snow white goes casting

Snow White goes tasting

Snow White & wineCentre Pompidou, Paris (Visual story)
A bizarre happening took place a few days ago at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, a cultural center also short-named as Beaubourg.
In the basement of the Contemporary Art Museum and in the midst of the public and onlookers, a performance art installation staged by Catherine Baÿ had a dozen of Snow White (Blanche Neige in French) characters impersonate wine tasters. The whole thing which unfolded around a long table took a little more than one hour maybe, it was very curious, at times disconcerting with a destructuration feel, there was purposely odd reactions and attitudes by the comedians/dancers who performed the show.
A real sommelier, actually a sommelière named Lindaboie (real name : Linda Grabe), was invited to speak about the wine tasting by a female speaker and this gave a partly-conventional screening of the event. If you immersed yourself in the visual experience of the Snow White characters and the waiters & sommeliers, there were many instant impressions, both pictural and conceptual to enjoy.
Here are a few pics that I shot there. There were many more visual snapshots that I enjoyed but hadn't the time or the right angle to immortalize, so this is just to give you a glimpse of the real thing.
At the end of the show, the sommelier took off the cloth hiding the bottle, but instead of a real-Chateau label, we could see "Le Banquet de Blanche Neige" with the names of all the comedians.

general view of the scene To help paint a wider picture of the performance, Catherine Baÿ, the author and conceptor of the happening has been setting up similar shows in real-life settings since 2003, using shops, outdoor places or even randomly-picked villages for her Snow-White conceptual acting. Her Snow White Project is always involving young female dancers dressed as Snow White, some casually holding mock Kalashnikov guns, but this was the first time as far as I know, that she singled out wine tasting as the central theme of her show. There's always some anti-consumerist undertone though in all these Snow White happenings, whith signs held by some of the characters reading Je suis un produit de consommation for example. One of these shows took place in New York a couple years ago for example. See here Catherine Baÿ's personal website. Snowhite gets her glass filledThis is all silent acting, no words are uttered, or they're barely noticed. The comedians play their part, dance sometimes, the waiters pour the wines the sommelier pours imposingly wines that seem outstanding at times, or disappointing, when you watch the facial expressions of the Snow White characters. Don't wait for a photographic similitude with a real tasting crowd : the reactions are often exagerated, disconcerting or out of phase. That's a contemporary-art happening. The actors and characters stare at you sometimes, or seem to ignore you or look at something beyond you, they make unexpected moves and take strange attitudes, standing at times upside down on a chair, the head on the floor and the feet on the table... Looking in aweExcept for the first bottle that Lindaboie opened in the sound studio, I don't know what were these wines. The first bottle was a Bordeaux, Chateau Jacques Blanc 2000, ans from the reaction of the speaker (second video at the bottom) it was excellent. The vigneron stopped making wine after this vintage and settled in Britanny to pick mistletoe, according to Lindaboie.
After tasting the wines, each Snow White character would choose a sign with a printed appreciation of the wine and would hold it like if they were rating the wines. The words were not always exactly the ones you'd see in a tasting panel, they would read sometimes épouvantable (horrible) or aimable (friendly). Peach pauseThe following artists took part in the happening (as listed on the bottle label) :
Junko Murakami, June Mc Grane, Guillemette Ferrié, Dorsaf Ben Nasser, Elise Ruth, Naomi Canard, Marilyn Grimmer, Béatrice Cherany, You Yamagami, Ans Van Den Eede, Lorena Dozio, Cécile Martinet, Estelle Gautier, Melina Faka, Véronique Leraie, Mathilde Bonicel, Amandine Ezelye, Béatrice bailet, Marie Cerise, Martine Midy, Annick Bouissou, Pascale Anin, Ionna Jordo, Alessandra Serra. Wine extasy Sitting and tasting wine toasting Still scene Drinking sommelier Snow White on the table Back-to-back tasting Snow white on stained table cloth Kalashnikov-clad Snow Whites Pouring concentration Flower aromas Lindaboie (right) commentingLinda Grabe (alias Lindaboie) created her Lindaboie website in 2005 with the aim of helping her friends discover good wines. She also co-authored a book with Valérie de Lescure, titled "Dis moi qui tu es, je te dirai quel vin boire", which means "tell me who you are, I'll tell you which wine to drink". The spirit of the book is that we actually "drink what we are"... The book lists humorously and lightly a serie of portraits with the wines to go with.
Her Lindaboie website kept some of this consumer profiling : on the sidebar on the right, you're offered a selection according to your style : a Bullimique (bubble-fan), a social animal, a magnumist, a white fanatic, an explorator, a Burgundy lover, a Bordeaux lover, a cellar rat (wines to age I guess), a bestseller fan (the wines that sold best on her site), an exclusive amateur (wines not found elsewhere), a taste historian (old vintages), and a surprising "regrets for missed opportunities" (wines that are not available anymore).