Giselle on MeToo time
Attending a show with Marie-Claude Pietragalla is already seeing stars shine in the eyes of an audience who has come, often with family, to attend an exceptional show.
This is the case with
Giselle(s)
, this new show from the Théâtre du Corps, the company created twenty years ago by Marie-Claude Pietragalla and Julien Derouault with love and tenacity and today based in Alfortville, near Paris .
And it took energy to impose this training which interweaves dance, theater, voice, singing, imagination, inner power, expression, thought, dreams... to result in a total show .
For Marie-Claude Pietragalla, the emblematic Giselle has become almost a double, a sister, she danced her a lot, at the Paris Opera, in Marseille... In the first part, she is a Giselle, an androgynous creature, come moreover to observe the world today, a world where couples of all conditions, with or without children, encounter extreme violence, male domination.
Adolphe Adam's score sometimes gives way to Bronx Drums or electro.
“Supergiselle” trains his troops who, in the second part, become an army of shadows, zombie women, ferocious and devouring, come from beyond to settle their scores.
The dance is telluric, often too repetitive, almost obsessive.
The troop becomes one, the bodies become cries.
The arms wave endlessly.
Lights hit the retinas.
What if we left room for love?
In front of a pre-established audience, for more than two long hours,
Giselle(s)
won her bet.
BB
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Giselle(s)
, until March 17 at La Seine musicale, in Boulogne-Billancourt (Hauts-de-Seine), and on tour.
laseinemusicale.com
Chef factory
During a master class at the Philharmonie de Paris.
Denis ALLARD / Philharmonie de Paris.
It took tenacity to break down prejudices and become a conductor.
It took women years to conquer this dream, but today they are living it to the fullest.
“An orchestra led by a woman is the resounding signal of a new era,” predicted the American pianist Antonia Louisa Brico, the first to conduct the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, in 1930, and to be internationally recognized.
In her lineage, today shine names like that of Nathalie Stutzmann (second woman in history, after Marin Alsop, to become director of a high-ranking American orchestra) and many others, highlighted before through initiatives such as the La Maestra competition, created in 2019 by the Philharmonie de Paris and the Paris Mozart Orchestra, a competition that has become an essential event in the international musical landscape.
For its third edition, the organizers brought together a jury chaired by Nathalie Stutzmann, who selected fourteen candidates from around the world.
The public will be able to attend the concerts which will accompany the three stages of the competition (quarter-final, semi-final and final) and which will lead the jury to award three prizes.
In France, the number of women at the head of permanent orchestras increased from 2.7% in 2019 to 10.8% in 2022: a spectacular jump, but still far from parity!
PG
La Maestra Competition, March 14, 16 and 17, at the Philharmonie de Paris.
lamaestra-paris.com/3e-edition/programme
Marilyn in Nevada
Blonde Dust
, by Tatiana de Rosnay, Éditions Albin Michel.
Press.
The Marilyn Monroe myth inevitably crosses the MeToo era, drawing new colors from it.
This mixture of extreme vulnerability and yet strength, of absolute star and woman abused by the patriarchy, generates more trouble and fascination than ever.
This is the very difficult filming of The
Unhinged
, by John Huston, with Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, in the Nevada desert.
The actress is staying at the famous Mapes Hotel in Reno with her husband, playwright Arthur Miller.
The couple is in crisis, she only thinks of Yves Montand with whom she had an affair shortly before.
Everyone is drinking and arguing, it's torridly hot, Marilyn is stuffing herself with pills... The good idea of the novel is to make us discover all this through the eyes of Pauline, the original young chambermaid. Frenchwoman, to whom Marilyn will offer her friendship in the simplest way possible.
Between the two women – one at the top of the social ladder, the other at the bottom (and unmarried mother following a relationship imposed by the assistant manager of the hotel) – there is, however, The essential common point: the feeling of being nothing more than an instrument in the hands of men.
The other great idea is that Pauline learned with her friend Billy-Pearl to ride mustangs, wild horses that need to be protected from hunters.
As a way for the author to appropriate the western with more feminine codes... Thus are embedded the life of Pauline, the moving meeting between the two women, the fantasized story of the shooting.
The evocation of the daily life of the hotel, vibrating with the presence of Marilyn within its walls and the phenomenal disorder in her suite, composes a chronicle coupled with a very successful comedy.
A sweet tribute to a woman whose aura seems eternal.
IP
Blond Dust
, by Tatiana de Rosnay, Éditions Albin Michel, 320 p., €21.90.