Ordinary Singularities

Singularités ordinaires stages three life stories. Arthur Genibre, 86, lives in rural Quercy (South West France). In a highly injunctive context—“You’ll be a farmer, period”—he found his place as a healing musician, who has to hide to learn how to play music and finds his inspiration “in the stars”. Wilfride Piollet, 64, is a retired principal dancer of the Paris Opera. She said she became an “outcast” because she created the most important “post-modern” plays in the 1960s and 1980s. She “let go of the barre” in order to create her own pedagogy. Michèle Eclou-Natey, is a 41-year-old Algerian-Togolese woman, who was raised by an Italian-American family in Marseille, France. She spends her time in a pub in which she is apparently not welcome. Patrons call her “the negro”. But she returns words, holds racism in check and turns the pub into a place where true affection is possible. These three characters oscillate between the exceptional and the ordinary, between vocation and biographical fiddling and sometimes they face tough situations of conflict. Still, they manage to devise places and tell their own stories. Though torn between these people’s frailties and abilities, the stories eventually hold water.