Encounter
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The actress will perform “Quixote”, directed by Gwenaël Morin, at the Jardin de Mons in Avignon. A cross-portrait between Cervantes’ hero and the actress, accustomed to cross-dressing.
For a long time she had only approached him through images: Picasso’s drawings, Orson Welles’ unfinished film and then the small wooden sculpture that her parents had brought back from Mexico and installed in the country house in Burgundy. Don Quixote, with his spear and his half-helmet, still looks thoughtfully out of the window. “I actually knew very little about it, recognizes Jeanne Balibar when we find her at home a month before the premiere of Quixote that she will play in the garden on rue de Mons in Avignon. I kept the idea of a heroic and ridiculous character. With also a lot of sympathy, perhaps because he always gets beaten up.” Then the director Gwenaël Morin asked her to play the role of the Knight of the Sad Face at the Avignon Festival. A month before the start of the festival, this is how Jeanne Balibar describes her debut with the character: “My first reaction was to say to myself: holy shit, how lucky I am. In this terrible world where I feel so lost, to be able to work for months on a character who escapes reality, what a privilege! This role came to meet my own desire to escape.” But three weeks later, she suggested we talk again: “As the country was plunged into im
