the world’s worst dancer, and although music is at the center of my life, I hate dancing.  I love to watch fine dancers, I just feel that I cannot do it.  But the choreography on Sunday was in the form mostly of a kind of boxing movement, and we were in a big enough group that I felt I could fade into the mass and not be seen!  So why did I do such a thing in front of the famous Pompidou Center – and in front of several cameras filming it?

Simple:  I, like the other 14 or 15 people who took part in the performance – called “La 27ème heure” – was invited by Ornella Bonventre and her TAC Teatro, with which I have performed occasionally over the last couple of years.  Most importantly:  The event was designed to fight violence against women.  Another detail for why I participated was that in addition to the dance, I was told I could sing a song and play my guitar. So that gave me the inspiration to try the rest….

https://ellepi.zenfolio.com/blog/2019/5/27-me-heure

So it was that the 15 or so artists, musicians, dancers, actors, had been rehearsing for several weeks to put together this street action in defence of women’s rights.   Although it came months after the usual day of women’s rights, TAC Teatro, which is new in France after several years of success in Italy, has since 2011 put on events annually in support of women’s rights in the streets in Milan, and Ornella was keen to continue this TAC tradition in France, with no need to fit any particular anniversary date.

For this, she put together this team of performers not only from her own group of artists who take part in her TAC Teatro high-level Monday morning actors’ training sessions, but also joined forces with the prestigious ARTA (Association de Recherche des Traditions de l’Acteur) based at the Cartoucherie in Paris, part of the Théâtre du Soleil group.

And so commenced several weeks of artistic creation for the Pompidou performance. Very early on the street action transformed from the kind of spectator participation event that TAC usually does into a performance in which the spectators were just that – invited to enter mentally into the performance, if not physically or vocally – and based on a choreography directed by Philippe Ducou, of ARTA. Ornella and the other artists proposed texts related to women’s rights.  

In addition to her experience in performing street actions for women’s rights at TAC Teatro, Ornella also has frequently staged the “Vagina Monologues” of the author Eve Ensler, in Italy, in Italian.  So several of the spoken texts came from excerpts of the “Vagina Monologues,” and were performed in several languages – French, English, Romanian, Vietnamese.

Ornella gave the event the name “La 27ème heure,” or “The 27th hour,” after an Italian study that showed that women have days that consisted of 26 hours – to take care of their jobs, their homes, their children, their husbands, etc. – where men need only 24 hours. The 27th hour is the hour that the women should have to be free and do as they please, to escape from their burden however they wish.

In the end, we put on a 35-40 minute performance, ending with my singing of the 4 Non Blondes song “What’s Up!” as I circled the dancers and finally incited both the artists and the spectators to sing along.  Luca Papini, a Paris-based teacher, photographer and filmmaker – invited to the event by Ornella – made a 5-minute film of the performance and put it on his blog. It’s a fabulous tribute, and paints a beautiful picture of the event, so I am sharing the link to his blog item with the video.

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