Skip to main content

Pinch yourself: Aurélia Thierrée perfects the art of the steal on stage

Bells and Spells casts the French star as a kleptomaniac in a performance that leaves the audience guessing

In her mystifying shows, Aurélia Thierrée has crossed the stage in an upside-down sedan, blown cigarette smoke through her ears and poured wine while trapped in a chest, her limbs spilling out of drawers. So it’s disarming to find this saucer-eyed queen of the uncanny sitting on a simple folding chair, sipping a can of Coke, in her attic room at Montmartre’s Théâtre de l’Atelier. You half expect the contents of the dressing table to disappear or the pictures to come alive as they do in her new show, Bells and Spells, staged several twisting flights of stairs below. But the only disruption comes from her cat, who stretches out on a yoga mat by our feet, scratches around in the litter tray and eventually hops into Thierrée’s lap. He is as sleek and mischievous a presence as his owner is on stage.

Bells and Spells, which comes to the UK in May, is the dreamlike odyssey of a woman who is both light-footed and light-fingered. Thierrée swipes silverware from her suitor during a tango, nicks exhibits in a museum and even steals her way into a medieval picture.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2XUKZlu
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more