Ryan M. Davis

L’Effet de Serge by Philippe Quesne and Vivarium Studio, presented at 3LD Art and Technology Center. Under the Radar Festival, January 2010.

Behold Serge, just a taciturn guy with the mildest of manners and a penchant for t-shirts. His routine is an evening alone in front of the television with pizza for-one in his humdrum apartment. An improbable showman, but give him a closer look and that’s precisely what he turns out to be. This unassuming personality at the center of French theater director Philippe Quesne’s winsome piece L’Effet de Serge—which had its States-side premiere at the Under the Radar Festival in New York in January 2010—highlights the overlooked artistry of everyday realities.

Every Sunday at six o’clock, Serge (Gaëtan Vourc’h) stages miniature spectacles, each “one to three minutes in length,” for friends, neighbors, or whoever happens upon his messy rec-room. His “effects,” as he calls these brief pieces of performance art, are created with ordinary objects that clutter one corner of the stage and spill across the ping-pong table serving as his workshop in an otherwise barely furnished living space. The home electronics, remote-controlled helicopters, and glow-in-the-dark toys that delight him privately are the same stuff used to enchant his guests. Serge turns his guests’ attentions towards commonplace bagatelles and pedestrian gestures.

Cast in this new spotlight, the mundane things that usually don’t get much notice suddenly take on the color of profundity. In one show-stopping demonstration, Serge hops in the car parked outside his sliding glass door and rhythmically flashes its headlights while Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries” blasts from his boombox. It’s no Busby Berkeley extravaganza, but, in its own right, this little ballet of blinkers dazzles his surprised viewers. After completing his virtuosic turn behind the wheel, he returns modestly to his guests’ company. “I didn’t know a car could do that,” one dumbstruck spectator responds awkwardly. “It was so…heroic.”

Quesne’s endearing minimalist plot and staging are something of a Generation X evocation of avant-garde composer John Cage’s influential aesthetic, which—like Serge’s thoughtful presence in itself—asks us to be mindful of the little things that would otherwise zip by without so much as a blip on the radar. “The attitude I take is that everyday life is more interesting than forms of celebration, when we become aware of it,” said Cage, famously eschewing grandiose theatrics in his interview with Richard Schechner. “That when is when our intentions go down to zero. Then suddenly you notice that the world is magical.” With L’Effet de Serge, Quesne—whose career in the theater came by way of the visual arts (he studied graphic design at the Ecole Estienne and scenography at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris)—is likewise interested in the unexpected places where art can be discovered. Take, for example, the production’s unfussy scenic design. We encounter Serge in what seems like a slacker’s den: its only features are unadorned grey, rectilinear wall panels, a muted nylon carpet, and that pile of electronic playthings. Not exactly the Louvre or the Paris Opéra. But against this flavorless background the senses heighten and the lanky figure of Serge and his blinking Radio Shack gizmos pop—commanding appreciation from spectators onstage and off for his playful investigation of the smallest elements of life around him.

Gaëtan Vourc’h plays Serge with an understated physicality. Gingerly and exactly, without distracting over-expenditures of effort, the actor orchestrates his character’s petite offerings, like the craftsman of a ship in a bottle. In only one instance does Serge let the reins slip: when caught up in his own enjoyment of the simple things, dancing in the dark with a luminescent plastic lasso to a maudlin acoustic cover of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” he accidentally bloodies his nose on an open door. Otherwise, his markedly unhurried stride indicates neither indifference nor torpor, but rather, is the bearing of a man assured he will delight in anything along his way. The sort of gait that American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau called “sauntering.” A pace for smelling the roses, as it were.

Such easy movements are well matched by the dulcet tones of Vourc’h’s slight voice and deadpan delivery, which dress down the already casual dialogue. Expression in this play is spare and matter-of-fact—language serving the plain utility of pointing out things as they are. Frequent, disarmingly long silences, likewise, help to purify the aural landscape. As awkward as some of these extended silences may seem, such moments are not meant as meditations on the difficulty of interpersonal communication. They, more importantly, permit the most minute gesture or utterance to fill the room with its resonance. As moments that wipe the drama clean of its traditional artistic medium of language, they recall Cage’s 4’33”, which permitted other incidental sonic elements to determine the piece of art.

Because it is the mundane odds and ends of real life that usually get passed over without a second glance, Quesne focuses, throughout the piece, on objects that have the same concrete ontology on and off the stage. The show’s opening sequence features Vourc’h standing outside and looking in on his character Serge’s fictive world. In a spacesuit with a cartoonishly oversized, globular helmet, he combs the terrain of Serge’s apartment with the meticulous focus of a deep-space explorer in search of a rich discovery. Outside the sliding glass door of Serge’s own little microcosm, this astronaut Vourc’h explains, there is a world composed of endless corporate chain stores, restaurants, and entertainment megaplexes—Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, MacDonald’s, Kinko’s, etc.

In contrast, Vourc’h catalogues the personal effects throughout Serge’s environment, analyzing the simple, yet wondrous potential of each item that comes into view. “There’s a chair: if he wants to sit, he can sit. There’s a space: if he wants, he can walk around, or stand still. He can think of something.” Vourc’h probes CDs, fiddles with electronic equipment, crawls under the carpet, all to demonstrate what each thing is in itself. This registers with Cage’s worldview, which valorizes the objects of aesthetic attention as they are in themselves, not as symbolic beyond their own inherent features: "I love sounds just as they are, and I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are. I don’t want them to be psychological. I don’t want a sound to pretend that it’s a bucket, or that it’s President, or that it’s in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound."

All the props that litter the right corner of Serge’s room, like accoutrements of a David Belasco production, are material and functional—right down to the last can of Silly String. Nothing visible is simply representational set dressing—it is onstage what it is in the real world without standing for something else. Serge, himself something of a latter-day Cage and a theatrical avatar for Quesne’s own sensibilities, recognizes the sublime in the trivial and points to prosaic realities as opportunities for aesthetic experience.

Similarly, at the center of each of Serge’s performed “effects” is some empirically real event. He really flies a remote control helicopter. The headlights that he rhythmically flashes are on the front end of a fully functional automobile car. The mini-pyrotechnics, which go off for his finale when he touches a set of wires together, are definitely real. Over the course of the performance, the experiential reality of time, not just space, is also accentuated when a recording of Serge flatly saying, “Time goes by. Time goes by. Times goes by,” marks scene transitions.

Quesne’s company Vivarium Studios also makes a regular practice—in the fashion of fellow contemporary groups like Germany’s Rimini Protokoll or New York’s Nature Theater of Oklahoma—of making theatrical use of untrained “real people.” Here local amateurs serve as Serge’s onstage audience, silently observing or responding with their own simple lines to what they have just witnessed. They’re not playing characters; they simply perform the action of watching and reacting.

The pronounced theatricalism of Quesne’s piece—setting up Serge’s onstage audience as ideal spectators and further framing Serge’s little fetishes as art—is a move that Cage could appreciate. Just as main thrust of Cage’s work is that the essential act of musical performance is not producing music, but listening; so too, Quesne is concerned with the audience as the primary creators of the theatrical event. Most of the stage time is devoted not to Serge’s spectacles themselves, which by design are brief, but to his ritual of signaling the conditions of a proper performance as such. Though certainly an amateur, Serge is resolutely formal at the opening of each performance: his insistence on which door his guests enter by, on stowing coats, on offering refreshments, on arranging seats, and on announcing each piece’s title, is more meticulous than the main event. He transforms his casual onstage spectators into a bona fide audience.

As Serge redirects his onstage spectators’ attention to notice the possibilities of real life, he can’t help but reorient his larger audience toward the world outside the theater, prodding them to frame quotidian reality for itself as aesthetic experience. That is Serge’s titular effect. Newly sensitive to the aesthetic value inherent to everyday life, no matter how banal its objects and events may appear in the face of our culture’s multifarious consumerist distractions, the audience becomes self-sufficient. This resonates with Generation X’s casual disdain for authority and corporate culture, while hearkening back to Cage’s positivistic aesthetic—an alternative to our seemingly permanent condition of simulacral schizophrenia, unmoored from art’s material aura and set loose in a funhouse of hollow brand iconography. Living in a sort of theatrum mundi, Serge shows that the plain minutiae of reality are themselves as theatrically satisfying as any sensational entertainment and the neon signs of an over-franchised culture.

The artist is the center around which a community organizes itself, because it’s he who amalgamates them into an audience to the art object he asks them to consider. But art only exists because its public looks on with assent. After Serge’s climactic show, when the rest of his onstage audience has straggled out with a refreshed worldview, one young woman remains, quietly chewing her pizza across the room. It’s pizza for-two as Burt Bacharach’s “The Look of Love,” playing faintly on the junky old stereo, underscores the meek smile she shares with Serge. He’s wearing the new t-shirt she gave him when she arrived. There is the hint of an unspoken affection in the twitch of her cheek as she watches him with the same satisfied absorption that characterizes her spectatorship at one of Serge’s shows. In that moment, she sees that Serge is a small wonder in himself. Although he appears to be a dime-a-dozen fellow, in the right frame, he charms with extraordinary creative potential and startling rareness. Beauty is, after all, in the eye of the beholder.