Romain Brau, the protean artist who electrifies the stage and the screen

At the age of 12, Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, the character of Baron whyby Italo Calvino, left the table exclaiming: “I said I don’t want to and I don’t want to!” The same day, he decided to lead a life different from the one that society had chosen for him by climbing a tree from which, until the end of his days, he would observe the world with a new perspective. “Through this insolent character, I dealt with the theme of freedom and that of surpassing the limits of man, whose being is in perpetual metamorphosis,” explained Calvino. In Romain Brau’s shows, we find the same insolence as that of Cosimo: this crazy desire to transform oneself and break the codes to access a rebellious consciousness. Pleasure, first of all.

Seeing this singer, performer and actor on stage is always an encounter with intelligence, sensuality, transgression, self-deprecation, melancholy. Each text echoes another, the songs resonate, connect, like the branches of trees. Balanced unsteadily on 16 cm Louboutin pumps, from the top of funny constructions placed on stage, Romain Brau declaims texts of cutting poetry about our society. He sings, moves and entertains the audience through an incessant series of metamorphoses which pass through the voice as much as the body.

Path of otherness

A protean artist, this nocturnal bird, with its long feathers of different colors each time, fascinates. Throughout the shows in which he participates (such as the weekend entitled Chaillot Experience #3 – Cabarets scheduled for November 21 to 23 at the Théâtre de Chaillot, in Paris), he appears like a strange creature out of a Dalí painting: long, incendiary hair, ballerina head carriage and androgynous appearance. From his frail and feminine silhouette emerges an enchanting baritone voice which depicts an imaginary world inhabited by the characters he alternately embodies. Through his glamorous disguises, he advocates the fluidity of identity and claims the art of cross-dressing as a performance well beyond gender.

Trained in Paris, at the Madame Arthur cabaret, which he helped to relaunch in 2015 (while continuing his other artistic projects) and where he performs regularly, he addresses the public “with the desire to transmit values ​​of tolerance and self-acceptance,” he says. Inspired by Kafka, Nabokov, Flaubert and Ovid, as well as by the American photographer Cindy Sherman, Romain Brau advocates the concept of metamorphosis as an engine of freedom: “The human being asks himself the question “Who am I?” and observes that the unity of the “me” is not obvious.”

The most important and incisive moment in my life as an artist is the one when I dared to lose my bearings by working on my fluidity

Romain Brau

He then sees metamorphosis as a “fiction, a creative path which allows us to approach the subjectivity of being.” And to discover oneself through this path of otherness… “The most important and incisive moment in my life as an artist is the one where I dared to lose my bearings by working on my fluidity,” he continues. Everyone should work on this. This would avoid many implacable points of view, convictions set in stone that arise from fear. And unacceptable behavior.”

Universal talent

Passionate about drawing and fashion since childhood, this son of a Parisian figure skating teacher and an osteopath wrote his life script by rejecting a model who bored him: “As a child, I went to my lessons drawing and in museums wearing little Lacoste polo shirts, he says. But the pink and blue shadows of the strange faces in Egon Schiele’s paintings attracted me much more than the codes of a formatted world. » As a teenager, her aunt Lili became her model: “She was a sort of eccentric Loulou de La Falaise, wearing Christian Lacroix, Martin Margiela or Jean Paul Gaultier outfits, matched with enormous African jewelry,” recalls -he. At 19, he joined the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, in the fashion section.

His next-door neighbors are then chrysalises in the making: the Georgian Demna Gvasalia, current artistic director of Balenciaga, and the Belgian Glenn Martens, today a fashion designer known for his deconstruction of genres. A polymorphous creature with a flamboyant aura, both woman and man, Romain Brau attracts the eye of avant-garde haute couture. After his graduation, he began a career as a model – for Dries Van Noten, Versace and Roberto Cavalli – and began producing stage costumes for the world of dance and music. His sculptural and phantasmagorical creations cover the moving bodies of Lana Del Rey, the singers of the group La Femme, or immense dancers like Marie-Agnès Gillot and François Chaignaud (with whom he is currently preparing two shows, one in Chaillot and the other at the Louvre).

In performance disciplines

A dancer himself, after a long course of figure skating starting at the age of 6, he explored the discipline of performance by performing at Art Basel and the Venice Biennale with choreographers like Ryan Heffington. Spotted by directors, he also pursued an acting career: he was notably seen on the posters of Glitter shrimpa comedy by Cédric Le Gallo and Maxime Govare about a gay water polo team released in 2019, and alongside Nathalie Baye in Haute Coutureby Sylvie Ohayon, in 2021. At the moment, he is multiplying projects and even appears in the series Franklin (Apple TV+), worn by Michael Douglas.

He plays the Chevalier d’Éon, a French spy from the 18th century.^e century who lived dressed as a man for forty-nine years and as a woman for the next thirty-two years of his life. “Man or woman, what does it matter! I love saying I’m a fairy. To be magical is to transform, to adapt,” says Romain Brau in a tone full of Warholian humor. This same tone which runs through the songs of his first album, entitled I am tomorrowpunctuated by danceable techno and wildly free pop art colors, which he will stage on October 8, at the Olympia, in Paris.

Album “I am tomorrow”, French Parade, released October 4. In concert on October 8, at the Olympia, in Paris.