What if Hamlet was a woman?
Christiane Jatahy is a regular at the Odéon, where she has been an associate artist since 2016. Which she is also at the Centquatre-Paris, the Schauspielhaus in Zurich, the ArtsEmerson in Boston and the Piccolo Teatro in Milan!
Another claim to fame for the director-director born in Rio in 1968: she won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale for all of her theatrical work.
For twenty years, his work has developed around borders: between artistic disciplines, reality and fiction, the actor and the character, the conscious and the unconscious, the past and the future... His theater is known for revisiting the classics in the light of the contemporary.
After adapting
The Three Sisters
,
Mademoiselle Julie
or
Macbeth
, Christiane Jatahy is now taking on
Hamlet
.
“I have always wanted to produce Hamlet, it’s a play that has always been with me.
The turning point came when I had the idea of making Hamlet a woman.
A bit like Virginia Woolf's Orlando, except that she was a woman from the start.
That would be the starting point.
What would happen if Hamlet, after four centuries, became a woman?” she explains.
Of which act.
The play was rewritten (even if 85% of the text is original), and the show focuses on three women, Ophelia, Gertrude and Hamlet, therefore, played by Clotilde Hesme.
To be or not to be, she says!
L.C.
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Hamlet
, by Shakespeare, a show by Christiane Jatahy, until April 14, at the Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, in Paris.
theatre-odeon.eu
Tina Modotti, activist focus
Men reading “El Machete,” by Tina Modotti (circa 1929).
Collection and archives of the Fundación Televisa, Mexico.
The exhibition entitled
Tina Modotti, the eye of the revolution
inaugurates the 2024 program at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris, which will consist exclusively of monographs of great female figures.
Long studied through the influence of Edward Weston, the work of Tina Modotti (1896-1942), Italian who emigrated to the United States at 16 and successively became a seamstress, model, actress, model and photographer's companion before launching herself into reporting, is today seen for its singularity and its fair value.
Tina Modotti is part of a generation of women who made an important contribution to photography in the 1920s. She produced committed work, documenting the emigration of Europeans to America for economic reasons, the post-revolutionary land reforms in Mexico, but also the rise of militant muralism (with Diego Rivera as a figurehead), or the struggle between Stalinists and Trotskyists after the Russian Revolution of 1917... This retrospective, which required six years of research, notably shows his portraits of the Mexican people (peasants, porters, market sellers, washerwomen, etc.) and his report on the women of Tehuantepec, with the emblematic
Woman with the Flag
. "I do not seek to produce art but honest photographs, without having recourse to tricks or artifices, while the majority of photographers continue to seek artistic effects or to imitate plastic expressions,” she said.
The proof in 240 images!
L.C.
Tina Modotti, the eye of the revolution
, until May 12, at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris.
gamepaume.org
Hypnotic power
Adikou
, by Raphaëlle Red, published by Éditions Grasset.
Press.
She can't stand the clichés relating to mixed race, like a bridge between cultures, she can no longer stand being constantly asked to define herself, Black or White or both, she is suffocated by not knowing what her identity is, where is his home.
So, young Adikou leaves for Togo, in search of this barely known father before he disappears completely.
With her goes the narrator, who, a brilliant discovery of the book, we will never know who she is.
Double of Adikou, one of her many and fluctuating identities or the author herself, in charge of the story of this road trip in search of appeasement, along the Gulf of Guinea, in Ghana, in Benin;
but also in the American South and its plantations, during a previous trip remembered.
So many territories marked by slavery and colonization.
Adikou is angry, against humanity and its history, against all this suffering inflicted, against all this stupidity, of which racism is the most terrifying component.
Adikou moves geographically, but the territory he belongs to above all is literature.
The writing is surprisingly rich, drawing its vigor from permanent risk-taking, making poetry spring not only from an accomplished mastery of metaphor but from the incessant collision of ideas, sensations and feelings. , facts recounted, in total freedom.
A harsh lyricism that leaps without worrying about landing on its feet, modern, abundant, and which always refuses to take itself seriously.
So much so that the original theme is constantly shaken up, surpassed, transcended, to offer us a world where everything is mixed, mixed, elusive and of stunning beauty.
IP
Adikou
, by Raphaëlle Red, Éditions Grasset, 224 p., €19.50.