I’ve been in charge of the national theatre in Besançon since 2011. For the past 20 years, I’ve been working to bring people and art together, focusing on the people and the artwork in equal measure, and helping to pave the way for artists within the region. I’m a team leader and a business leader, and I enjoy having a job that’s so multi-faceted. It involves human and professional investment and combines artistic sensitivity, financial management, political negotiation, team building and creativity.
My passion. I truly believe that each person has a role to play in building our society. I also believe that art can help to emancipate people. I really enjoy talking to artists about their projects, going far and wide in search of theatre plays, circus shows, operas or a choreographer’s latest creation, and studying approaches that are different from mine in order to fine-tune and reinvent them and create new ones. I like building a place for thinking, research and innovation in order to help develop a society that is more united and more fulfilling for each and every one of us.
My career path. After studying geology, I got interested in geoarchitecture and also came across artists and artwork that were determining factors in my professional choices. I listened to my desires and trusted in the future. I worked in the dance world as a youngster, then was put in charge of production and distribution for a choreographer. I built my network with my mentors, and gained experience before applying for the job of theatre director 13 years ago. My support network is made up of my teams and my family.
A downside or obstacle ? I always have to fight with politicians to get a budget for culture and to justify that budget. And women account for just 30% of the directors of cultural spaces subsidized by the Ministry of Culture – and it’s often the ones with the smaller budgets. Among the one hundred largest cultural companies in France, nine in every ten are run by a man. In public institutions and audio-visual companies working for the public sector, women are overrepresented in the lowest paying jobs and underrepresented in the highest paying ones. Women don’t get artistic recognition in most fields. Since 1970, only one film directed by a woman has won a Palme d’Or. Literature is one of the rare sectors in which women get prizes, despite the male-dominated juries.
My ambition is to keep developing artistic projects by working with other cultural organizations, such as coOpérative, which is a project that works with local communities, and LaBe23, named after the E23 European road that connects Besançon and Lausanne. This latter project links my theatre, Les 2 Scènes, and the Vidy-Lausanne Theatre so that we can increase our offering and pool our resources and networks. It’s a France-Switzerland INTERREG 2014-2020 project.
The Proust Questionnaire
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Au-delà de votre profession
L’art sous toutes ses formes, l’être humain,
la nature et le sport.
Des personnes qui vous inspirent
Marie Curie, je lui dois bien ça, elle m’a sauvé la vie.
Un livre & un film
Narcisse et Goldmund (Hermann Hesse) et Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi et Vincent Paronnaud).
Un modèle
Étrangement, ce sont des femmes qui ont été
des modèles, certaines pour avoir été de grandes artistes alors inconnues, d’autres pour
leur militantisme. Toutes m’ont fait très vite prendre conscience que les femmes doivent travailler souvent davantage que les hommes
pour agir librement.
Une couleur
Le orange, couleur porteuse d’optimisme
et d’ouverture d’esprit.
Un rêve
Faire un vol spatial pour regarder la terre depuis l’espace. Et s’il reste assez de carburant,
pousser jusqu’à la lune !
