Alone on stage, Coline Serreau reveals the behind the scenes of her art

the joys of creation, but also its difficulties, its hazards and its learning. Coline Serreau, known in particular in cinema for her work as an actress and director, screenwriter and dialogue writer, went alone on stage in front of the audience of the Festival des Tragos. Her show La Belle Histoire de Coline Serreau explores multiple facets of this free artist, whose work is anything but one-dimensional. "People know me mainly from cinema, but they don't know how much else I've done, " she says. "I've been a musician, a circus performer and I've done a lot of theater, obviously, but I've also written and directed a lot of operas. This show is a bit like saying all that, and it's also the desire to share moments of joy and criticism, in the background."

This rich artistic journey began in her early years. There was her family , "very cultured, but broke" and her happy schooling at the Beauvallon school, launched by Marguerite Soubeyrand in 1929, a pioneer of active pedagogy. "These people were wonderful and their philosophy inspired me a lot." In her show, Coline Serreau fondly remembers the "five minutes of culture" offered each morning to discover a work. "That's what remains today," she says on stage, for her and for many former students, who also had the freedom to make their voices heard democratically, to play barefoot and to climb trees, in the middle of nature. This taste for the heights of the peaks gave her the physical strength necessary to progress in her passion for trapeze when she entered the National Circus School in 1977, founded by Annie Fratellini and Pierre Étaix in 1974. A step which, among many others, would mark her understanding of acting and writing, crossed by a taste for humor and the mixing of genres, as when she worked with hip-hop dancers for shows under the big top of a circus or at the Bastille Opera. She also shows video excerpts to the public, which are interspersed among other moments filmed behind the scenes of her shoots throughout her one-woman show.

"Every art is there to say something. There are things that can be said with one art, and others that can be said with another. I have never accepted limiting myself to something," the artist states.

“The public teaches me my job”

Although it is articulated between words, gestures and video, the show "is constantly evolving," explains Coline Serreau. With the audience, it's down to the last detail, I adjust according to how they react, not simply to please them, but to touch them as best as possible. The audience teaches me my job, it's them who give me something. Live performance is irreplaceable. In cinema, you learn once every three years, but when you're acting, you learn every night."

What the artist seeks above all is to connect his life with that of others "through humor, through self-mockery. There is a philosophy behind all this, which is not verbalized. People then feel it or they don't."

If Coline Serreau shows us fits of laughter on film sets or recounts a failed performance of Othello in a hilarious way, the choices she makes from the "enormous material" of her experience, as she calls it, often have an underlying critical perspective.

For the video excerpt of the trapeze act she performs in La Belle Verte (1996) and of which she shows a passage under different axes in the show "I was 48 years old , she remembers. It is therefore also interesting to see that one can absolutely be an athlete. Life does not stop, as is sometimes the case for dancers and athletes, at 30. What is beautiful is to make your body work in pleasure, in harmony. That is what is beautiful."

Other social themes dear to her permeate the show: the artificialization of soils and the impoverishment of the earth, but also questions of mental burdens, masculine shackles and claimed autonomy, as when she takes up Maria Pacôme's tirade in La Crise (1992), to the great delight of the audience. If it will not return to the South, the show will travel for a major tour until 2027, which leaves the opportunity to discover it during a trip.