Montparnasse: inside the model's studio

Toronto: Beauty isn’t talent, says Amelia (Maev Beaty) to Margaret (Erin Shields), in Montparnasse an exploration of physical form, creation, perception and still-life and part of this year's SummerWorks Festival. 

The basic set up is that two young Canadians have left the nothingness of their pretend country to seek the somethingness of Paris in the 1920s, encountering the movers and shakers of the modernist era.  Shields plays a sort of Sally Bowles of Paris and while Beaty isn’t exactly Cliff (although – intriguingly – she is a lesbian), she is initially overwhelmed by the intensity and openness of the European city. Amelia wants to be an artist but has the behaviours of a prude. Margaret, an artist model, lives an artist’s life but is she really anything more than the subject of men’s sexual and artistic designs?

Although the idea of the wild child and the prude living together is not a set up of particular promise – you just know a switch is going to eventually take place – the ideas that the play explores are sophisticated and for the most part nuanced.  At the core of this exploration is Amelia whose journey from bumpkin to fragile artist is plausible and beautifully articulated by Beaty. Shields does strong work as well but there is less meat for her to dig into as Margaret is more static and ultimately acts as an agent for Amelia to react against.

The most notorious element – and one played up in marketing the show – is the extended full frontal nudity.  This is a brave gesture – and as the press notes, um, cheekily mention – could have the appearance of exhibitionism. In the playing, however, this is far from reality. Instead what is effectively evoked is the de-sexualized nature of a life-drawing class, where, after the initial intake of curiosity at the dropping of the robe, the figure really does become planes of light and curves of flesh. It is amazing how quickly this is achieved both in the context of a life-drawing class and in this production.

Perhaps one of the cleverest tensions of the piece is the way it teases with the idea of the model as simple, physical subject on one hand and the potential for erotic charge between creator and subject on the other. Margaret screws her painters as part of the creative process – her contribution to the work – while Amelia, the aspiring artist, seduces Sylvia Beach, of Shakespeare & Co fame, who she talks into posing for her. This is perhaps Amelia’s moment of fullest articulation as both a sexual being and an artist.

But is beauty talent or at least its equal? The role of the model in the artistic process and their relationship to the (male) creators is certainly a fascinating one. Are they real contributors or are they there because of their beauty, fuckability and exhibitionistic tendencies? Does a model have any more value to an artist than, say, a bowl of fruit or, as Amelia says at one point, a well-lit pile of garbage? And outside the studio, what is their position within the broader artistic community? In a sense, both characters struggle against the notion that they are just bodies for display. Margaret keeps her artists on track with helpful blow-jobs and later finds a role as a sort of handmaid to a male artist, lugging around objects for him; Amelia wants to be an artist and becomes a sort of disciple by virtue of being in the room and observing how they approach their craft. Both women desire to be something more than observed beauty and I wonder whether that lowered the heat a little bit on the dialectic, since even Margaret wanted, in a sense, to be an artist.

To my taste, the play was at its most engaging when it was tackling these issues. The dynamic between the two women is generally less compelling – until, that is, towards the end when Margaret becomes Amelia’s subject. And while both performers do great work playing multiple male roles as required (a particular highlight is a night on the town with a group of literary glitterati) I did wonder whether the male – and, yes, clothed – energy was missing from the proceedings.

For me the script is still in process. In particular, it needs to shake off some of the conventions, particularly some of the longer monologues which veer a little too much into one-person show territory. Unfortunately I also found the staging somewhat conventional. There was one striking sequences, where the two performers, one clothed, the other naked mirror one another’s moves. I would have loved to see more of this type of innovation.  

Still, this is a beguiling, provoking piece of theatre.