Winner of the Hans Reinhart Ring 2024, the highest Swiss award for the performing arts, actress and director Lilo Baur received her prize on October 31 during a ceremony in Zug. Portrait of a mischievous and humorous artist who worked hard to make a living from her passion.
After a nomination for the Molières, French Theater Prize, in 2020, Lilo Baur, 66, is rewarded this year with the highest Swiss distinction in the performing arts: the Hans Reinhart Ring. A real surprise for the Aargau artist. “It’s quite incredible. (…) It takes me back to my childhood, to my dreams, when I discovered my passion for theater and said to myself: ‘we must not give up, we must go until the end'”, testifies Lilo Baur in the Vertigo show on October 30.
>> Read the article: Aargau actress and director Lilo Baur receives the Hans Reinhart Ring
The theater and her career have allowed her many meetings and wonderful trips, but returning to Switzerland, where it all began, is a source of great emotion for Lilo Baur. “Today, that’s it, I receive a reward for my passion and I find it incredible,” she emphasizes.
Movement and silence
From her small village in Aargau, Lilo Baur has taken the steps of a brilliant journey one by one. She trained at the International School of Jacques Lecoq, after being rejected in Zurich. “The course was called ‘Movement-mime-theatre’ and I had always had an aversion to mime because I wasn’t very good at it. But movement is life, the body, the “observation, the senses… Jacques Lecoq taught us to observe our body (…) I find it very interesting to observe people, body language. It still pursues me,” she says.
She then began her career in London where she joined the Complicite company in 1989. Then she collaborated with the director Peter Brook, who taught her listening and the importance of silence. “The best thing about him was that we had the impression when we spoke to him that we were the only person who mattered at that moment.” Lilo Baur becomes his assistant. She collaborated with him on “Les fragments” by Beckett, and “Warum Warum” in particular. Since the 2000s, productions have multiplied, as have collaborations, with among others the Comédie-Française.
Leave room for improvisation
Lilo Baur is a director, but she is also on stage all the time. She works on the body and on improvisation. When she embarks on a project, she always begins with a few days of improvisation on the chosen theme, without using the text. “Obviously, everyone has read their role, everyone knows the play, but it really gives you material to work on afterwards,” she emphasizes.
Lilo Baur is also an opera director. A stricter framework, far from the improvisation that theater allows. The artist loves music, she was born into a family of music lovers with a father who was a fan of Joséphine Baker who played the piano, and a brother who made it his profession. “I wanted to do theater and not piano. But knowing music helped me a lot for my opera career,” remembers the artist.
And what she brings to opera singers is this desire to go further into the body and movement, a kind of theatrical curiosity. “What I notice when I work with young singers is that I am no longer dealing only with voices, but with real actors. It’s a treat,” she says.
A mischievous and humorous woman, Lilo Baur was awarded the Hans Reinhart Ring on October 31 at the Casino Theater in Zug in the presence of Federal Councilor Ignazio Cassis.
Comments collected by Pierre Philippe Cadert
Web adaptation: Lara Donnet
