ARCHIVES 2014 / Irrévérence(s)

“I'm beginning to understand that I am an exile from my own gender. A voluntary exile. Struggling, resisting. Against the one I should have been.”*

*We Are the Birds of the Coming Storm by Lola Lafon

Lola Lafon and Marie-Agnès Gillot together. Two personalities whose boldness, work ethics, and persistence command respect. They like nothing more than questioning history and fate, and their confidence is also doubt. A doubt that finds its roots in their flexibility, the constant change of what they are, the metamorphosis of what they continue to be. Possibilities must remain open so that they can be “beyond help,” joyfully beyond help, in projection, in escape, and above all in desire. 

Prima ballerina at the Opéra de Paris and choreograher, Marie-Agnès Gillot has bent her body to the demands of classical dance since her childhood. While performing the repertoire of the Opéra de Paris and dancing for Pina Bausch, Maurice Béjart, or William Forsythe, she cultivated artistic affinities with directors and plastic artists like Pippo Delbono and Olivier Mosset.

The author of four books and three records, writer and musician Lola Lafon is just as comfortable in a bookstore as she is in a recording studio or a theatre, like the Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe or the Bouffes du Nord, for which she creates shows halfway between concerts and readings. In La Petite Communiste qui ne souriait jamais (The Little Communist Who Never Smiled), she blends story and history, gymnastics and geopolitics, to question the construction and representation of the female body, a recurring motif in her work.

VDC, April 2014

© photo Christophe Raynaud de Lage