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The actress Ad\u00e8le Haenel bristled when asked what drew her to radical art and politics. \u201cThe term \u2018radical\u2019 is used as a way to discredit protest discourse,\u201d said Haenel, who is best known in the United States for the 2019 art-house hit \u201cPortrait of a Lady on Fire<\/a>.\u201d <\/strong>That was also one of the last feature films she worked on. Since then, she has opted to dramatically alter the course of her life and career.<\/p>\n Over the past few years, Haenel, 34, has become one of the most visible and committed faces of the #MeToo movement in France<\/a>. In May, she wrote an open letter published in the influential French culture weekly T\u00e9l\u00e9rama<\/a> to explain her absence from movie screens: \u201cI decided to politicize my retirement from cinema to denounce the general complacency of the profession toward sexual aggressors and more generally the way in which this sphere collaborates with the mortal, ecocidal, racist order of the world such as it is.\u201d<\/p>\n She has, she told me, \u201ca political understanding of the world, and my actions are consistent with it as much as possible. Calling someone radical is a way to say \u2018She\u2019s hysterical, she\u2019s angry.\u2019 I prefer coherent to radical.\u201d<\/p>\n I said that I had used the word in a positive way \u2014 to suggest bold choices that steered clear of the artistic mainstream. \u201cI\u2019m not annoyed with you,\u201d Haenel said. \u201cI\u2019m reacting strongly, but it\u2019s just to make myself clear.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Making herself clear is important to Haenel, who has an intense focus and frequently looked to the side as we talked, as if to better organize her thoughts away from an interlocutor\u2019s gaze. She sometimes wrote down points she wanted to come back to later \u2014 and she did return to them.<\/p>\n We were talking in a house on the bucolic campus of PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century<\/a>, in Chatham, N.Y., where Haenel was appearing in the director-choreographer Gis\u00e8le Vienne<\/a>\u2019s show \u201cL\u2019\u00c9tang.\u201d The show comes next to New York City for performances at New York Live Arts, Saturday through Monday<\/a>, as part of the Dance Reflections<\/a> festival.<\/p>\n By American theatrical standards, \u201cL\u2019\u00c9tang\u201d (\u201cThe Pond\u201d) is pretty close to radical, though. Based on a short play by the Swiss-German writer Robert Walser<\/a>, the dance-theater piece locks Haenel and Julie Shanahan, a longtime member of Pina Bausch\u2019s Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble, in a helix of escalating tension performed in often excruciatingly slow motion<\/a>, a tempo familiar to those who saw Vienne\u2019s hypnotic \u201cCrowd\u201d<\/a> last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.<\/p>\n Haenel takes on multiple roles, most notably that of Fritz, an adolescent who fakes suicide to attract his mother\u2019s attention, and his two siblings; Shanahan plays their parents. The atmosphere is somewhat hallucinatory \u2014 Vienne has cited David Lynch among her influences \u2014 but it requires consummate precision, both physical and emotional.<\/p>\n \u201cWe worked a lot on trying to pierce through the surface of things, and that\u2019s not something you can do alone,\u201d Haenel said. \u201cAmong the people onstage, we tried to better understand what\u2019s implied, to understand a person\u2019s feelings. You start anticipating when a person is going to stop moving. That\u2019s a kind of communication I feel very strongly with Julie. We don\u2019t need to talk about it endlessly; I just feel how long she\u2019s going to take to do something.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For Vienne, effort is an integral part of the process. \u201cWhat I do is very technical from a choreographic and interpretive standpoint,\u201d she said in Chatham. \u201cThis virtuosity is the result of a long physical and theoretical training \u2014 sociology, philosophy and politics are important to understanding what we\u2019re in the process of building, and the formal choices we make as we create the piece.\u201d<\/p>\n This rigor and commitment suit Haenel, as she passionately pursues a path in which artistic goals are intertwined with politics and life, a dedication that coalesces in her work with Vienne.<\/p>\n The two met in 2018, when they were on the admissions committee for the National Theater of Brittany\u2019s acting school. Haenel participated in a workshop with prospective students led by Vienne. \u201cI loved it,\u201d she said. \u201cThe improvisation was related to her show \u2018Crowd\u2019 and involved developing slow motion as a new sense, like seeing or hearing, that would allow you to live or experience things differently.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The pair further explored that theme in \u201cL\u2019\u00c9tang,\u201d which became their first official collaboration and, after a Covid 19-imposed delay<\/a>, premiered in 2021<\/a>. Over the course of our conversation, Haenel often circled back to what she referred to as de-hierarchization. In the show, for example, words, movement, music, sound and lighting all contribute to communicating information, feelings and emotions. This undermines the traditional place of text at the top of the theatrical pyramid, and makes us reconsider what carries meaning onstage.<\/p>\n And \u201cL\u2019\u00c9tang\u201d subverts the usual link between the performers\u2019 body language and the way text is delivered \u2014 especially since the voices are often electronically distorted. (Adrien Michel did the sophisticated sound design.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt\u2019s about the friction between text and subtext,\u201d Haenel said. She brought up an especially intense scene in which she and Shanahan are face to face. They barely move, but the effect is one of terrifying brutality. \u201cJulie actually speaks very calmly, but for us it\u2019s a crazy scene of aggression because there is a negation of the body language,\u201d Haenel said, adding that something they explored with Vienne was dissociation. \u201cWe\u2019ve achieved a level where we can have a body that looks almost stoned with a speeded-up voice.\u201d<\/p>\n The impact is intended to be as much political as it is aesthetic. \u201cAt the heart of \u2018L\u2019\u00c9tang\u2019 is the issue of violence,\u201d Haenel said, \u201cand this violence is not about saying tough things, but about turning someone else\u2019s speech into silence.\u201d<\/p>\n Haenel and Vienne\u2019s partnership has bloomed since 2018. In August, they premiered a new show, \u201cExtra Life<\/a>,\u201d also starring Theo Livesey and Katia Petrowick, at the prestigious Ruhrtriennale festival<\/a> in Germany. They are also involved with public readings of work by Monique Wittig<\/a>, the lesbian philosopher and activist who died in 2003 and has been enjoying a revival in France over the past few years. While in New York for \u201cL\u2019\u00c9tang,\u201d Haenel is participating in a Wittig event on Wednesday at the Albertine bookstore<\/a>, which its organizers conceived in collaboration with Vienne.<\/p>\n \u201cTalking about Monique Wittig is a political act of active memory creation,\u201d said Haenel, who is trying to get new English translations of Wittig\u2019s work off the ground. \u201cI\u2019d love to help her be read again in the United States, to be studied more.\u201d<\/p>\n Digging deep with Vienne and championing Wittig are of a piece for Haenel. \u201cI\u2019ve always tried to engage in a thinking process,\u201d she said. \u201cThe idea is not so much to become better, but not to become calcified in an antiquated relationship to the world. What\u2019s at stake is not whether that relationship is truer or not \u2014 I find the idea of a criteria of truth super-problematic \u2014 but whether it\u2019s more alive or not. At least for me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n