Les reines de cœur en majesté

Photographe
At the end of August 2000, Maxime Rebière began attending rehearsals for La Dame aux Camélias at the Théâtre Marigny. The peculiarity of this preparation, the exceptional intensity of our concentration, the unique intimacy in which we were working together had convinced us to accompany these days and nights with reflection. I systematically took notes, and Maxime sketched. Little by little, the idea of publishing a rehearsal diary took shape.
Maxime Rebière was introduced to me by Dominique Borg, who was to design the costumes. Maxime’s sketches discreetly capture this history, these aesthetic mutations, some deliberate, others made necessary by the clash of personalities and technical and artistic imperatives. Theater is a school of reality. We dream and then have to face reality. Maxime’s sketches and watercolors bear the trace of dreams, of all our dreams – those of Isabelle and Alfredo in the first instance, the show having been conceived for her and by him from my text and the novel by Alexandre Dumas fils – but also of reality, its hesitations and determinations. Theater is a living art form that nothing can ever freeze. Though ephemeral, it is not doomed to oblivion. On the contrary, it remains inscribed in everyone’s subjective memory. But this memory needs material support, and we know – me writing every day, Maxime drawing – that we will, much later, have support for our memories and those of others. Isabelle Adjani had begun her career in the theater, then moved on to film, and now she was rediscovering the mystery of acting. Anyone who has attended one or more performances of the play will know just how far she has gone in expressing pain and passion, and what three months of rehearsals and two and a half months of performances meant to her.
Maxime, himself more accustomed to cinema than theater, was discovering theatrical time and the multitude of inventions that follow one another in this work. In the theater, you never stop inventing: new gestures, new tones, new looks. Some are abandoned, without being totally sacrificed, while others are immediately adopted, definitively found and preserved to the last, rigorously intact. Maxime Rebière’s testimony, originally intended to follow the creation of his friend Dominique Borg’s costumes, turned into something else: while following the work of design and production, in the workshops, in the dressing rooms, backstage and on stage, he also looked at the preparation of the play, the analysis of the text itself, the relationships between the actors and the director.

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