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Marion Cotillard to take Joan of Arc to New York

French actress Marion Cotillard will play Joan of Arc with the New York Philharmonic in a production of Arthur Honegger's oratorio, the orchestra announced on Thursday.

Published: 27 March 2015 09:31 CET

Marion Cotillard to take Joan of Arc to New York

French actress Marion Cotillard performs in Joan of Arc. Photo: AFP

Cotillard, who won an Oscar for portraying singer Edith Piaf in the movie "La Vie en Rose," will perform in "Joan of Arc at the Stake" for the New York Philharmonic's season finales from June 10th-13th.

The performances mark the US premiere of director Come de Bellescize's production of "Joan of Arc at the Stake," which opened in Japan in 2012 at Seiji Ozawa's Saito Kinen festival and recently toured France with Cotillard.

Cotillard — who was also nominated for an Oscar this year with "Two Days, One Night" — will be making her New York Philharmonic debut.

But she has repeatedly portrayed Joan of Arc in Honegger's oratorio, a role also played by her mother Niseema Theillaud.

Cotillard in a statement described the role as "one of my greatest experiences as an actress."

The oratorio covers the final moments of Joan of Arc as she was burned at the stake, with flashbacks to the peasant girl's short life rallying against English forces.

De Bellescize said that the oratorio, which Honegger wrote on the eve of World War II, could have easily been turned into a nationalist anthem.

"But it's really the opposite: it is about going out of the darkness and trying to find the light with the power of love," he said.

"The whole world meets together in New York, and I think there is something universal to say with this production."

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Top Paris theatre reopens as Covid occupy movement ends

A picture taken on January 26, 2011 in Paris shows the facade of the Odéon theatre. LOIC VENANCE / AFP

The protesters took down the banners they had slung across the facade of the venue in the Left Bank as they left at dawn, leaving just one inscribed “See you soon”.

“We’re reopening!,” theatre director Stéphane Braunschweig exclaimed on the venue’s website, adding that it was “a relief and a great joy to be able to finally celebrate the reunion of the artists with the public.”

The Odéon, one of France’s six national theatres, was one of around 100 venues that were occupied in recent weeks by people working in arts and entertainment.

The protesters are demanding that the government extend a special Covid relief programme for “intermittents” — performers, musicians, technicians and other people who live from contract to contract in arts and entertainment.

READ ALSO: Protesters occupy French theatres to demand an end to closure of cultural spaces

With theatres shut since October due to the pandemic, the occupations had gone largely unnoticed by the general public until this week when cultural venues were finally cleared to reopen.

The Odéon, which was inaugurated by Marie-Antoinette in 1782, had planned to mark the reopening in style, by staging Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece “The Glass Menagerie”, with cinema star Isabelle Huppert as a former southern belle mourning the comforts of her youth.

But the protests scuppered the first five performances, with management saying the venue was blocked — a claim the protesters denied.

“What we wanted was for it (the performance) to go ahead, along with an occupation allowing us to speak out and hang our banners. We don’t want to stop the show,” Denis Gravouil, head of the performing arts chapter of the militant CGT union, said on Sunday.

Two other major theatres — the Colline theatre in eastern Paris and the National Theatre of Strasbourg — have also been affected by the protests.

France has one of the world’s most generous support systems for self-employed people in the arts and media, providing unemployment benefit to those who can prove they have worked at least 507 hours over the past 12 months.

But with venues closed for nearly seven months, and strict capacity limits imposed on those that reopened this week, the “intermittents” complained they could not make up their hours.

The government had already extended a year-long deadline for them to return to work by four months.

The “intermittents” are pushing for a year-long extension instead.

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