Tombeau de la sœur

• Duration: 15 min
• Europe
• Adult audience
• 341 vues

Gravide

Mime is certainly a form of expression conducive to comedy, but it is also entirely compatible with tragedy and philosophy. Etienne Decroux, the founder of modern mime, considered it to be an art form of unsurpassed intellectual and symbolic potential.
Aline Gélinas, director of Montréal’s Compagnie Gravide, is an indirect heir to this tradition, having trained with Jean Asselin and Denise Boulanger, Québécois disciples of Decroux.
With each new creation she reaffirms both her rigorous discipline and her delicate sensibility, with a distinctly feminine worldview.
In the literary world, an epitaph is a poem addressed to the departed. Tombeau de la sœur is a hymn to a woman entering her final act. Two actresses, Denise Boulanger (the dying woman) and Francine Alepin (her younger sister) engage in a form of ceremonial dance, with the latter embracing the former for the final time as she celebrates their bond with a seemingly infinite variety of gestural nuances.