The most humanist of composers to account for the plight of migrants. With the Baby Doll show, presented on Wednesday 10 November at the Cité de la Musique in Paris, the director Marie-Eve Signeyrole intends to report on the multiple hardships that candidates for forced exile can go through, wherever they are. are coming.
Relying for this on Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, a sort of compendium of the European aesthetic ideal, she offers a hybrid creation on stage, based on dance, to deliver a “documentary fiction” with the aim of confronting the Western public has a problem that it is “far from being able to identify, think and judge, while providing it with some keys, sometimes poetic, sometimes real, on what could happen to us too”, explains the one who designed the booklet and the scenography.
To better stick to a painful reality that sometimes goes beyond the imaginable by avoiding fantasies, and which concerns thousands of Syrian, Indian, Sudanese, or Afghan women, Marie-Eve Signeyrole based this show of 1h30 on real stories and testimonies that she herself has collected: “I feel responsible and even guilty of my ignorance and my passivity so far. I find it criminal not to help human beings in danger of death, in a state of survival, who ask us for the recognition of their humanity by our welcome and our benevolence. It is a question of reason and duty, and not of choice ”.
Interweaving these stories, she invites spectators to follow the journey of Hourria, a young Eritrean of nineteen years old, on her way to Europe. With her, a doll, which she will wear hidden under her clothes to make people crossed on her way believe that she is pregnant, and thus avoid multiple violence.
Balm for the soul and the heart in front of this reality, or on the contrary amplifier of the strong emotions which should touch the public, this famous 7th symphony of Beethoven was chosen by the director for the rhythm of its four movements, kind of ‘call to travel. “Music allows us to be in pure emotion and sometimes to” relieve “the violence of this reality,” she explains, specifying that she modeled the structure of the show on these 4 musical parts. While the Orchester de chambre de Paris, conducted by Marzena Diakun, will perform the symphony, Yom, clarinetist and specialist in Kelzmer music – whose themes of exile and uprooting are linked – will also officiate, taking up the themes of the symphony to make them evolve, and thus decompartmentalize the genres. For their part, the three performers, Annie Hanauer, Stencia Yambogaza, and Tarek Aït Meddour will embody through their dance this dark but necessary epic.
Baby doll, by Marie-Eve Signeyrole, Paris Chamber Orchestra, dir. Marzena Diakun, Yom (clarinet), on Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. Wednesday November 10, 8:30 p.m., Cité de la Musique, Paris 19th.