ARCHIVES 2014 / La Foudre

Lydie Dattas relates her encounter with lion tamer Alexandre Bouglione one night after a show at the Cirque d'hiver. “Handing me my ticket back, the bohemian with her jungle eyes predicted, 'You will marry my son!'” The two lovers are like struck by a fireball, and not only on that first day. “When Alexandre seized the ebony neck of his lute, notes shuddered with fear. (...) I would read to him and he would listen until, murder gleaming in his eyes like a heat stroke, he would break up with me in the middle of a sentence. At night he would come back to me like a lazy lion comes back to a carcass. (...) Leaning on his caravan, with its mud-caked wheels, a Sinto mockingly reminded him of the law of his tribe: 'I play the lute, too: I uproot a tree, I use a man's guts as strings—and I play!'”

Dominique Féret, April 2014

Lydie Dattas is twenty when her poems are discovered by the poet Jean Grosjean, who works as a reader for Gallimard. The letters they start exchanging eventually lead to the publication in 1970 by Mercure de France of a first book, Noone. It is only in 1999 that Lydie Dattas relates her first meeting with poetry and light when, only three years old, having fallen sick, she was entrusted to the care of a nun whose kindness saved her (The Experience of Kindness). The daughter of a virtuoso organist, she starts wondering very early about the absence of women in the history of art. She does, however, have a very clear vision of what a great actress is, as her mother is a tragedian. In La Foudre (Lightning), published in 2011, she paints the portrait of her first family, that of her childhood, and of the adoptive gipsy family she chose for herself, the family of the lion tamer Alexandre Romanès, with whom she founded the Lyida Romanès circus. After their break-up, she published Les Amants lumineux (The Luminous Lovers) and Le Livre des anges (The Book of Angels), before starting work on La Chaste vie de Jean Genet. Published in 2006, this isn't the first book the famous author prompted her to write. At the very start of their long friendship, in 1977, his taunts led to her writing a cutting and deep poem, La Nuit spirituelle (The Spiritual Night), a powerful response which started as a letter to Genet and ended up being its own book.

Marion Canelas, April 2014


France Culture et le Festival d'Avignon se sont associés dans le désir de faire connaître à un large public l'oeuvre de Lydie Dattas. La diffusion de La Foudre sera suivie le 24 juillet par La Nuit spirituelle lue par Mireille Herbstmeyer dans le cadre du Cycle de Musiques sacrées et captée à Avignon le 8 juillet.