9 August 2010
Playtime Festival
Sixpack France presents:
PLAYTIME FESTIVAL
August 11-12-13, 2010
@ Privé, Avignon, South of France
In a scene of Jacques Tati’s Playtime, released in 1967, a seemingly quiet cocktail settled in a new upscale hotel slowly goes out of control : as time flows, dance moves get crazier, and people start happily destroying parts of the brand new dance hall. As the orchestra plays, the square patrons look more and more oblivious of their usual principles, of themselves, and of their fresh modernist environment. Parts of the ceiling fall down, lights look unsafe, smokes float around, but some people really seem like they want to dance all night long to the sound of the orchestra’s eerie psych-latin jerk. Spasmodic moves, general confusion, and an exhilarating ignorance of conventions : the Playtime party is of an overwhelming kind, since it invades the bodies of « non-party people », of people usually disconnected with their own bodies and emotions – typical French people of the sixties, actually, but what if these guys could be our role models now ? Because, frankly, who cares about being cool and stylish, about thinking smart and looking sharp, if it’s just a mere excuse for avoiding any kind of emotional outburst and just becoming some pitiful control freak severed from any physical dimension – and please don’t even start with the whole « that’s a dandy attitude » thing, that’s much more embarassing than you trying non-ironically to dance.
Playtime’s jerk dancers probably live in the same massive, high-tech suburbian houses than the ones featured in another Tati movie, Mon Oncle, and that’s why watching them dancing like there’s no tomorrow is so enjoyable. Doing the jerk, they turn into parts of giant, dionysian, confused and confusing body. That’s what Sixpack France’s Playtime festival would love to trigger : a desire for carelessness, outrageous dancing (whether you dance well or not) and destroying material things. Maybe that’s what the avant-garde needs. Or maybe that’s even what the avant-garde is, today. We’ve been spending more than a decade caring obsessively about being cool and witty, fine-tuning our attitudes, pronouncing smart, in-the-know stuff, neutralizing and freezing pretty much everything, and confirming how true this whole social « distinction » theory was. So we guess it’s high time we have to let ourselves go, and that doesn’t have to mean being a frat boy. Remember the Playtime Royal Hotel dancers, remember this vibration that takes them higher without even realizing, and then begging the orchestra to keep on playing. This is our very own avant-garde, here, at Sixpack France.
The Playtime festival will feature Jean-Baptiste de Laubier’s (aka Para One) movie, called It Was On Earth That I Knew Joy, a short that pays an oblique yet sort of obvious homage to Chris Marker’s La Jetée, in which video rushes from a destroyed world are being watched, or say, broadcast by a post-apocalyptic computer. Then we’ll have three nights of general sound with a danceable edge : on the 11th, at the « Le Privé » club, DJ sets Jean Nipon (who just released an unbelievable mix CD on Six Pack), and by the Adam Kesher boys, from Bordeaux. On the 12th, the club will host some nice guys from the NYC beardo-disco elite, Rub-N-Tug and Château Marmont. And the 13th, things will get all mixed up with « Le Privé » virtual mainstays Tekilatex & Orgasmic (aka Sound Pellegrino Thermal Team), and an older, but nonetheless flamboyant duet, the mighty Optimo, from Scotland, from whom we can expect dislocated yet juicy grooves, quite similar to the ones heard in the Playtime soundtrack, and also to the curved-up, tangled lines featured on a poster for another Tati flick, Traffic, whose artwork was an obvious inspiration for the festival’s flyer.
Check out PLAYTIME Facebook Event !
9 July 2010, 11 h 41 min
Excellent texte.