Terrace. End of summer. Exterior day. Artisanal cooked wine. Pistachios. It is 7 p.m. in Montreuil, in the Parisian suburbs, and the sun is mild. The actress opened the door to the pavilion where she moved to a little over two years ago with her companion, the mathematician Michel Broué. He made his office upstairs; she created her workshop on the ground floor. The actress, in fact, draws, and paints, and embroiders, and these days publishes a book with Odile Jacob, In the brains of comedians (304 pages, 22.90 euros).
“I’ve been an actress for a really long time, Anouk Grinberg slips in his worried voice, feet folded under his buttocks, the silhouette askew. Suddenly I was wondering: am I someone sincere, me who cheats all the time, me who always pretends? I had a hunch that neuroscientists had answers to my questions. What I didn’t know was how much this was going to revisit entire life. “
After having published in 2020 a collection of art brut texts: And why do I have to speak like you? (Le Passeur éditeur), the one who spends her life working with the sensitive has come to rub shoulders with the exact sciences, confronting the knowledge of neuroscientists with the testimonies of her fellow actors.
Strong words and emotions
“My favorite place in the theater is the backstage. Behind the scenes talk about our brains. I have this image of the actors in the dressing rooms before going on stage like stranded boats on the shore at low tide. And then the sea rises and the boats go out to look for the fish and feed them… The characteristic of the actors is that they have an ego which is not that compact. When you breathe life into a character who is just words on a piece of paper, you breathe in something of yourself that sometimes escapes you completely, and things of others, as if you are a trumpet and the world is playing. through you. “
She lights a cigarette. A dog barks in the distance: “Considering the turmoil we go through, sometimes I look at the actors, I say to myself: ‘How does he do that, him? And how does he do it the next day? ” Me, there are tomorrows when I am a scorched earth, where I am no longer anything, where I am 150 years old. And what’s amazing is that – like you’re making a movie about the seasons, but time-lapse – in no time, scorched earth can turn back to spring… This is the place I went to search. “
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