[Classifieds] Ondine productions presents "The Leatherette Couch at Saint Owen’s Gate"

[MBL Classifieds]

[cid:02d0d811-2f4d-45fb-9f2f-aad095eb719c]Ondine productions presents The Leatherette Couch at Saint Owen’s Gate,

solo music theater by Eugenie Kuffler. Friday & Saturday, August 23 & 24 2019 at 8 pm at the Woods Hole Community Hall, 68 Water Street, Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Tickets $15. Reservations :  (508) 548-4659.


The leatherette couch is a metaphor for a refuge. This particular couch has been abandoned on the sidewalk at the Porte de Saint Ouen (Saint Owen’s Gate) at the edge of Paris. It offers a resting place to the itinerant artist and precipitates the 1st of her ethno-poetic chronicles.


This piece juxtaposes 2 characters – Jean de La Bruyère, the 17th century French moralist and a contemporary French/American performer. Between 1670 until his death in 1694, La Bruyère wrote, published and revised «The Characters or the Mores of this century», a popular success which went through 8 editions. Since 1980, the performer has been noting her adventures and reflections in «The Barbès Notebooks».


Many of the 1120 remarks in the last version of «The Characters» are scathing critiques of the court of the Duke of Condé where La Bruyère served as preceptor to the Duke’s son, other remarks concern the creative process, give advice or impart philosophy. Those included in «The leatherette couch at Saint Owen’s Gate» seemed particularly relevant to the contemporary performer, their incisive language offer strong principles to one who has learned to adapt to innumerable situations through mobility, invisibility, observation, silence and improvisation, her stories wrap themselves around La Bruyère’s moral pillars, like dream states around telephone poles.


La Bruyère’s formal literary style, baroque gestures and courtly manners contrast with the colloquial words, manners and supple corporal expression of the performer, but moments of meditative audible breathing and an eclectic choice of music provide transitions between the realms of the 2 protagonists which converge in the last scene – Paradise Rock. La Bruyère’s remark #38, Chapter XI – Of Man, concerns death, time and the infinite.

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Press Release - The Leatherette Couch at Saint Owen’s Gate…

Biography

Eugenie Kuffler was born in 1949 in Baltimore, in 1967 she moved to Paris where she studied composition with Nadia Boulanger, flute with Alain Marion, electro-acoustical tape music at the GRM-Paris Conservatory. She was a member of the composer-performer collective – the GERM, co-founder of the avant-garde cabaret ensemble – 010, member of the 4 women ensemble – Hot Chills, is presently participating in the poets’ collective – Les Toboggans poétiques. She has composed radio works for France Musique and France Culture, for solo flute, for small instrumental and vocal ensembles. In 1998 she formed the music-theater troupe Conexión Habana and with them until 2007, performed 6 chapters of Etno Poesía Cuba in Havana and Santiago de Cuba. «The leatherette couch at Saint Owen’s Gate» will be her 21st consecutive annual performance at the Woods Hole Community Hall.


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