THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2019| 17
Culture
John Cassavetes’s “Opening Night” has
long been catnip to theater fans. It’s
easy to see why: The 1977 film is about
an aging, hard-drinking actress, por-
trayed by Gena Rowlands, who be-
comes increasingly unhinged during a
play’s out-of-town tryout.
Cassavetes shot a lot of it in front of a
live audience in Pasadena, Calif., and the
result constantly threads the line be-
tween fantasy and reality, performance
and life.
Coincidentally, two different theatri-
cal works drawing from “Opening
Night” are coming to New York this fall.
And they are radically different: The
Australian import “The Second Wom-
an” has a cast of 101 — one woman and
100 men — and runs 24 hours; a French
“Opening Night” features three actors
and lasts 75 minutes. (The original film
has a large ensemble and goes on for
two and a half hours.)
“This is an experiment: Don’t expect
the movie or you’ll be disappointed,” the
Parisian director Cyril Teste said of his
“Opening Night.” In comparison, Ivo
van Hove’s adaptation of “Opening
Night,” seen at the Brooklyn Academy
of Music in 2008, feels downright con-
ventional in retrospect, despite his repu-
tation as an iconoclast.
Mr. Teste’s piece, at the Alliance
Française from Thursday through Sat-
urday, does have a formidable presence
perfectly capable of matching Ms. Row-
lands’s charisma: Isabelle Adjani, who
joined the illustrious Comédie-
Française troupe at 17, in 1972, and left
two years later to become a movie star
(“The Story of Adele H.,” “Camille
Claudel”).
Ms. Adjani is exactly the kind of out-
size performer suited to the flamboyant
role of Myrtle Gordon, a leading lady
haunted by a young fan who was hit by a
car after trying to talk to Myrtle. And the
role spoke to the French actress. “I
found personal echoes with her journey,
her emotions, her relations with the di-
rector and the other actors, her self-in-
vestigation,” Ms. Adjani said in an email.
“Why do I do this job? What’s the point?
Do I trust myself enough?”
But Mr. Teste did not want a star vehi-
cle. He tried to evoke not so much Cas-
savetes’s film as the director’s process.
His “Opening Night,” which he de-
scribed in a FaceTime interview from
France as a “filmic performance,” mixes
live video and actors, and a degree of un-
certainty was baked into the production.
Back in February, Mr. Teste, 44,
scrapped everything after the dress re-
hearsal and had his cast basically re-
hearse a new version live during the
show’s premiere, in Belgium. Since
then, each evening has been slightly dif-
ferent from the previous one.
This approach is not far from Cas-
savetes’s own modus operandi: He often
re-edited and sometimes even reshot his
films, most notoriously “Shadows.”
“Doing the film isn’t interesting — I
hope what we do is a tribute to Cas-
savetes via his working methods,” Mr.
Teste said. “The process is the show.”
Despite its high-tech trappings, his
production is very much actor-centered,
as was Cassavetes’s work.
“John’s writing is all about characteri-
zation, to let actors perform in ways that
they seldom get a chance to,” said Al
Ruban, 86, a longtime Cassavetes asso-
ciate who was the producer and cine-
matographer on “Opening Night” and is
in charge of licensing rights to the film-
maker’s oeuvre. “When we shot the
movies, it was really the characters
driving each one of these productions.”
He added that he thought that stage di-
rectors “see that and see opportunities
for them and for actors.”
“Opening Night” deals with the com-
plicated professional and personal rela-
tionships among writers, directors and
performers, but also between men and
women — which may explain why the
film, in which Myrtle has fraught rela-
tionships with the men around her, is an
object of scrutiny right now.
That was one of the aspects that drew
the young Australian theater makers
Anna Breckon and Nat Randall, both of
whom wrote and directed “The Second
Woman.” Their show borrows its title
from the play within the film but uses
fewer than 10 lines from the original.
Wearing a red dress and a blond wig
to look like Myrtle, a woman performs
the same scene 100 times with 100 male
volunteers over the course of the show
— the single performance at the Brook-lyn Academy of Music will start at 5 p.m.
on Oct. 18 and conclude the next after-
noon.
Speaking by Skype from Adelaide,
Australia, where she and Ms. Randall
were developing a new project, Ms.
Breckon, 35, described the one scene as
“two people negotiating a relation that
has become toxic but are sufficiently at-
tached to each other not to leave. The
idea is that small emotional interactions
say something about the way men and
women treat each other in a particular
cultural context.”
Ideally the men are nonactors,
sourced from “spaces and communities
that don’t necessarily have a strong re-
lationship with the theater,” as Ms. Ran-
dall, 33, put it.
Their not being used to the stage
helps spark variations and physical im-
provisation that evoke the often unpre-
dictable energy of the Cassavetes piece,
she said. The length adds an extra layer
of potential tension. “It’s rough, it’s very
hard to do because that element of sur-
prise is really intense when you’re also
quite fatigued and something radical
comes in or something more aggressive
or more sexual,” Ms. Randall said. (She
created the part, but in Brooklyn there
will be a new actress, whose name has
not been announced yet.)
Ms. Breckon and Ms. Randall often
talked about their production in abstract
terms, with references to theories of the
male gaze, for example. Audience mem-
bers unfamiliar with academic research
should not fret, though: “The piece is
quite funny,” Ms. Randall said, laughing.
“It’s light and entertaining!”Make that two for ‘Opening Night’
Stage versions of the film,
from Australia and France,
honor John Cassavetes
BY ELISABETH VINCENTELLI
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY THE NEW YORK TIMES; FROM LEFT: SIMON GOSSELIN, HEIDRUN LOHR AND FACES DISTRIBUTIONIn the photo illustration at top, from left: Isabelle Adjani in Cyril Teste’s adaptation of “Opening Night”; Nat Randall, who is a co-
creator of “Second Woman”; and Gena Rowlands. Above, from the Australian production.HEIDRUN LOHR“John’s writing is all about
characterization, to let actors
perform in ways that they seldom
get a chance to.”
Twerking on a chain-link fence; doing
a split on concrete in the rain; bounc-
ing a basketball off multiple body
parts, between effortless pirouettes:
When Normani released the music
video for her irresistible single “Moti-
vation” in August, the message was
clear. Not only could she sing — she
could also really, really dance.
A rising pop singer, on the order of a
young Beyoncé or Britney Spears,
Normani, 23, was a dancer and a gym-
nast first. Growing up in New Orleans,
she began taking ballet, jazz and tap
classes at age 3. After moving to Hous-
ton in the wake of Hurricane Katrina,
she joined a competitive dance team at
the studio Dancezone, eventually
putting aside gymnastics to focus on
dance. (In 2017, she was a contestant
on “Dancing With the Stars,” placing
third.)
“Dance was my first passion, before
I started singing or doing anything
else,” she said in a joint phone inter-
view with Sean Bankhead, the choreo-
grapher for the “Motivation” video. “I
gravitated to dancing because I’m a
more reserved, shy person, so I felt
like that was kind of my way of being
able to fully express myself.”
Normani first worked with Mr.
Bankhead about five years ago, when
he began choreographing for the girl
group Fifth Harmony, of which she was
a member. The two also collaborated
on dance videos with Normani at the
center.
“He’s really like my big brother,” she
said. “He believes I can do things that I
don’t even think I can do.”
In the “Motivation” video, shot in
Los Angeles, she holds nothing back,
finding recklessness inside of confident
precision. Her moves — particularly
the one in which she spins and pops a
basketball into the air with her knee,
then her butt — have inspired a flood
of fan videos tagged #motivationchal-
lenge. (“Honestly, I’ve seen some
pretty good ones,” she said.)
Her own inspiration for the video
came from artists of the early 2000s
and her experience watching music
videos on the BET show “106 & Park.”
While many comparisons have been
drawn between “Motivation” and
earlier pop and R&B videos — like J.
Lo’s “I’m Real” and Beyoncé’s “Crazy
in Love” — she and Mr. Bankhead said
that most of the similarities arose
organically.
For Mr. Bankhead, 30, watching
music videos also played a formative
role. “That’s really how I learned to
dance,” he said, “so it kind of just hap-
pened that a lot of the movement and
choreography tipped our hats to those
iconic videos we grew up on.”
At MTV’s Video Music Awards on
Aug. 27 — shortly after Missy Elliott
dedicated her Video Vanguard Award
to “the dance community around the
world” — Normani cemented her
image as a performer who can do it all,
commanding the stage in an acrobatic
solo during her debut live performance
of “Motivation.” (It can be seen onYouTube.) A few days later, she and
Mr. Bankhead took some time to talk
about the work leading up to that
moment. Here are edited excerpts
from the conversation.In the “Motivation” video, Normani
almost never stops dancing. How did
the decision come about to make a
dance-driven video?
NORMANIWe wanted it to be very high
energy. We wanted it to be an opportu-
nity for people to see me have fun. I’ve
had records like “Love Lies” and
“Dancing With a Stranger,” which arevery different from “Motivation” soni-
cally, so we wanted to use this as an
opportunity to dance and move from
start to finish.
I also knew that I wanted to repre-
sent my culture. I wanted it to feel as
black as possible. That was very im-
portant to me. I wanted everyone to
get a sense of who I was when I was
growing up watching “106 & Park.”
SEAN BANKHEADDave [Meyers, one of
the directors] had a lot of creative
ways that he wanted to capture dance,
which was great for us. Working with
someone like Normani, we know thatshe can dance, that’s to be expected, so
we’re always looking for different ways
to change up choreography or shoot it
differently.One part that stands out to me is the
long duet between Normani and
Christian Owens, where they dance
together in the street.
NORMANIThat’s probably my favorite
scene in the video. It was very reminis-
cent of Omarion’s music video “Touch.”
I just love the camaraderie between
the two. It’s kind of like a cat-and-
mouse situation.
BANKHEADIt goes between having kind
of this raw, ’hood choreography, but
then she has this really nice beautiful
lift, and then goes back into chewing
her gum. It’s cool to play with those
different textures and different styles
of dance, mix them all into one mo-
ment.What do you think makes Normani a
great dancer?
BANKHEADNo matter what, she works
extremely hard. I say this all the time,
but it’s hard to book dancers for Nor-
mani, because she’s actually some-
times more trained and has more
technique than some of the dancers in
the industry right now. She always has
been able to try things. I’ll be like,
“Normani, try this, try that!” She’s
always like, “Are you sure?”What’s an example?
NORMANII feel like it’s all the time. I am
a very hard worker and I do come from
those different backgrounds, dance
and gymnastics, but I also haven’t
done a lot of tumbling or gym in a verylong time. So even what you saw on
the V.M.A.s, me doing the back walk-
over going into the split — there was a
moment where I was like: “Wait, I
don’t know if I’m going to do the back
walkover. I don’t want to stress out
over it. I have other things to stress
out over.” And he was like, “No, you’re
going to do it.” He allows me the oppor-
tunity to know that I’m still capable of
doing certain things.What was your reaction to Missy
Elliott dedicating her Video Vanguard
Award to the dance community?
BANKHEADThat was really major. A lot
of artists, they have their dancers but
really don’t allow them to be part of the
moment. They’re just background
noise. So to have a legend like Missy,
who paved the way and changed and
inspired so much in the dance industry
— for her to acknowledge that her
dancers are so important to her show,
it’s very heartwarming.
NORMANIEspecially for me coming
from the dance community, I feel really
at home when I’m in a room full of
talented dancers.Sean, why did you feel it was impor-
tant for Normani to have that solo,
with the back walkover, in her V.M.A.s
performance?
BANKHEADWe had a lot of dancers —
20, 21 dancers. And I remember being
like: “Normani, during the dance
break, it just needs to be you. Let’s get
everybody offstage, let’s put a spot-
light on you and just show the world
what you can do.” It was probably one
of the better decisions we made, and
she came through. She can do it.Normani can do just about anything
The singer brings to mind
Beyoncé or Britney Spears,
and her dancing dazzles
BY SIOBHAN BURKE
Normani in the music video for her single “Motivation.”