Theatre Zingaro – Chimère

Chimère 1995

The most amazing thing about Bartabas is that he exists at all.

Having invented himself and his Théâtre Zingaro, Bartabas has now created an art form that is as unique as the man himself.

In the past the horse has always been an object of fascination for the sculptor, the painter, even the poet. Indeed the great écuyer of the nineteenth century, François Baucher attracted many of the Paris glitterati of his day to his performances of High School, and divided the artistic world of the day with his ‘war’ with his great rival the Comte d’Aure.

But what Baucher did was simply ride his horses. Ride them superbly, Ride them artistically no doubt, perhaps even with a little music to heighten the ambience, but essentially the audience was there to witness a display of horsemanship.

Bartabas has gone far beyond that with the Théâtre Zingaro.

What he has done is to build a new equestrian based art form that is more like opera than traditional displays of riding and training technique. And as each new production unfolds, it would appear that Bartabas is inviting us to join him on a voyage of self-discovery, and on each occasion the relationship between man and horse is crucial.

Chimère is a journey of growth as much as self-discovery. Gone is the rampant, rambustuous clown of the first production; gone the smouldering power and machisimo of the second, and in this his latest production – Chimère – the Paris based horseman has aspired to and achieved a new dimension of refinement and spirituality.

In its major review of this year’s Avignon festival, Europe’s most influential English language newspaper, the International Herald Tribune devoted second highest billing to the new production of the Théâtre Zingaro’s latest production, Chimère. And followed that up with a lead article on the new circuses of France, featuring a photo of Bartabas from Chimère.

We caught up with Bartabas’ latest offering at Avignon. As is usual with Zingaro performances, the tension starts to build even before the performance begins, the spectators crowded at the entrances, waiting (at times not too patiently) to be admitted. Finally we throng to our seats, an hypnotic pounding ringing, and there is the first of the surprises of the night… for the centre of the circus ring has been turned into a pool, little horse statues stand in the water, a floating candle burning bright beside each one. The first of the key colours – blue – has been introduced, and the places on the band stand taken by the musicians from Rajasthan.

For Bartabas, music has always played a key role in his productions, the music is no background score, and it is a critical element in the unfolding dialetic of each piece. From the wild gypsy sounds on the first production, to the dialogue between the Berber women and the male voice choir from Georgia in the second, now Bartabas has turned to the ancient and mystical sounds of India’s northeast, to Rajasthan.

A beautiful woman in a sari gathers the little statues and takes them away, when she returns, as if by magic the little lighted candles are drawn to her, dashing across the water. She blows them out one by one. Opposite the Rajasthani musicians, a percussionist and his assistant and producing yet another of the elements on their wind machines. Fire, water, and wind…

Bartabas rides in, slimmer, almost frail looking, clad in black, sitting head bowed on his chestnut horse in the middle of the pool, saluting the maiden – the odyssey is about to begin.

And if the complexity of the subject matter increases with each production, it is also true that the quality of the horse work continues to grow.

Riding a young bay Alter Real stallion, Bartabas alternates some very fine rhythmic passage with a spectacular extended trot.

Still there are a few of the old favourites.

The little black hackney stallion bad temperedly chasing his master – the golden stallion first being chased by, then chasing his dusky princess in a courtship that is as charming as it is gentle…

The trick riding is as wild, and literally death defying as ever (you really cannot believe how many risks these riders take), and the voltage is as athletic and as spectacular as you could hope to imagine (the vaulters make good use of the pool in the centre of the ring, turning cartwheels through it at regular intervals, the water performing its own aerodynamic fantasies.) The Indian colours perfume the costumes, the bright pink and green to join the blue of the pool, everything has a lighter, subtler feel to it, even the humour.

The percussionist leaves his airy perch to join Bartabas and his black Lusitano, in the ring, and the old, portly man waddles like a delighted duck as he infiltrates his subtle rhythms into the stride of the stallion. And yes, the old man ‘canters’ through the pool to the horse, and canters backwards to his side – the challenge is thrown down – and yes, the horse canters across to him, canters for a while on the spot, then canters backwards through the water! It must be confessed that on the night I saw Chimère the strides of the canter to the rear were not as defined as I remember them on dry land in the previous production but it remains an extraordinary feat.

However the canter to the rear is not the show-stopping climax of previous shows. In this lighter, more ethereal tale, Bartabas has a new act for us when he rides a grey Spanish stallion with no reins at all (there is perhaps just a tiny attachment of the reins to the rider’s belt but to notice would be churlish) and now we see the full extent of the physical transformation of Bartabas.

In his last show, if you pulled the black stallion from between his legs, and substituted a Harley Davidson ‘fat boy,’ Bartabas would have certainly looked the biker part – now he is waving his hands through the air as if flying, curving his body from side to side with the grace of a dancer, it is a wonderful magical very special moment.

But something is missing. The show has almost finished and we have yet to see the proud stallion that gave the troupe its name – in he comes,.. Zingaro! Black, proud, running free around the pool. Gone though are Zingaro’s attempts to savage Bartabas, or Bartabas’ attempts to savage Zingaro (or for that matter, Bartabas’ tendency to leap lasciviously into the lap of any lady foolhardy enough to sit in the front row!). No, the great black horse has lowered himself peacefully so he is sitting in the little lake, reflecting no doubt on the transitory nature of being and non-being – and on the other side of the lake, his old friend, Bartabas also sits contemplating this, his personal chimera.

Two old monks meditating at the water.

Two Rajastani musicians take centre stage, singing a final duet… floating on little platforms in the centre of the water. Then all is dark. The lights come up, the cast waves and smiles to the audience that frantically signals its appreciation, but in the middle of it all, Bartabas, the creator, stands, head bowed, strangely withdrawn.

All is illusion… the master has taken yet another step along the path of life.

The Interview: Chimère 1995

The suburb of d’Aubervilliers doesn’t feature in the tourist guides. It’s a slightly grubby suburb on the north east of Paris, and the most unlikely spot to be home to a troupe of artistes who have set European intellectual circles ablaze with a unique melange of circus, opera, gymnastics and philosophy.

Not that the Theatre Zingaro is the property the Parisian intellectual, the round arena is packed out, five nights a week with patrons, and always standing outside, there are at least a couple of hopeful individuals holding their little cardboard signs, je voudrais achete…

And the other six months of the year, Zingaro packs out houses at the most prestigious of festivals – Milan, Antwerp, Avignon, and soon, it would seem, New York and Tokyo.
The Theatre Zingaro is a phenomenon, and more than that, the culmination of the dream of one very exceptional individual, Bartabas.

Bartabas seldom offers biographical details. When the Theatre Zingaro was first formed there were those who ridiculed him for assuming a gypsy (zingaro = male gypsy) persona he was not heir to – in truth the tall dark horseman is most proud of the fact that none of the forty five persons who live in the little wagons on his most unlikely of encampments are from either a gypsy or circus background. On the contrary, they have chosen freedom, assumed the life of a nomad, for themselves.

Bartabas was, he tells me, almost as an aside, once a jockey, riding horses in jumping races. He had a very bad fall, and rather than go to a rehab unit, had himself assigned to a program of dance to regain the use of his body. The ex-jockey with his two horses, and two other artistes (one with a troupe of performing rats) joined the crowded ranks of the little circuses who ply their wares in the villages and towns of France. But Bartabas was no ordinary strolling player.

Ten years ago, he formed Zingaro – named after the handsome black Friesian stallion who still occupies the heart of every performance. Seven years ago, France’s minister of culture, Jack Lang, was so impressed that the State, along with the local council, joined forces to create a special home for Bartabas in d’Aubervilliers. Incongruously set next to the six lane highway, the façade of a village clusters around the metal sign – Zingaro – and surrounds the courtyard in front of the barn which houses the horses and the caravans of the company.

The first Zingaro performance was a boisterous cabaret, with comic waiters juggling trays of drinks to a blaze of wild gypsy strings, but right from the start the horse work was dazzling.
Not since the great Écuyer of the nineteenth century, Baucher, had set the Romantics and the Realists at loggerheads over the virtues or otherwise of his hippological performances (and his intellectual war with his great rival Comte d’Aure) had Paris seen such a prodigy, and like Baucher, Bartabas quickly captured the imagination of the city.

Now the man and his company are firmly established, and we are lucky since we seem to be about the only equestrian magazine granted the favour of interviews.

“The other magazines did not want to know about me when I started, now I do not want to know about them… unless they want to put me on the cover…”

There is a twinkle in Bartabas’ eye. For all his formidable persona, he really is a very gentle person. Over lunch in the little bistro across the road from his base, Bartabas talks about his latest, and most successful production, Chimère.

Where did you get the idea of using the music of India – of the people of Rajasthan?

“It is the origin of the nomadic music. The opal of Rajasthan is the original gypsy, the zingaro. For the past ten years, all the music of our performances has been this kind of music, music of the oral tradition, the music of the nomads. So now we were going to the origin of that music.”

“When I do a performance I just ask myself two or three questions. The questions for Chimère, were India, Water and Don Quixote. Those were the three questions I was working on, but those questions are just pretexts. For me in the performances, it is always about the relationship between human beings and the horse. India, the music, it’s a pretext, it’s important of course, it is the context of the performance, but the real work is the evolution of that relationship, from the beginning, it has been about what I can show of that relationship of man and horse, that is more important than the story of the performance.”

“The more I work, the more I think, what is the significance of someone who gives his life to working with horses? What does it mean for an artist – even a horse is an animal, so what does it mean to give your life to an animal?”

“The more I work the more I feel that to speak about the relationship of horse and man is to speak about the relationships between people themselves. The way you work a horse, is the way you are. Now I am more and more interested not in showing performance – to show the extraordinary things I can do. I am not so interested to show how we ride well, how we are good, how we can do fantastic things – that’s not my interest now. My interest now is to find the inside, the things that are before and after the moment – the moment is just a pretext, and just before and just after is what is interesting – the little details that give the humanity of the performance. The pretext is our work, that is usual.”

“When you work, if you play music, you play music well, or if you ride horses, to ride well is normal for me, it is the minimum. When you do a job, you have to do it well, so that is not my preoccupation now. The idea will be that the horse can give emotion.”

“This performance – Chimère – is more inside, and the next performance will be even more in this direction, always more inside.”

You have already started to plan a new performance?

“I do not yet have the story but I have the idea of the direction of the work, the spirit… I don’t know exactly what I will speak about but I know the way I want to show it. For me what is important with Chimère is the evolution, that now Chimère is a very big success, but I needed ten years to do Chimère. If I was able to do it as the first performance of Zingaro, ten years ago, then maybe it would not be appreciated by the public, it was very important that they first saw the other two performances so they could appreciate Chimère, so they could understand that this was more interior. Maybe if this had been the first one I did, maybe, I am not sure, maybe not so many people would have come.”

“The original aim of Zingaro is that I bring the public to an appreciation that is more difficult, more refined, but I bring ALL the public to that, for me that is very important, not only the intellectual, for me it’s important that for all the public Zingaro is growing, and going in the direction I want. So I have to go slowly. If tomorrow I do a spectacle really very pure then it is possible that the public will not recognise the performance, you have to bring them little by little to a show which is more difficult, less complaisance.”

“The very first Zingaro – I like it – but it was the cabaret, it was more complaisant, the clowns, it was easy – but Chimère is more important… it is easy to look at of course, but it brings to the public things that are more important, more inside, a reflection more and more…”

And yet the audience seems to understand Chimère immediately, and appreciate it greatly?

“Yes, more than the other two. Each performance the people like it better, it is growing and for me that is important.”

Ten years ago when you started Zingaro, did you have such a clear idea of your direction?

“It is the same as my thoughts on the next performance. I did not have a clear idea of what it would be, but I had the idea of my way – not my way of saying ‘I want to do that’ – but knowing the direction I wanted to work. I don’t know what it is going to be. Maybe the end of my work might be for example, if I continue my research, maybe I will finish along with five horses (laughs) without a performance, sometimes showing something for ten minutes to a friend… maybe.”

“I don’t know what I am going to do. The horse will say to me what I am going to do in ten years, they will decide. What I have known from the beginning is that there is something there to find in the way to work the horse. Even with Chimère, I consider that I am only at the very beginning of my work. I consider that we can do very much more.”

“The horse is a strict actor, it is an animal that is not intelligent, it is there. If intelligence is the notion of ourselves in the universe, then only the human being has this notion, only the human being knows that when they are born they are going to die in sixty, or eighty or one hundred years time. The animal doesn’t know that, so you can’t speak about intelligence, but you can speak about feeling. The animal has feelings stronger than human beings, they feel things that human beings are not able to feel, or are not able to feel now – maybe they were able to feel it years and years ago when we were more close to nature.”

“Horses are very interesting to work with in the theatre. They are very just, they are there at the moment, they can’t play a role, they are of the moment – that’s why the comedian says he does not want to appear with children or animals, because children and animals are always good, they are here, and they are what they are.”

“There is much work to be done to investigate horses, to investigate how they feel the tension. We don’t know how the horse sees, if they see in black and white, if they see bigger. There is theory, but we don’t know how animals see, because we are not in their minds we cannot say. What I do know is that the horse can recognize you not by your physical appearance, but by the energy you have around you. I’m not talking about every horse that you pass in the street, but the horse with which you have a regular relationship, if you work every day with a horse then one morning you are not happy in your mind, you are not well, perhaps someone has died in your family, but you still have to work, so you set out to work. I do my training like any other day and from outside I am normal, you do the same movements that you do every day – but the horse will always quickly see that you are not normal. It depends on his personality how he will react – some horses will seize the opportunity to do things then, or he will be sad too. He feels that, but another human being will not see it. He will say ‘Oh I saw him this morning, he said hello and he was normal’. It is very important for the theatre that the horse can feel these things, because you can work on the energy, not on the appearance.”

Can you tell me a little bit about the grey stallion that you ride with no hands in Chimère?

“Like all my horses, all the ideas for work come from the horse – the origin. For a long time, I have always felt that it is not possible to speak on a horse, or act on a horse because what is beautiful is the notion of man and the horse as a couple, and the more the rider doesn’t exist, the more you are part of him, the more beautiful it is. But with this horse, I feel the necessity to move, because the horse moves in such a way that requires my movements – not in a technical way, it is quite difficult but not very difficult. The notion of difficulty is not for me a notion, because what is difficult for me is maybe not difficult for another. For me to run one hundred metres very quickly is very difficult – for Carl Lewis, it is not difficult. For me to work with horse is not difficult, for another it will be difficult. I don’t like to talk about how this movement is difficult, or this horse is the only horse in the world that can do this. Sometimes this is true but it is not for me the most important thing, the most important thing is that you feel with this horse and its given emotion.”

“I can do the same movements that I do on the grey horse on my black horses, I can do it, technically I can do it but it makes no sense, the black horse he is very straight in his movement, it is not right, it is not interesting – the idea of the performance is not developed like that, saying, I will do this with this horse. Working with the grey horse it comes from him, I can do this with him, not to do it technically, it is what is good for this horse. His name is Vinegar, he is a Portuguese Lusitano, I have had him for seven years now. He was not in the second performance because I worked with only black horses in that performance. When he came to me he was crazy, he was a five year old, you could ride him quite well but he was eating all the other horses. Very aggressive with the other horses, but after five or six months with us, he was all right but the first five or six months he was trying to eat the others. He is still very nervous, he is a horse that loses ability in performance – what you see in the performance is half of what he can do. When I work him in practice he is at his very very best. He grows tense in a performance. It is the character of the horse. There are some who are better in the performance than they are in the morning in the practice.”

Our lunch arrives, it is time to turn off the tape, to eat and make our farewells, but the story of Bartabas and his Theatre Zingaro is a story that goes on and on…