A young, beautiful blond girl

Cast

Created by Gisèle Vienne
Texts Dennis Cooper & Catherine Robbe-Grillet
Music Peter Rehberg
Light Patrick Riou
Costumes Simone Hoffmann
Make-up Rebecca Flores
Dolls created by Raphaël Rubbens, Dorothéa Vienne-Pollak & Gisèle Vienne
Translation from English-American to French by Laurence Viallet

Created in collaboration with, and performed by Jonathan Capdevielle, Catherine Robbe-Grillet & Anja Röttgerkamp

Partners

Executive producer DACM

Coproducers Festival d’Avignon // Bonlieu Scène nationale d’Annecy // Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione – Modena // Centre chorégraphique national de Franche-Comté à Belfort dans le cadre de l’accueil-studio – Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication
Residency at Subsistances, Lyon (2005)

With the support of Centre National de la Danse for providing a rehearsal studio
With the support of Ministère de la Culture – DRAC Rhône-Alpes, Région Rhône-Alpes, Conseil Général de l’Isère & Ville de Grenoble
With the support of ADAMI & Etant donnés : The French-American Fund for the Performing Arts, a program of FACE
With the support of Institut International de la Marionnette & Compagnie des Indes for the video shooting

Aknowledgements to Minijy / Clara Rousseau, Séverine Péan, Sophie Metrich, Esther Welger Barboza,Théâtre de la Bastille, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Editions P.O.L, Ateliers de construction du Théâtre de Grenoble, Anne-Claire Rigaud, Patric Chiha, Jean-Paul Hirsch, Martin Lecarme, Antoine Masure, Paul Otchakov-Laurens, Geneviève Pelat, Béatrice Rozycki, Estelle Rullier, Yury Smirnov, Alexandre Vienne, Jean-Paul Vienne, Geneviève Vincent

Presentation

Having choreographed and staged Splendid’s (2000), Showroomdummies (2001), Stéréotypie (2003) and Tranen Veinzen (2004) with Etienne Bideau-Rey and our company, and more recently I Apologize (2004), and having centred my work on the relationship between natural and artificial bodies, I am now aiming to focus this latest show around the theme of an accident reconstruction.

Une belle enfant blonde / A young, beautiful blonde girl is the continuation of I Apologize. This new work, based on the link between fantasy and death, as the variations of an accident reconstruction, which question a univocal representation of reality and are part of an ambiguous slip between reality and fantasies. These shows both revolve around the relationship between natural and artificial bodies and the idea of disturbing strangeness.

A young, beautiful blonde girl evolves, first linearly, from the concept of a crime, in the presence of an audience made of articulated dolls resembling young girls of around twelve years of age. The reconstruction of this crime, in which performers, dolls and absentees are neither entirely real nor ghost-like, disturbs the natural order of the narration of the crime.
The characters all have their own experience, which makes them question their relationship with fantasy and the confusion that can arise – or not – with reality. This is a complex and infinite representation of a fantasy and the way it is repeated and modified. Several variations arise from the research done on the representation of an event and the expression of obsession and void.
This show presents the relationship between three people, in which internal deviances appear all the more clearly as they manifest themselves in a rigid and organised environment.
Dolls represent a dramatic antagonism: the one that happens in the body, the link between eroticism and death. In spite of their physical presence, they can also represent absence, void and disincarnate spirits. Their bodies are the intermediate between a real body and a body that is a merely imagined object of desire.
Dennis Cooper has written an autobiographical text from which Catherine Robbe-Grillet improvises, while adding some of her own autobiographical elements to the mix. Jonathan Capdevielle plays a character with a blurred sexual identity and split personality that allows him to investigate his own death. Anja Röttgerkamp, first a victim of a harrowing environment, later reveals her own sound voyeurism, which she obviously greatly enjoys.
The three performers begin by playing the lines they have been given, but soon seem to take charge to play out their own agenda, their own fantasies, and wonder about the relations between eroticism and death.

Une belle enfant blonde / A young, beautiful blonde girl is no less exalted than its diptych counterpart, I Apologize. It encompasses the same dark and passionate atmosphere, leaving adolescent exaltation for a more calm and organised maturity.

History

Press

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