Gardenia: A human tale, no matter how you dress it up
Brighton Festival's dance show, set in a ->-bleeped-<- cabaret, will be an intriguing look at growing old, says Zoë Anderson
Wednesday, 20 April 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/gardenia-a-human-tale-no-matter-how-you-dress-it-up-2269979.html (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/gardenia-a-human-tale-no-matter-how-you-dress-it-up-2269979.html)
It wasn't the idea to make a statement about transgender," explains choreographer Alain Platel. "It was just a human story, first of all." He's talking about Gardenia, the latest work from his company Les Ballets C de la B, which comes to the Brighton Festival on 11 May. Set in a ->-bleeped-<- cabaret, Gardenia stars a group of ageing performers, each with a story to tell.
The production's own story started when Vanessa Van Durme, an actress and writer who is also Belgium's first transsexual, saw the Dutch documentary Yo soy asi, which covered the last days of a Barcelona cabaret. "The artists who were working there were older people, 70 and over. I was intrigued by that," Van Durme explains. The film "followed the artists in their private lives. I was very touched." She turned those themes into the play Gardenia, created in collaboration with Platel and director Frank Van Laecke.