L'Autre [avant-première]

After Signature, a choreography created in 2010 with the dancer and choreographer Claire Richard, Françoise Gillard has gathered actors from the troupe of the Comédie-Française to embark them on a new dance adventure. Going beyond the boundaries of their discipline, the actors will work on movement and reinvent their relationship to the body –bodies of earth or rubber, bodies that are generous, aerial or athletic. This experience –physical and intimate– is also a way of conceiving the collective differently, of confronting one’s own otherness. In a mobile set and using video media, this fascinating and frightening “other” becomes a terrain of exploration yielding multiple perspectives –artistic, human, and societal. Through solo, duet or group performances, this atypical ballet body blows conventions wide open by embracing a delightful creative freedom.

Françoise Gillard et Claire Richard, the authors and directors
Françoise Gillard entered the Brussels Royal Conservatory in 1991, in the class of Pierre Laroche, and graduated with a first prize for performance. She joined the Comédie-Française in 1997 and became the 507th sociétaire in 2002. She notably played Roxane in Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac directed by Denis Podalydès, the title role in Molière’s Psyché directed by Véronique Vella, and sang in the Cabaret Boris Vian directed by Serge Bagdassarian. She was also Anouilh’s Antigone for Marc Paquien, Stella for Lee Breuer in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, Cassandra for Denis Marleau in Seneca’s Agamemnon, Alarica for Andrzej Seweryn in Audiberti's Le Mal Court and created the role of “she” in Lars Norén’s Pure, directed by the author. Fond of crossing artistic languages, Françoise Gillard is interested in choreography and in 2010 performed Signature, a show inspired by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui that she created under the supervision of Claire Richard. With The Other she is continuing the collaboration with Claire Richard, a dancer and performer who, since the start of her career in 1980, has participated in productions by François Raffinot, Joëlle Bouvier and Mathilde Monnier, as well as in more than twenty of Claude Brumachon’s shows. Since 1999, she has been working on actors’ movements in theatre projects. Working regularly with Christophe Rauck, Claire Richard designed the choreography in his production of Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro in the Salle Richelieu in 2007. She once again worked with the Comédiens-Français on Jean-René Lemoine’s Erzuli Dahomey, Goddess of Love directed by Éric Génovèse at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in 2012.

L’Autre est présenté en avant-première au CENTQUATRE-PARIS, avant sa création au Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier du 5 au 22 février 2015.