Boozy:
The Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier
Featuring Robert Moses and the Urban Planning Players
The Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier
Featuring Robert Moses and the Urban Planning Players
Background
Each Les Freres Corbusier show selects a different historical figure, crafts a bold, unprovable thesis concerning them, and then pursues that thesis with an absurd, rigorously academic argument, while simultaneously casting the subject into a world of avant-garde terror. Past subjects include Herodotus, the Shakers, Benjamin Franklin, President Warren G. Harding, and L. Ron Hubbard.
Over the past two years, a documentary on the history of New York’s government, architecture, and urban planning has been playing almost incessantly on PBS. Suddenly, everyone seems to know who Robert Moses is. This man, responsible for the vast majority of New York’s bridges, highways, and parks, is considered by many historians to be one of the most important and influential people of the 21st century. Yet, the general public seems to have known nothing about him, up until the past two post-September 11th years when he is suddenly once again a celebrity.
The connection between Le Corbusier and Robert Moses is clear: Both were visionary urban planners obsessed with mass production and the machine age. However well-intentioned and concerned with the general good of “the city,” their idealistic planning neglected to consider the concerns of the individual (as a thinking, feeling human being). The execution of their designs divided neighborhoods, uprooted and attempted to cast away the lower classes, and led to their ultimate vilification today. The intentions of both are frequently compared today to those of totalitarian dictators.
Boozy will be an attempt to examine the lives and work of these two, to demonstrate the direct link between them, and to play with their ultimate historical perception in the popular and academic spheres.
Synopsis
The intention is earnest, but the approach is comically pretentious and highly academic. We will embrace a bold, unprovable thesis—that Le Corbusier wanted to harness atomic energy in order to destroy the Western hemisphere so that he might then rebuild it as a series of “garden cities,” and that he conspired with FDR and Hitler to plot Moses’ fall—and then attempt to demonstrate and argue it, employing myriad post-modern theater techniques and primary sources. The proceedings are completely straight-faced and hopefully very funny.
Approach
Boozy is a musical-dance theater piece examining the lives, work, and legacies of urban planners Le Corbusier and New York’s own Robert Moses.
The show begins with a twenty-minute modern dance piece that embraces a Franco-sensibility and retells the story of math—man’s embrace of it and his eventual rejection of it—and prophecies his destruction by it. In this six-movement piece, Un Piece de Movement Historique avec la Geometrie, the dancing descendants of Le Corbusier are repeatedly interrupted by his ghost who screams “Stop Dancing!” He does not want his ancestors to tell the story of math, for it vilifies him. The fourth movement depicts the life of Thomas Jefferson—who, to the dancers, embodies man’s perfect union with math—and argues that Le Corbusier and Jesus conspired to kill Jefferson, through the creation of a puppet-like Sally Hemmings Machine Monster. (The logic of the piece seems extremely convoluted and absurd at first glance. Part of the humor is that all of the motivations and historical observations are somewhat steeped in fact. A 30-page course packet, handed out with the programs, outlines the dance’s narrative and includes footnotes, primary sources, and blank pages for the audience to jot down its own thoughts and ideas.)
This dance acts as a prologue, and the rest of Boozy is comprised of abstract sequences, tonally dissonant, presented in a non-linear fashion. With Moses as our protagonist, the argument behind our central thesis is recounted and the two hugely-influential figures of the 20th Century are coupled and pitted against one another.
Just as the exploration itself is entertaining and extremely pretentious, we will present our story, and argument, using self-consciously overblown and clichéd postmodern theatrical techniques, including abstract dance, live sound/micing, video art, found texts, Viewpoints, repetition of aphorisms, gestural performance, and others. The resulting pastiche is not merely parody. The show’s creators have a sincere fascination with these theatrical styles. Similarly, the mythology of Le Corbusier and Moses will be skewered but simultaneously revered. Why else create a show about them?
Aside from the dance, other scenes will most likely include:
-Lectured argument comparing the fundamental divide between the two urban planners embodied by the dialectic of Corbusier/Plato and Moses/Aristotle. The former believed in simple, primary forms. The latter were pupils but challenged their teachers through their obsession with deductive reasoning, formal logic: empirical forms. This is foreshadowed in the prologue dance, when Aristotle murders Plato.
-Video of man-on-the-street interviews with people who live in Corbusier’s co-ops, to be conducted entirely in French.
-Found text passages from Lewis Mumford’s The Highway and the City, and Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, among others.
-Selections from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment inserted into mundane, gardening scene. Just how many square feet of garden does a human being need for sanity?
-Formal explanation of Complexity Theorems. Mark C. Taylor’s Complexity and Architecture makes the distinction between architects who adhere to the “grid system” versus embracing the “network,” which reflects the complexity of our times. Essentially, Le Corbusier and Moses’ work necessitated the rapid rise of the network, and indirectly the advent of the atomic age. This argument is essential to the explanation of Le Corbusier’s earlier championing of the destruction of Warsaw and gutting of Rotterdam—cities that could then be landscaped and reborn using his utopian, urban planning theories—and his subsequent obsession with “the normalization of the irrational” and with harnessing nuclear power.
-Various eulogies for Le Corbusier, accompanied by blueprints and models. A sung requiem.
-Finally, scenes and musical numbers that contribute more directly to Boozy’s narrative line/argument.