"Why wouldn't a guy who goes to a rap concert go to the theater?"
: As he prepares to embody
Gatsby the Magnificent
on the boards of a major Parisian theatre, rapper Fianso says he wants to be a
“bridge”
between urban and classical cultures.
“I am looking for new sensations and the theater is the perfect place to experiment and push my limits
,” explains the 35-year-old artist in an interview with AFP.
To discover
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Read alsoFrom rap to theatre, Fianso becomes
the Magnificent Gatsby
at the Maison de la Radio
From Wednesday and for five evenings in the great hall of the Châtelet theater (more than 2000 seats), Sofiane Zermani alias Fianso will push her limits in the title role of an adaptation of Francis Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece,
Gatsby the magnificent
.
An emblematic text that he has already interpreted.
It was in 2018, during the Avignon Festival, in a creation for France Culture directed by Alexandre Plank for the staging and Issam Krimi for the music.
From this experience, a radio drama was recorded in stride.
It was the performance in Avignon that changed the rapper's life.
Bridge between urban and classical cultures
“Avignon, it was a click because it is there that I proved to myself that I could do it (…). And it is also there that I proved to those who came to see me that I was serious in my approach
, ”says the one who has never studied or taken drama lessons.
A year after his "click", he returned to the city of the popes to interpret
the death of Achille
, an unpublished text by Wajdi Mouawad, the current director of the Théâtre de la Colline.
“The problem with theater is that once you've been stung, it's very, very hard not to go back,”
he jokes.
Having become essential in the world of rap in 2017 with his first album
Bandit Dirty
, he has since, without abandoning rap (his last album
La direction
was released in May 2021), multiplied the hats: producer and talent scout, host of a web-TV, actor... Thanks to his notoriety, he obtains opportunities to develop his other passion: acting. In 2018, he enters the very cozy world of the seventh art, playing alongside Reda Kateb in the film
Les enemy brothers
of David Oelhoffen.
The following year, he played in the series
Les Sauvages
by Rebecca Zlotowski and Sabri Louatah.
Self-taught and workaholic, he has a string of projects.
On February 17, he will be, with the rising star of the cinema Dali Benssalah, on the poster of the series Arte
Alger Confidential
and has just finished the filming of a Netflix series.
If it is up to us, artists, to take the first step, the public on the other side must take the other half of the way.
If it doesn't, what can we do?
But it is the theatre, and more broadly live performance, that fascinates him.
Last fall, he was invited by the Opéra de Lyon to narrate the tale written and composed by Sergei Prokofiev in 1936, Pierre et le Loup.
A first, for those who confess to having
“never set foot in the opera”
.
“For me, going on stage to sing or to play is the same thing.
But the question I've always asked myself is why we don't address the same audience.
Why wouldn't a guy who goes to a rap concert go to the theater?
, he asks.
By breaking the boundaries between scenes, the artist wants
“to be a sort of bridge between urban and classical cultures”
.
If he recognizes
"that there are cultures that we forbid ourselves when we come from a certain background"
, he also believes that it is by proposing renewed creations with headliners not only from 'a classic circle, that the big theaters will manage to open up more.
And to conclude,
“If it's up to us, artists, to take the first step, the public on the other side must take the other half of the way.
If he doesn't, what can we do?”
.
