From La Mexicaine
If ever a city has had cause to boast about its artistic underground, it must be Paris. Beneath the city lie the catacombs, a series of historic, interconnected tunnels housing the bodies of thousands of dead and, occasionally, the bodies of the living — squatters and thrill-seekers known as cataphiles, who are pursued by groups of special police called cataflics.
In 2004, a cataphile group calling itself La Mexicaine De Perforation (The Perforating Mexicans) built a movie theatre across (and under) the Seine River from the Eiffel Tower, calling their improvised space Les Arènes de Chaillot (The Chaillot Arenas). During the summer, the group managed the space, serving food and alcohol, even contributing to the city’s Urbex Movies festival, until a group of policemen on a training exercise stumbled on the empty venue. When the cataflics returned three days later intent on arresting the offending parties, they found the theatre deserted and a note reading simply: “Do not try to find us.”
Now, backed by the high drama of Paris’s basement, a trio of performers and their director are stitching together text and physical theatre to create their own version of Paris’s catacomb subculture. With a company debut by Trepan Theatre and a four-month Canadian tour, Aaron Coates, Cheryl Hutton and Rev Lowes are set to delve into the Parisian catacombs with La Mexicaine De Perforation.
Like the story that inspired its name, La Mexicaine De Perforation began in Paris. While attending L’École Philippe Gaulier, a 28-year-old institution of clown and physical performance, local performers and spouses Aaron Coates and Cheryl Hutton met Rew Lowe, a member of the U.K.’s AITHERIOS Theatre, which is also co-producing the show.
After batting around ideas for a collaboration, the trio eventually settled on a dark, multi-role piece built around a collaborative script and the physical theatre principles they’d learned at Gaulier’s knee, adding the insight of their director, local artist Nathan Pronyshyn.
“The first week was very much about opening different ways of working physically,” Lowe explains of their creation process. “We were looking at the script and deciding, ‘Maybe we can approach this using acrobatics, or from clown.’ It’s about finding avenues where we met… and felt it had the right kind of vibe.
“But it’s not as categorical as that might sound,” he adds. “It’s a case of establishing a language and skill set that we feel comfortable in using and establishing boundaries in which three performers and four collaborators meet and have a spark, a magic and a lightness, and then applying that.”
Beyond its rehearsals, the show will also include improvisation each night, with sections left open to audience reaction. The production’s Canadian tour will also let it continually evolve, with stops in Innisfail, Regina, Swift Current, Saskatoon, Wells and Vancouver. It’s an open experience that Coates, an experienced Calgary playwright and director, looks forward to.
“So many shows throughout the theatre season go up and then they cease to exist,” he says. “I know I’ve had rewarding experiences with my own work directing the same show four or five times. Each time I felt it grew. There are things you only discover when you’ve done the play 100 times, and I think it’s a great luxury that we have, and I think that will give it strength.”
“And to perform to a variety of audiences,” adds Lowe. “(AITHERIOS has performed in) Paris and London, which are very different than Wells or Tyvern (Hutton’s hometown in Saskatchewan).”
Incorporating the play’s experience has already played a major role for the young company after an unexpected contact gave the play a fresh impetus. Reached by representatives of La Mexicaine De Perforation, Trepan Theatre was told in no uncertain terms that the Parisian group didn’t take kindly to its name being used and, further, was prepared to take legal action. “So we’ve been having a wonderfully charming and at the same time hostile exchange about the show,” says Coates with a smile.
“We’ve received some e-mails that can be construed in several ways,” says Lowe. “Which are both typically French and perhaps of this group. There seems to be money connections and a fair amount of balls. They wrote to us that we’d mistranslated the note, which read “nous ne cherche pas,” which they intended to mean, ‘Do not push your luck.’ So we’re not quite sure where we are.”
The reason the group objects to the show, notes Hutton, is that it refuses to charge money for its events, including its contributions to the Urbex Movies festival. But if an ensemble of collaborating Canadian and U.K. artists are breaking the mores of anarchistic Parisians, Coates points out that at least one stark artistic reality remains constant across continents. “As theatre artists, in the best circumstances we tend to starve,” he says. “Even if we do well.”
