“La Ronde” is a world of your own making, cued by voices in your ears and paths on the floor of the Goffe Street Armory building in New Haven.
The performance, created by the French theater troupe Projet In Situ for an audience of one person at a time, is conducted via Samsung cell phones. Gentle voices direct you down the long corridors of the massive Goffe Street Armory building in New Haven, which for the past three years has been a key component of the city’s annual City Wide Open Studios event.
“La Ronde” opened when the Armory was largely empty. This weekend, the Armory is the setting (Oct. 15 & 16) for hundreds of artists displaying their work for “CWOS Armory Weekend.” The throngs of artists, and the display of thousands of pieces of art on the Armory walls, should change the “La Ronde” experience considerably.
There are three separate color-coded paths each audience member can take for “La Ronde,” each with four distinct stops. Eleven rooms of the Armory have been reserved for this peripatetic performance. Some locations overlap, but the recorded narratives differ. Each features a different voice — it could be a man, woman or child — relating their personal observations of the space you are in. You are putting yourself in the heads of these performers, and becoming the center of the performance. Sometimes you are able to exactly follow the actions being described in the audio track: opening a door, turning, sitting, looking out a window or under a counter. Other times, you simply listen.
“La Ronde” offers ample time to get from one location to the next, and expects that you will use this time for contemplation and reflection. It can lull you into a meditative state. When a programming glitch caused an interminable gap in my own journey, I simply read and wrote for 20 minutes in an empty room until I was convinced that something was amiss. Others might react differently.
Due to that technical difficulty, the rest of my journey was assisted by Projet In Situ’s co-artistic director Martin Chaput. Doing the walk solo is certainly preferable — anticipation and confusion are essential parts of the overall experience — but the co-creator’s low-key guidance led to an enlightening conversation with him and the company’s co-founder Martial Chazallon about the work’s conceptual boundaries and ultimate aims.
“By sensing a space, you can let your imagination go,” Chazallon said in a “backstage” office on the first floor of the vast Armory building. “It’s different for each person.” The audio narratives are not scripted — they’re the genuine initial reactions of those people to the spaces they’ve been asked to explore.
“La Ronde,” Chazallon claims, “Is about entering a relationship.” The piece has been performed around the world — as nearby as the Vermont Performance Lab in Guilford, Vt., or MASS MoCa in North Adams, Mass., and as far away at Seoul Arts space in South Korea. It has been done in “museums, town halls, libraries or any large building,” Chaput says. Each situation has been different from the others. Most of the locations used within the piece are not modified. What you see — or what you’re led to see by the voices — is what you get. “In other places, there may be carpets on the floor, or the building may be heated,” Chazallon says. That’s not the case in the Armory.
The New Haven production of “La Ronde” was organized by the International Festival of Arts & Ideas and is being co-presented by Artspace, that runs the monthlong City Wide Open Studios event of which “Amory Weekend” is a part. “La Ronde” was originally intended to run during the main Arts & Ideas festival in June at a different site, but that plan fell through.
Projet in Situ plans to keep staging “La Ronde” around the world as long as there is a demand for it.
“It is an ongoing process,” Martial Chazallon says. “It never really stops. There are always new volunteers, new artists, new spaces. Looking at things is creating things.”
PROJECT IN SITU’S “LA RONDE,” presented by the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in association with Artspace, continues through Sunday, Oct. 16 at the old New Haven Armory, 290 Goffe St., New Haven. Tickets are $15, $10 for Arts & Ideas members. Each performance is a solitary experience for one person only, and lasts for around 90 minutes. artidea.org.
