Making Their Names in Mud

Too few of the pieces from the Festival d’Avignon manage to claw their way past customs and into New York. The Edinburgh Fringe gets 10 times the coverage in this country, since many of its cheap, tourable productions are panting for American exposure. Festival d’Avignon, though, despite being the Cannes of theater festivals, is relatively ignored here. What Stateside theater, struggling along on its nonprofit status, could afford to bring over those operatic, state-funded spectaculars?So the rare import “Paso Doble,” a splash in Festival d’Avignon 2006, is already welcome. With its two-man cast and 12-foot square set, its quickie 60-minute running time and sly sense of humor, it certainly comes travel sized.The “stage” is actually two slabs of clay — the floor red, the back wall covered in a white potter’s slip. Every performance makes a spectacular mess, with the creators flinging around clumps of clay and making free with an industrial hose. “Paso Doble” is as exuberant as a mud pie-making contest, but it manages a galleryready result.A collaboration between the Yugoslav choreographer Joseph Nadj and the Spanish artist Miquel Barceló, the show begins in silence. Almost imperceptibly, the canted back wall begins to bubble. Soon, the blisters pop, and we can see hands lurking in the resulting holes, like snakes in a burrow. When the black-suited Mr. Nadj and Mr. Barceló come stomping around the wall, however, we have had our last quiet image. With knees and fists, bats and spades and hollowed bamboo, they have at the clay with a vengeance.The clay will go where it’s pushed, so that strange, spiky stems stand up from the floor and Mr. Barceló can create a series of Gaudí-esque crenellations. They chop out a hole in the floor, fill it with water, and dump their tools in it like a bucket. They throw balls of clay around, and draw weird, vaguely animalistic shapes in its surface. Soon, though, they themselves become “canvases” — each takes a series of 3-foot-tall raw clay vases and drops them over his head. With some rudimentary slaps and punches, the vases become masks: heads for gods or monsters.The paso doble itself borrows its gestures from bullfighting, and so it’s only a matter of time before one of the half-monsters becomes a minotaur. Mr. Nadj, a crude red clay tube forming a paw on each hand, waits patiently while Mr. Barceló flings vase after vase at him. The wet amphorae collapse over his head in folds, amassing into a giant, primitive bull’s head. By the time Mr. Nadj has collapsed to his knees, he needs only the picador’s lances to finish him off. Naturally, Mr. Barceló provides the coup de grace with some oversize putty knives.These two aren’t the first to enjoy making a mess while dancing. Just in the last year, we have had a woman splashing through olive oil in Jan Fabre’s disposable “Quando l’uomo principale é una donna” and the director Rachel Cohen’s attempt to dress her actors in saltwater taffy. But in this case, mess isn’t the end goal; rather, we are audiences at the creation of a gigantic work of art. The two men may seem frenzied — Mr. Nadj flails at the wall with his elbows — but here the end (the last exciting image of overwritten, pummeled clay) is as consistent as the means.Mr. Barceló’s other work often concerns animalistic, sometimes fetishistic images. In his décor for a cathedral on his native Mallorca, he clotted the entire apse with white and cracked ceramic, studded with the occasional marine creature peeping through. “Paso Doble” peeks inside his process, or at least an expedited version of it, and the honest sweat of it is refreshing.But the performative elements are not as rewarding. The soundscape, an unassuming live mix of the slapping, squelching noises onstage, barely registers. Mr. Nadj, who usually turns his pierrot face to Chaplinesque effect, has no room for cuteness. All the usual conventions of display seem beside the point — the work is ritual, ancient, and pure.At the end of the piece, when the two men literally disappear, reabsorbed by the clay, it’s a perfect metaphor for artistic creation. No matter how much artists try to rough it up, the piece always wins.

Making Their Names in Mud

Making Their Names in Mud

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