JE VOUS EMMÈNE

The first time writer Eric Reinhardt went backstage at the Paris Opera was in the autumn of 2004. It was to keep a logbook on a creation by Angelin Preljocaj, Le Songe de Médée. It was then that he fell in love with the magic of the Palais Garnier. It was also at that time that he struck up his lasting friendship with étoile dancer Marie-Agnès Gillot. Eric Reinhardt returned to the Paris Opera five years later—to Bastille this time—when Angelin Preljocaj commissioned him to write the libretto for his ballet Siddharta.

So it was no surprise that for the Paris Opera’s 3e Scène he thought of Marie-Agnès Gillot and the Opéra Bastille’s colossal 80-meter-deep stage. His only requirement: that all the areas behind the proscenium be entirely empty and stripped bare to allow him to relight them and film Marie-Agnès Gillot lost in the abstraction of an indefinite, metaphysical space. Eric Reinhardt had already asked composer Sébastien Roux to compose a soundtrack based on an extract from his novel Cendrillon, read by Laurent Poitrenaux.

An eight-minute soundtrack, overlaid with an eight-minute sequence shot, combining the voice of a man recalling an undreamt-of encounter followed by a loss as cruel as it is inexorable: Je vous emmène results from the simultaneous combustion of sound, text, image, body, time and space in order to release a slow and unique sensation—that of the pure present, the demands of here and now, opportunities we never seize. 

—
Curator

Author
ERIC REINHARDT

Dancer
MARIE-AGNÈS GILLOT

Sound designer
SÉBASTIEN ROUX

Voice
LAURENT POITRENAUX

Image
MADJID HAKIMI