Paris Syndrome's Bertie Ferdman and Suzi Takahashi on City of Lights Mania

Each year a dozen or so thirty-something Japanese women on vacation in Paris lose their minds. Who knew? Ex.Pgirl is an eight-year old movement theater group that creates performance works that address cultural identity in today's global community. "Ex.P" stands for "experimental and expatriate." Half of the company performers for Paris Syndrome, opening at HERE arts center, have some sort of Japanese background, and the other half are French. Created by Bertie Ferdman and Suzi Takahashi, and directed by the masterful Emma Griffin, the cast of six explores this real life mystery with music, dance, vaudeville and games. I spoke with both Ferdman and Takahashi.

Tom Murrin:  Hi Bertie, Hi Suzi.  Maybe one of you could tell me how your show came about.

Suzi Takahashi: We were looking for a story and a friend read on the Internet a couple years ago about a true-life phenomenon, which was called The Paris Syndrome.  It was a form of psychosis that apparently happens to 13 or 14 Japanese women in their thirties per year.  They go to Paris, as tourists, for the first time, and they experience a psychological meltdown.

TM:  How do you mean?

ST:  They have delusions, like they think they are Louis the fourteenth.  And they have other psychotic fits, like they might think the microwave oven is talking to them.

Bertie Ferdman:  They imagine that they were trapped in Versailles.

ST:  And apparently, over the years, it has happened enough so that a Japanese psychiatrist, Dr. Ota, living in France, has seen a number of cases.  He and the Japanese Embassy in Paris started a hotline for Japanese tourists, to call if they felt they were losing their minds.  There is a center in Paris they can go to, a psychiatrist will meet you, and the government of Japan will fly you back to Japan to undergo repatriation.

BF:  The final cure is: you can never go back to Paris.

TM:  This is pretty amazing.

ST:  This became an interesting concept to our group, and we asked ourselves:  Why Japanese women?  And why France?

BF:  What was of interest to us was to examine the phenomenon from our perspective. The reason anyone can have Paris Syndrome is because of cultural stereotypes.  What we explore in the show is cultural stereotyping and clichés, in a humorous way; in order to explore what are our dreams, how we achieve them, and how we are disappointed.

TM:  How do you do this on stage?

BF:  There are two teams. I'm on the French team, and Suzi is on the Japanese team.  We create a lot of games. We use sports as a metaphor. The set is a green soccer field. Each team has three players. Team Japan vs. team France. We also do a lot of gender and cultural drag. Some of the women would see themselves as Marie Antoinette. So we're trying to cross barriers.

ST:  We do all of this because we came up with the idea that Paris Syndrome is really talking about (the fact) that we all have a dream; we dream of a place where we will be the person of our dreams.

TM:  So how do you think this phenomenon happens?

ST:  We looked at the subject and Japanese women, and the anime and mange comics, and Japanese films and theater, where France is so romanticized to them. To be in the court of Versailles is to be a Frenchwoman like Marie Antoinette. It is a dream space and a dream identity.

TM:  How do you show this in the piece?

ST:  The six actresses of Ex.P take on a bunch of French iconic people and re-invent them.  We play Edith Piaf, Serge Gainsbourg, Marcel Marceau. We sort of take on an imagined Parisian identity.  We all dream and we all take on the identity of other people, and that's the beautiful part of life and theater.

BF:  To be a little crazy is to be allowed to dream actually, and it makes us saner in this crazy world.

HERE Arts Center, 145 6^th Ave., (1 block below Spring), (212) 353-3101, here.org, June 3-19, Tues.- Sat., 8:30 P.M., $18.