Do you dream of them?
At one point, I had an incredible dream that came back with extreme clarity. I was in the warm-up room, announcing to those present that I was going to show them how to fly. I ran, I spread my arms, I took off.
You can’t imagine the well-being I felt. It turns out that at the time I was doing a show called The Centaur and the Animal with Japanese butoh dancer Ko Murobushi. There was a horse whose very gentle gallop led to this dream.
Can you imagine the end of Zingaro?
Necessarily. I want to evolve! There is the troupe which, for me, is ephemeral. The day I quit or break my pipe, it will end in a second. We cannot resume the repertoire, already in our lifetime. Unable to go up Chimera: each show was tailor-made for personalities and horses who are no longer here.
There remains the question of the building built for us in 1989 by the architect Patrick Bouchain. What to do with it? What can we also do with the restaurant with all these objects which are the remains of our creations?
Patrick told me that it should be burned. If it’s to make bad horse shows, I’d actually prefer that it no longer exists.
How was this born? Exile Cabaret – Persian Women?
This show is part of a cycle on exile. The first was devoted to the Yiddish world, the second to the Irish Travelers, these gypsies from Ireland. The third was to focus on art and exile.
But I was caught up in the news, the women’s revolt in Iran, the fate they are facing today in Afghanistan. I researched and discovered that Scythian civilizations were matriarchal.
These are nomadic societies, which also means that the horse is the equalizer of genders. Women fought alongside men. Their revolt today refers to this ancient reality.
From the outside, Zingaro seems very masculine…
This is false. The last bastion of so-called male superiority was strength.
In our company, I have always said that there is no difference between men and women. It’s a human on a horse.
It’s a coincidence, but currently all the grooms, the people who take care of the stalls and who cart the wheelbarrows, are women. The most physical work is carried out by them.
What comes first when you’re putting on a show like this?
I read a lot, but I don’t travel. I am not going to the country concerned by the show. You cannot claim to know a culture by spending a few months, even a year, there.
I prefer to rely on people who know Iran well. I read a lot of poetry, for example. That of Persian and Afghan women is sensational, I am thinking in particular of landaysthese lightning poems, two scathing sentences.
It’s sharp, sensual and violent. We find them in the show.
