La Vie D’Artiste

LA VIE D’ARTISTE

RACCONTATA A MIA FIGLIA 

uno spettacolo musicale by

JÉRÔME SAVARY

with

JEROME SAVARY

NINA SAVARY

orchestra from vivo

directed by e scene JÉRÔME SAVARY

musical directorGÉRARD DAGUERRE

costumesMICHEL DUSSARRAT

sound designOLIVIER “ALDO” PEDRON

lighting designPASCAL NOËL

collaborazione artistica LÉONIDAS STRAPATSAKIS

The show premiered at the Teatro della Tosse in Genoa on 3 February 2005. The story is well known: in his days as an elderly artist, Charlie Chaplin dreamed of acting with his second daughter, Victoria, and this was to have been his last film.

But a few weeks before shooting, Victoria ran away through the window of the family home with a handsome circus magician, and the film was never made. Chaplin then sank into melancholy.

My daughter Nina looks so much like Victoria that I sometimes wonder whether she isn't Charlie's daughter.

Let me reassure you at once: I don't think I am the great Chaplin. But like him, as I reach the edge of the joyful forest that has been my long career, I wanted to perform with my daughter. It must be said that from the day she was born Nina shared every moment of my artistic life. Still in her cradle, she changed hotels every night, and when she woke the only faces she knew were the badly made-up faces of her father and mother. She was three when I directed Stravinsky and Ramuz's L'histoire du soldat at La Scala in Milan. I decided to add Nina to the company, and asked the theatre's management to add to La Scala's legendary poster: 'In the role of Ninetta: Nina Savary.'

'But that character doesn't exist!' exclaimed the artistic director.

'In my production, yes – I invented the role myself.'

And so Nina, who could barely walk, crossed the stage of La Scala in a lovely white classical tutu, holding her mother's hand.

When she reached the middle of the stage she sang 'la la la la!' All of which allows her to write in her biography: she began her singing career at the age of three on the stage of La Scala in Milan.

Later, with her sister Manon, she played an elf in A Midsummer Night's Dream in Avignon.

When I understood that she had definitely chosen to be an artist, I became a strict father. She needed serious training.

Today there are pseudo-schools that produce stars formatted for 'reality shows' in three months. Nina followed fifteen years of musical studies: piano, guitar, opera singing and finally jazz. When the delightful Clotilde Courau, who was playing Irma in Irma la Douce, stepped out to throw herself into the arms of a handsome prince, Nina replaced her and triumphed.

Da parte mia, incatenato da regie e regie by spettacoli sempre più grossi e sempre meno tournables (stanziali), perché troppo cari.

I remembered my beginnings with the Magic Circus, when I performed in small provincial theatres and gyms, on makeshift stages in university canteens or at the back of a barn. I wanted to take to the road again to feel those precious sensations.

Our show is the opposite of a one-man show. It is a real show, with images, music, songs, magic tricks and doves coming out of the hat.

I tell of the crazy Sixties and Seventies and the early Eighties. I recall May '68 and those exciting moments when I too shouted in front of the walls of the Palace of the Popes, 'Vilar, Béjart, Salazar – fight!'; the Beatles, who came as a group with Cat Stevens to see my shows and admired their 'putrid sound'; David Bowie, a young boy of seventeen, beautiful as a god, who was part of the Magic Circus for a while; my friends Arrabal, Copi – who began his stage career with us – and Jodorowsky with his delirious happenings. I recall the jazz musicians I had the incredible luck to meet and spend time with when, at eighteen, I worked in New York as assistant to a famous jazz photographer.

Billie Holiday, the great lady who, banned from Manhattan for drug use, sang in a burger joint at the far end of Brooklyn; the great Monk, who called me 'Frenchy' and played 'Blue Monk' just for me in a deserted Five Spot Café; Lenny Bruce, with whom I shared a landlady and who became my friend; Jack Kerouac and Coltrane, who hated and loved each other at the same time.

I recall Argentina and its melancholy, Buenos Aires and its tango, the pampas where I was born.

The crazy Seventies, when AIDS did not yet exist but the pill did. All this told to a girl – mine – who at twenty has known caresses only through latex, and who lives in a world eaten away by economic crisis and unemployment.

It is a very special show, bitter, sad and funny at the same time – at least that is what the audience seems to think as it applauds us every night.

******

I became a man of the theatre, a juggler, so as not to leave the world of children. In theatre the actor plays, like a child; in fact children, without knowing it, make theatre: they invent characters, costumes and situations, they talk to animals. One day princes, another day slaves; one day cops and another… In their bedroom or the garage they build cardboard castles. They invent psychological theatre playing 'mummies and daddies', they discover Freud without knowing it, playing doctors… They sing, dance and act without any restraint. Then one day, at the fateful moment of life called 'the age of reason', they are told they must become reasonable, that animals do not talk and that above all they must study. So children reluctantly give up theatre and imagination; they no longer dress up, they no longer sing, and they no longer invent characters or fables. I have tried to remain a child: I have kept building my cardboard castles, holding fairies in my arms, killing villains with a slash of my fangs, imagining myself king and bandit and leading armies of actors towards the world of imagination. It is a bold bet; people are not at all kind to children who play at being grown-ups. So far life has smiled on me fairly well, and the Circus is still there. The 'Old Glories' of the Grand Magic Circus have scattered along the roads – old, children perhaps… but eternal children, creatures of paradise… In this time I have created more than 150 shows across theatre, opera and musicals – but that is another story… I decided to tell my life, the life of an Artist, of any artist at the service of his audience, drawing on my experiences and encounters through music and songs; I will tell of successes and failures, but in my own way and with my daughter Nina. My faithful friend Gérard Daguerre at the piano, together with the orchestra, will accompany us on this musical journey.

Jérôme Savary

The fragility and poetry of theatre, the circus taste for display and for the 'number', in a show that the 'magician' Savary wanted to 'give' to his daughter Nina, to tell her, through the tools of the stage, about his extraordinary experience as an artist. A life devoted to the stage and told – on stage – to his daughter, herself an artist. Jérôme Savary poetically rewrites his past and creates a show with a circus, almost Fellini-like flavour, with music as the thread of a unique destiny. From Argentina, his country of origin, to New York and Paris, Savary weaves musical moments – from Billie Holiday to David Bowie, from jazz to brass-band tunes – into the story of an artistic journey through crucial historical moments, such as the May '68 movement reflected in the experience of the Grand Magic Circus, which Savary led. Thanks to Nina's musical talent, Savary recalls, with tenderness and small magic tricks, the Paris of Arrabal and Copi and memorable anecdotes such as his meetings with John Lennon and David Bowie, who as a very young man was for a while part of Savary's Grand Magic Circus. In the background, history and great changes in society and behaviour; at the centre of a kaleidoscope of sounds and emotions, theatre. Articles. Photographs are free of publication rights for press use. Please always credit the photographer.

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