Nathalie Vairac, actress in touch with the invisible

Text by: Sabine Cessou Follow | Sabine Cessou Follow

The French actress, of Indian and Guadeloupean origin, has lived in Africa for ten years, where she is in high demand for her performances. His style: improvisation, in direct contact with the invisible.

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Nathalie Vairac, experienced actress, travels Africa and the world with her frank smile, her sensitivity on edge and her contagious good humor. She notably read in April 2019 at the Pantheon the political writings of Aimé Césaire, and performed in Brussels this month, in a play on the restitution of works of art to Africa, Les restes suprêmes , du Rwandan playwright Dorcy Rugamba.

In the meantime, she has given performances or participated in residences at several points on the continent, in Abidjan, Kigali or Casablanca. Called within the framework of very serious forums, it punctuates the purpose which is elaborated there by restoring it, in a sensitive and embodied form, by addressing the "souls" present in the room. In Kigali, for example, she asked men, one by one, to turn off their laptops and kindly listen to her, a woman, after a conference on… the place of women in development.

Flourished in performance, on the continent

Born of a Guadeloupean father and an Indian mother in a vineyard village in the Bordeaux region, she made her career in Paris in the theater. But it has flourished for ten years in Africa, first in Nairobi then for six years in Dakar. " The ties I have found on the continent allow me to grow, " she said, emphasizing the fact that everyday values, " like saying hello and smiling ", mean a lot to her. How would she describe herself? " Everything except a patchwork," she replies. Rather than eliminating origins, counting supposed identities, I want to have the right to multiplicity, which is my heritage. "

In recent years, she explores her own writing, and tells in her words how she lives Africa. A memorable date for her: the day Amadou Diaw gave her carte blanche, at the opening of her Forum in Saint-Louis. Accompanied by kora player Ablaye Cissoko, she dared to say for the first time in public words that were no longer those of others, but hers. She also returned to Saint-Louis to record a disc, ten songs with which she wrote the lyrics and which she says in music.

How did this transition take place? In the most natural way possible: “ During the Biennale of the arts of 2018 in Dakar, seeing all the creativity of the plastic artists, I was upset by the idea of ​​the freedom to create, to question space in which we find ourselves. With my tool, speech and theater, I asked myself how I could create differently: in this link that has always moved me between the visible and the invisible, what is greater than us - is it possible to let yourself be penetrated by grace, carried by words that come from elsewhere, from the unconscious or from an ancestral fruitfulness ... All in public space, a building other than the theater. "

Designer Johanna Bramble makes an exhibition during the Biennale and suggests that she improvise on the opening day. Other artists, impressed by the visceral nature of his performance, made other requests.

A mentor, Sotigui Kouyaté

Nathalie Vairac did not study in a conservatory, feeling more inspired and influenced by the Indian transmission model, between teacher and student. She wrote in 1994 to a great director, Philippe Adrien, artistic director of the Théâtre de la Tempête à la Cartoucherie. After seeing one of her pieces, she asks him to take it under her wing. At that time, she also saw the Burkinabe actor Sotigui Kouyaté in plays by Peter Brook. " I felt like I saw my grandfather, " she recalls. In 1995, she enrolled in a course he gave at the Cartoucherie de Vincennes. They will never leave each other. “ I had at heart to work with both, Philippe Adrien having done a lot of work around the theater and psychoanalysis - the world of dreams and the invisible universe of the unconscious. Sotigui being deeply animist, he also transmitted this link through the link to the ancestors and the intangible world. "

She plays in an Oedipus directed by Sotigui Kouyaté, who takes her in 2002 on his first tour in Africa, but also in Les Nègres by Jean Genêt, directed in 2001 by Alain Ollivier. She also participates in the work of Philippe Adrien in Guadeloupe, and plays in a Creole adaptation of La noce chez les petits bourgeois by Bertold Brecht.

Nathalie Vairac travels with a few books, among which, Regal for Vultures by Claude Régy, contemplative traveler. She reads the great Indian philosopher and spiritual master Jiddu Krishnamurti, who had proposed an alternative education in the 1960s, but also the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne. At the heart of her life, there is a spirituality that she does not live in the religious mode, but the obvious, as well as this permanent idea of ​​choice. " What am I going to do with myself and what emerges from my emotions, a word that literally means to be in motion ?" His dream today would be to embrace all of his creativity and " tell himself that anything is possible ". In short, making a contribution to the building, by acting on two main questions: " What do we want to participate in ?" What are we going to leave to our children ? " Even more central in these times of pandemic.

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