For more than three hours, Cécile Laporte confides her life to spectators in a relationship of raw and unvarnished intimacy, with humor and generosity. Marion Duval, director and friend of the performer, wanted a real encounter and not the presentation of a ready-to-consume show. Here is a performance of joyful humanity, which takes the direct form of an irreverent and salutary cabaret.
An activist with overflowing humanity
Who is she, this long actress sitting like a child on a stool, facing us but with her back to a white screen? An unknown to the general public, tells us her friend and director Marion Duval, who came to introduce the show. The lights are turned on in the room and immediately the relationship with the spectators turns into a knowing dialogue. “I make people blossom” confides to us this tall blonde girl who seems to not care about appearance and moves forward without filter. “Calamity Jane,” she replies, citing her clown name. Because it’s a clown, Cécile, who is part of the Laughing doctorthis battalion of artists who arrive in hospital rooms to make children suffering from serious illnesses or in palliative care laugh. She gently explodes the hierarchy between nurses and doctors when she unexpectedly bumps into an intern while acting like a dog. It’s because she shakes up everything, this child woman grows up too quickly, whose only vital concern is to bring resources of happiness and humanity to a suffering world.
How to laugh with death?
©Mathilda Olmi
Laughing with dying children, with a group of disabled people gathered together to celebrate the end of the year, laughing at cancer and at the psychiatric institution that takes you in when you propose to create a musical there, it’s is somewhat the specialty of this activist with a big heart who refuses the inevitability of misfortune and sadness. So she will tell us about her life, her crazy adventures, her madness and her anxieties. When, at twenty years old, she found herself alone, with a license barely in her pocket, driving a group of disabled people in the Pyrenees, without any experience, and she came through with flying colors by telling us scenes from an anthology with supporting photos, it’s irresistible. We believe her, with proof to back it up, there are the photos, but of course it’s theater and she will seduce us. She plays the clown, and it is undoubtedly the clown scene, tacked on and too long, which is too much in the show. It is found in oncology departments, then in the STERN of Notre Dame des Landes, boots in the mud, diving naked like other southerners to counter the stunned CRS.
« Fuck for Forest »
©Mathilda Olmi
The adventure with Calamity Cécile is never over and spans around ten moments. In Switzerland, we find her in a collective of environmental activists who create an amateur site for pornographic videos, Fuck for Forestto finance reforestation in South America. Not even afraid, neither of sex, nor of men, here she undresses, asks the audience for panties, goes around them to find herself horizontal, doing a plank, almost naked, carried by the wave of spectators until to the stage. At the psychiatric hospital, Cécile already imagines herself as a musical comedy star, but she doesn’t appreciate the fact that two nurses surround her. On stage, giant puppets (Séverine Besson) transform the ritual of the psychiatric hospital into a Mexican crucifixion, games on space and power relations, created by Marion Duval and Luca Depietri (KKuK), throw the heroine into a world where like Don Quixote she will fight against all the mills of oppression and power. A beautiful form of freedom.
Helene Kuttner
