Intro: Pascal Ramber's "Race" In Los Angeles and Paris

Susan Mason
Barbara Mason

    French director/playwright Pascal Rambert arrived in Los Angeles last April with three goals he hoped to accomplish through a local production of his play, Race, under his direction: to combine students from California State University, Los Angeles (CSLA) with performers from LA Poverty Department (LAPD, a skid row theatre company); to perform in a site where skid row meets corporate LA; and to attract a diverse audience. All three goals involved bridging disparate worlds with his play Race as the medium. Rambert had spent two months in Los Angeles in the fall, meeting with actors from LAPD and students from CSLA. The two groups worked together during several Saturday workshops, and he met separately with the fifteen CSLA students on Fridays in a class where students brought in interviews they had collected from various immigrants and people of color in Los Angeles. Because several of the students were themselves immigrants, some interviewedthemselves or members of their families.

The student interviews were to become part of an LA adaptation of Race, a play Rambert wrote in 1997 based on interviews he had conducted in Paris with immigrants from former French colonies: Algeria, Vietnam, and West Africa. Race was first staged by Rambert in the 1997 October Festival in Normandie and subsequently at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe in Saint-Denis in January 1999. In both French productions, the three leading roles of The Arabian, The Asian, and The African were performed by

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photo 1: francisco uribe with his dog, ebony, and parrot, george. photo: ibrahim saba

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photo 2: a rehearsal at the los angeles theatre center. stephanie bell, carla melo, brian brophy, pascal rambert (with script in hand), charles clay, and patricia soto. photo by francisco uribeArab, Asian, and African professional actors with a chorus (thirty in Normandie, nineteen in Saint-Denis) comprised of immigrants in the local communities who were not actors.

Rambert's growing preference for working with untrained, community members comes from a tradition that extends back to European medieval theatre, but more recently to the work of Armand Gatti, who...