The Barbès Notebooks

By: Eugenie Kuffler, August 31, 2011

In 1982, in Paris, where I live, I began to fill spiral notebooks, writing on the lined pages and drawing on the blank ones. When I went out, I ripped out a page, folded it, put it in my vest pocket, and continued to write in the streets.

Last summer in Woods Hole, I assembled this cryptic, undated material, begun in one language in a notebook, continued in another tongue on a “pocket paper,” and presented in the ether for a production with a short wave radio.

After that production, I decided to work backwards in order to apply my hard-earned rationality and consolidate the trail of ink. The Barbès Notebooks, named for the multi-ethnic Parisian neighbourhood in which I live, begin on June 22, 2009 while crossing over the Atlantic, and ended on April 18, 2010 in an airport in Gerona, Spain.

These stories, read script in hand, are linked by miniature dances - abstract manifestations of the depths from which they arise.

Ondine Productions presents The Barbès Notebooks, a dance-theatre piece written, choreographed and performed by Eugenie Kuffler, will take place Thursday, September 1 and Friday, September 2 at 8 PM at the Woods Hole Community Hall, 68 Water Street, Woods Hole, 02543, Massachusetts. Tickets 12$. Reservations: 508 548 4659.

About the artist:

Eugenie Kuffler was born in 1949 in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1967, she emigrated to Paris where she studied composition with Nadia Boulanger, Henri Dutilleux and Max Deutsch; electro-acoustical composition with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales-Conservatoire de Paris; flute with Alain Marion, classical voice with Sophie Boulin and Yves Müller, ballet with Helène Sadovska, Afro-Cuban dance with Daniela Giaconi and now, Graham technique with Maggie Boogaart.

She was a member of the composer-performer collective GERM and a founding member with Philippe Drogoz of the avant-garde cabaret ensemble 010. Currently she is a member of the four-woman music collective Hot Chills and also plays with the Woods Hole Folk Orchestra for the summer contra dances.

From 1998 to 2007 she sustained the music-theatre project Etno Poesía Cuba. She has created radio works for France Musique and France Culture and solo performances for the Biennale de Paris, Frauenwoches in Vienna and Hambourg, the Festival de Performance de Lyon, Musica Strasbourg, La Muga Caula (Catalonia), AccionMAD (Madrid), ArtContact (Helsinki) and FEM_10 (Gerona).

Each summer since 1998 she has performed alone or with high local talent at the Woods Hole Community Hall.