Creation the 19th of june - Studio of CCNG at MC2:Grenoble
Performances from 19th to 27th of june 2009

Director Marylin Alasset has invited Jean-Claude Gallotta and the Company to take part in experimental work on the issue of gender. Taking an interest in gender and the underlying identity of each being, above and beyond sexual affiliation, inevitably stirs up trouble. And it’s this trouble that the show attempts to examine. Disrupting the categories – artistic or sexual – is disturbing for both the ego and the law. The stage seems the perfect place for contesting “normative” ideas. It’s part of its role to play the “gender outlaws”, put a few spokes in the wheel of accepted ideas and in some way jam the machine of politically correct thinking. Le Maître d'amour tries to do this.

The choreography is based – unusually – on a romantic story: love at first sight, a sudden death, impossible grief, a man’s desperate attempt to “reconstruct” his lost love, a woman forced to become another’s double. A dream of eternal new beginnings.

The show was first staged at the National Dance Centre in Pantin in June 2007. Based on the novel of the same name (1) by Maryse Wolinski, published in 1980, it brought together a choreographer, a novelist, a director and a playwright. Different artistic genres, examining gender.

Jean-Claude Gallotta’s choreography winds around Marylin Alasset’s direction, flirting with the story, sometimes shying away, sometimes embracing it, bringing even the author herself on to the stage - a story within a story -, who has physically become a character in her own novel.

Around her there is nothing other than a waltz in troubled waters in which male and female question each other; in which, through dance, in search of their identity, everyone is searching for his gender.

(1) Maryse Wolinski’s novel will be reprinted by Seuil in spring 2009, in the “Points” collection.

Distribution