Chloé Oliveres gave a gift to the little girl that she was. She put on a very beautiful sequined costume and decided to break the chains of her dreams of a bottle-fed midinette in romantic comedies. “When I grow up, I’ll be Patrick Swayze”: behind this proclamation, the title of his first solo performance, is one of the nuggets of the Avignon “off” festival, a treat, funny, subtle , invigorating.
It took time for this experienced actress, co-founder of the theater company Les Filles de Simone – known for her joyful feminist creations, It’s (a little); complicated to be the origin of the world and The Secrets of a effective sheathing – to make her think, “Actually, I’m cap.” Capable of creating a solo, capable of writing a life story with love – real or imaginary – as the red thread, capable of sincerely telling his identity construction, made up of chimeras and disenchantments.
It also took him through the midlife crisis and the dire need for a “new adventure.” “The big trigger was the confinement,” explains Chloé Oliveres on the terrace of an Avignon café. To deceive the boredom and the shutdown of her job, she posts short hilarious videos on Instagram. She plays the confined actress who claims the right to telework by revisiting classics. “At this time, someone from Little Bros. Productions calls me and says: if one day you want to play a solo, don’t hesitate to tell us about it. »
She lets time pass and a post-confinement depression. “I was 40 years old, feeling like a blocked future, feeling dreadful that the best times of my life were behind me. Like a trip to China, undertaken alone at the age of 27 to turn the page of a toxic love story, the actress wonders if a solo could not be this hoped-for new adventure and “a mise en abyme” of her childhood dreams, of her “princess syndrome” in search of the white knight.
Meeting with Grandpa Degois
But where do you start when you’ve never written? An actress friend advises her to contact Papy Degois. The discoverer of Jamel Debbouze and director of Blanche Gardin’s first show becomes a bit of his maieutics teacher. “It was the perfect meeting,” Chloe Oliveres recalls. I arrived with lots of snippets of texts, Grandpa said to me: “Leave that, get on the set and tell me.” I improvised, he challenged me, questioned me, gave me leads, writing “homework” and, above all, he spotted that Dirty Dancing was an interesting pretext for the story. »
Dirty Dancing: American feature film by Emile Ardolino, released in 1987, with the handsome and muscular Patrick Swayze, whose role as a dance teacher marked many young girls. Dirty Dancing, where THE “founding” discovery of little Chloé, 8, during a summer vacation with her grandmother. “Finding this video tape was an event for me,” she insists. I wanted to live in this film and become an actress so that my life resembles a love story. This fiction has never left me. »
After the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art and internships with Ariane Mnouchkine, Alain Maratrat or Krystian Lupa, the young woman was spotted by directors Jean-Marie Besset and Pierre Notte. Chloé Oliveres achieves her professional goal as a child, but the romantic that lies dormant in her, shaped by sentimental comedies, must readjust the image of Epinal that she had of this profession.
When I grow up, I’ll be Patrick Swayze, it’s like revenge. The midinette has seen and reviewed Dirty Dancing and makes a tasty, emancipatory and feminist rereading of it. With her temperament a la Florence Foresti and her physique a la Valérie Lemercier, this actress delivers a perfectly constructed, very well-written and delightfully self-deprecating first solo performance. “This solo made me grow,” she says, quoting essayist Mona Chollet: “There is a close relationship between the narrative drive and the love drive. And it is this liberating force that she manages, with sincerity and humor, to share with the public. At 40, Chloe Oliveres has her life ahead of her.
