“Simone en aside”, “La Galerie”… three favorites of the festival
♦ “I spoke my own language so little”
At the Espace Roseau dyers until July 30
“I…I don’t talk about it.” But I still have a heavy heart to have been expelled from my country. » The words of Jeannine, who had to leave Algiers in 1962 and settle with her family in France, evoke a heartbreak that she kept silent for fifty-five years… Until her daughter discovered her notebooks and they went back together the thread of its private history, but also the political history of France.
For this work of memory, Agnès Renaud, the daughter of Jeannine, who staged the show, chose the setting of a popular radio program and a fictional character, Carmen Sintès. At the Amicale du Soleil, “the radio of all repatriates from Algeria” broadcast live and in public, two hosts received Carmen’s best friend and a renowned writer with whom she corresponded all her life. Four talented actresses animated this docufiction full of finesse and humor where even General de Gaulle with his emphatic ” I understood you “ is part of the game, embodied with a military jacket and cap by the irresistible Pauline Méreuze.
On tour in Saint-Quentin on December 8, in Abbeville on January 10, 2023, in Pont-Sainte-Maxence on January 27 and in Soissons on March 28.
♦ “Simone aside”
At 3 suns until July 30
The bun tight on the nape of the neck, the tailored suit over an ivory blouse, the matching earrings, Sophie Caritté brings Simone Veil back to life more real than life. Until this particular voice, calm, almost authoritarian… but where fragility often insinuates itself. In a moving solo-on-stage, written and soberly directed by Arnaud Aubert, with subtle lighting by Estelle Ryba, the whole life of this extraordinary woman is offered to us. Her happy youth in a loving family in Nice, her terrible months in the extermination camps, her years on the bench, her political battles, her faith in Europe, her life as a wife and mother…
If the career of this public figure is not unknown to us, we follow him again with pleasure as he commands admiration… “We women shake things up”, she says, with a knowing smile. Didn’t she do it at the podium of the National Assembly, when, Minister of Health under the presidency of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and in front of an audience almost exclusively male, she defended the right to abortion? But behind the shell she has forged pierces a pain that has never ceased. “There is one thing that I will always regret very much and that can never be filled, and that is the fact that there was no connection between them, my children and mum. That mother didn’t know my children; but above all that my children were not known mum, and that my husband was not known mum either. » This bond so deep to her mother, so loved, who died of typhus in the camps, Sophie Caritté says it with infinite delicacy.
♦ ” The gallery “
At La Scala until July 30
After the Scala Paris opened in 2018, here is the Scala Provence included during the Avignon “off” Festival in a former Art Deco style cinema with four rooms of different sizes, which will be open all year round. Among the shows offered, breathtaking acrobats from Quebec who know how to handle humor as well as the towel! On music played live by a saxophonist with a very high wobbly bun, they chain, on a frenzied rhythm, spectacular numbers, with perfect control, competing in feats as dizzying as they are perilous around a huge metal wheel, a secure seesaw, a flexible and mobile Russian beam…
The bodies, ever more elastic in their three-piece suits, play with codes and conventions when, on an immense white canvas, they slide and twirl, buried under an explosion of colors… An aerial and virtuoso journey to the borders of the circus, music and art.