Sinister and Festive: a sung medley of wacky glamour and dark poetry

Halfway between concert, performance and theater, Sinistre et Festive is a singular stage project imagined by Julien Bienaimé, Jonathan Capdevielle and Jean-Luc Verna. This trio of heterogeneous influences will deliver an iconoclastic and emotional tour de chant, presented at Théâtre de l'Atelier from April 5 to June 8, 2025. Through this collective creation, the public will discover an artistic universe where improbable musical references, strange poetry, cross-dressing games and disconcerting staging come together.

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Sinistre et Festive presents itself as a musical and performative salmigondis, mixing songs from a wide variety of eras and genres: from Francis Cabrel to Lady Gaga, from Gabriel Fauré to Siouxsie and the Banshees, with a hint of Francis Poulenc. This tour de chant would play with the boundaries between the serious and the light, the elegant and the kitsch, in a series of tableaux where texts, voices, wigs and costumes intersect.

Pianist Julien Bienaimé is joined on stage by actor, director and performer Jonathan Capdevielle, as well as Jean-Luc Verna, a leading figure incontemporary art and the queer world. The show, punctuated by the presence of special guests, seeks to blur the traditional markers of cabaret, without adopting its classic codes.

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Sinistre et Festive would appeal to a curious audience open to hybrid forms combining visual art, music and theater. Lovers of experimental performance, queer culture and trans-disciplinary shows could find fertile ground for exploration. Those who have followed the work of Capdevielle or Verna would undoubtedly recognize their taste for the grotesque, the interplay of identities and emotional ambiguity.

On the other hand, this show could confound audiences looking for a structured narrative, traditional formats or an agreed-upon stage setting. It would be neither a classic cabaret nor a linear recital, but an unclassifiable artistic object, playing with discomfort and strangeness.

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With Sinistre et Festive, Julien Bienaimé, Jonathan Capdevielle and Jean-Luc Verna propose a stage experience that is both jubilant and disturbing. Somewhere between musical revival, theatrical performance and queer aesthetics, this unclassifiable tour de chant invites us to laugh, reflect or simply let ourselves be disturbed.

This article is based on information available at the time of writing. The show has not been viewed by the editorial staff.

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