09 March 2011

Review


BEIRUT: “I am Belgian,” smiled comedian Alex Vizorek, by way of introduction. “Good evening. But don’t worry, it’s not contagious!”

His opening remark filled the French Cultural Center’s Theater Montaigne with laughter, which continued to reverberate through the hall for the hour or so of his one-man show, “Alex Vizorek est une oeuvre d’art” (Alex Vizorek is a work of art), staged as part of the French Cultural Center’s francophone month.

As the title of his show suggests, Vizorek’s stand-up routine takes its point of departure from the arts. At least that’s what he wanted the audience to think.

His performance is broken down into several distinct chapters, not unlike an academic lecture. At various points he reflects upon classical music, contemporary art, sculpture, cinema and poetry. Even bullfighting falls under Vizorek’s generous definition of art.

Unlike an academic presentation, the Belgian’s objective wasn’t to present a lecture on art history, but to guide the audience into thinking about “What is this art? Why is it there?”

He invites his spectators to embark upon a journey through his lunatic world. “Each person,” he remarked in a pre-performance interview with The Daily Star, “has to recognize himself/herself in what I say.”

During the hour of his performance, Vizorek played with the media and his spectators’ collective memory.

Projected images served not as tools to support his arguments but as means to say “What if what you see was something else?”

One such projection features a photo of Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich performing Bach in front of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 11, 1989.

Vizorek reminds the audience members what they are seeing. Then he goes on to wonder, “What if Rostropovich didn’t play cello, but cymbals?”

He conjures from the air before him the scene of a cymbalist performing something by Bach in front of the Berlin Wall – something that would be impossible to listen to because a man banging cymbals together outside the context of an orchestra is somehow unimaginable.

Vizorek concludes his cymbal-ic conjurings with a rhetorical question. “How can an intelligent, respectable human being one day decide he will become a professional cymbalist?” he asks. “Cymbals are to music what proctology is to medicine.”

That’s Vizorek’s art: he shows the audience something they know already then uses it to lead them into a completely different world.

“Vizorek is Belgium’s up-and-coming comic,” opined Belgium’s Ambassador to Lebanon Johan Verkammen (whose embassy helped sponsor the comic’s appearance) in his introduction to the routine. “He interrupted his tour in Paris to come to Beirut, to salute the important place of the Francophonie in Lebanon.”

Appropriately enough, Vizorek studied engineering and journalism before deciding to focus all his energy on making people laugh, entering Paris’ Cours Florent, a well-known drama school.

“Tonight will be an experiment,” he told The Daily Star beforehand. “I ask myself how it’s going to work. I hardly changed or adapted my script for the Lebanese audience.

“I did add something about governmental issues. This is something we are also well acquainted with in Belgium … I think my audience will mainly be francophone expatriates. So, hopefully they will understand the things I will be referring to in my show.”

Though he may have been unknown to his Lebanese audience (francophone or otherwise) before Monday evening’s show, Vizorek’s joke about Belgian-ness not being contagious broke the ice with a resounding crunch and undermined any fears he may have had of his Middle Eastern audience.

Vizorek said he doesn’t like stand-up comedians who just tell their stories and walk off the stage and his Monday show was unique in his ability to interact with his spectators.

He quizzed his spectators regarding their tastes in the paintings he projects – whether Matisse, Magritte or Monzoni – testing their knowledge of the oeuvre as well as their sense of humor. It is an unusual approach that gave the spectator the impression he/she isn’t just part of the theater’s décor, but part of the show itself.

With irony and subtlety, Vizorek jumped from one topic to the other, rendering a large patchwork on arts.

He said his objective isn’t to criticize the arts but to show how they can be completely diminished to their comic aspects.

Vizorek explained how Luchino Visconti’s film “Mort a Venise” (Death in Venice) is probably one of the longest and slowest movies he has ever seen.

For more than two hours, he says, we are waiting for something mentioned in the title. The comic said it was “easier to read the 50 pages [of the Thomas Mann novel that inspired the movie] than to watch the two-hour film.”

By the end of this movie, he declared, the spectator is left with criminal impulses.

After illuminating the stage with his wit and irony, the Belgian ended his show with the promise, “I absolutely must come back.”


The French Cultural Center’s Francophone month continues at Theater Montaigne on March 11 with “Livre d’Impro,” an improv performance in which two comedians create a book from the audience’s ideas. For more information call 01-420-200.

Copyright The Daily Star 2011.