An iconic figure of the Roaring Twenties in Paris, Josephine Baker is often reduced to the image of the Black dancer in the banana skirt, her bare body given over to a frenzied dance before a white audience. And yet Josephine Baker left her mark on the artistic history of France and bequeathed a cultural and political legacy that far transcends this image. Looking back on her life reveals a woman of many causes who fought passionately against discrimination and for equality and freedom.

Born into a poor family in St. Louis, Missouri, Josephine was fifteen when she left the segregated South for Broadway. There she began as a clownish mascot in the chorus of Shuffle Along, tasked with entertaining the audience between musical numbers, before establishing herself in Chocolate Dandies with comic routines that drew critical notice. It was at the Plantation Club that Caroline Dudley Regan spotted her, one night when she filled in at the last minute for an ailing singer. Tasked with recruiting Black performers for a show at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées that would become La Revue nègre, Regan won Josephine over by presenting France as the land of freedom, where the color of her skin would no longer be grounds for discrimination. From the ferry crossing itself, Josephine exercised this promised freedom and installed herself on the deck reserved for white people.

On October 2, 1925, at the opening night of La Revue nègre, Josephine set the hall ablaze before an audience that included Robert Desnos, Blaise Cendrars, and Francis Picabia, all captivated by her frenzied Charleston and her final "savage dance." She recounts in her memoirs:

This performance launched Josephine's Parisian career: she was hired at the Folies Bergère and opened her own club, "Chez Josephine Baker," where artistic Paris gathered, already enamored of African art and jazz.

After a tour of South America, in 1931 she was hired by Henri Varna to succeed Mistinguett at the Casino de Paris in Paris qui remue, where she sang "J'ai deux amours" for the first time. This show transformed her image: she now spoke and sang in French, adopted the manners of bourgeois society, earning praise even from the more conservative press.

Josephine diversified, finding success in film with Zouzou and then Princesse Tam-Tam, as well as in Offenbach's operetta La Créole : roles that cemented her fame while perpetuating exoticizing stereotypes. She nonetheless protested: "Why do the French, who have so many African colonies, put on theater in which one almost never sees Black people?" In 1931, she commissioned the writing of Mon sang dans tes veines, intending to turn it into a film: the story of a young Black woman who gives her blood to save a white man, who is then left by his wife when she discovers he now has "Black blood" in him, and who consequently takes his own life.

From the very start of the war, Josephine mobilized alongside Captain Jacques Abtey, head of military counter-espionage in Paris. At their first meeting, she declared to him: "It is France that made me what I am. I am ready today to give her my life." At grand embassy dinners, where her celebrity opened every door, she gathered information and probed Italian and Japanese diplomats about a possible entry into the war on the side of the Axis. When Belgium was invaded, she traded her stage feathers for a nurse's uniform and joined the IPSA (nurse-pilot air rescue corps), tending to refugees.

L'avancée de l'armée allemande la contraint à quitter Paris pour rejoindre les Milandes, son célèbre château en The advance of the German army forced her to leave Paris for the Milandes, her famous château in the Dordogne, which would become a refuge for numerous Resistance members. She now served as cover for Abtey, who accompanied her on her tours under the pseudonym "Jacques Hébert" in order to pass intelligence to the Allies. After a year-long hospitalization in Morocco, she immediately resumed her activity, touring North Africa and the Middle East to give concerts in support of the Free French Forces to raise troop morale, replenish the coffers of this fledgling army, and lend legitimacy to de Gaulle's provisional government. She raised nearly ten million francs and declared: "I sang from time to time, but above all I was doing Resistance work." In May 1944 she was officially enlisted in the Air Force as a "propaganda officer" with the rank of sub-lieutenant. For these services, she received the Croix de Guerre and the Medal of the Resistance, before being made a Knight of the Legion of Honor.

After the war, Josephine continued her fight for equality and against segregation. At the Milandes, with her new husband Jo Bouillon, they created their "rainbow tribe": twelve adopted children of nine different nationalities, embodying in the flesh her ideal of universal brotherhood.

Her American tours of the 1950s turned into battlegrounds against racial segregation: she now demanded, in her contracts, that her shows be open to mixed audiences. In 1951, at Copa City in Miami, she performed before the city's first integrated audience. That same year, after being refused service at the Stork Club in New York, she publicly denounced the discriminatory act. The affair took on national proportions, widely covered by the African-American press. The NAACP soon after named her "Woman of the Year," and May 20 was declared "Josephine Baker Day" in Harlem. Her activism culminated on August 28, 1963, when she was the only woman invited to speak at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King.

Despite financial ruin and the loss of her château, the Milandes, Josephine Baker took the stage one final time in 1975. Her retrospective show in Paris met with triumphant critical success, just days before her death. Her funeral, held at the Church of the Madeleine, was honored with a twenty-one-gun salute, military honors reserved for the heroes of France. In 2021, she became the first Black woman, the first music-hall performer, and the first American to enter the Panthéon.

Far from this brilliant trajectory that made Josephine Baker a national figure, the show Perle Noire, at the Paris Opera, lifts the veil on the tormented inner life of a woman grappling with her own contradictions. Drawing on the experience of "double consciousness" theorized by W. E. B. Du Bois, Claudia Rankine's texts give voice to a divided woman, compelled to see herself through the white gaze that assigns her an image she came to inhabit. Perle Noire thus invites us to hear another Josephine Baker: one who seeks to disentangle her own identity from the public persona she learned to embody.

It so happens that, like Rossini, I am Italian. Is that the reason why I appreciate his art so much? I don’t think so. It is not a question of nationality, of consanguinity, but of affinity. I love the brilliance that constantly shines through in his music. I love the burlesque vein of his orchestration. The characters in The Barber of Seville are deeply rooted in the tradition of the commedia dell’arte and its types: the old man in love with a young girl (Pantalone), the ingenious servant (Arlecchino), Colombina, Il Dottore… These masks originated in Venice. This is not the only link between Rossini and Venetian theatre: some of his works – one-act operas, farces such as La scala di seta (The Silken Ladder) or Il signor Bruschino – were composed for the Venice Carnival.

I myself come from Venice. My family was very deeply rooted in this region which, until I was twenty, was my living environment, my horizon: I drank in this atmosphere, I absorbed it. This world, these characters are therefore very close to my imagination, to my fantasy.

That said, there is no question for me of simply putting a mask on the faces of the performers. I prefer to approach Rossini’s works by drawing on entirely modern references, because I am convinced that they speak to us about our world and that we need to draw on our everyday lives for the means to tell his stories.

I always start with an atmosphere: in the case of The Barber of Seville, that of a contemporary working-class neighbourhood in Spain. This image, which comes to me, is not connected to any precise representation of Spain. It could be a neighbourhood in any Mediterranean country. Above all, it is a pretext for getting to the heart of the libretto and bringing its characters to life.

Of course, everything that belongs to my personal culture comes through in my productions. Almodóvar, undoubtedly, since his cinema is for me an inexhaustible source of inspiration. But these cultural and artistic references are not primary in the creative process. At first, it is important for me to base myself solely on the libretto and the music. It is only afterwards that this framework is enriched with elements drawn from my imagination, which make it possible to nurture and give greater depth to the characters.

In The Barber of Seville, Rossini succeeded in creating a synthesis of a micro-society. The characters are so strongly defined that it is almost a caricature of opera: this makes it a delicate work to stage. To this must be added the intimidating number of renowned directors who have taken it on. In the production I have conceived, above all I wanted to move beyond stereotypes and emphasise the humanity of the characters: to tell the story as faithfully as possible, without overcomplicating it, without seeking a double meaning – so that my message is accessible to a broad audience – while preserving the rhythm of the score.

Rhythm is fundamental in Rossini, whether in the arias, the ensembles or the concerted sections. This is as striking in The Barber of Seville as in La Cenerentola. In order to maintain this rhythm, we imagined a complex stage device that develops in a crescendo throughout the performance: a set design that follows the accelerations and breathing spaces of the work.

I work with Paolo Fantin, who has designed the sets for all my productions. Starting from an initial idea that I communicate to him, the two of us then play a real game of tennis, with very intense exchanges, in order to arrive at an absolutely homogeneous whole. The aim is to intimately combine set design and staging, so that no one can say what comes from him and what comes from me.

That is my conception of opera: not an individual approach that seeks to translate an artist’s imagination, but rather an amalgamation of different talents in the service of a work…

For this Barber of Seville, for example, I imagined that the whole production would revolve around Bartolo’s building. That was the starting point. But starting from this principle, how do you sustain it over the whole performance, manage to tell the whole story without ever running out of steam, without ever giving the impression that you are repeating yourself, while managing to renew it with every scene?

After completing my studies in directing at the Paolo Grassi School of Dramatic Arts in Milan, I first directed prose theatre productions with small companies, before beginning to work in the world of opera.

Opera and theatre are two very distinct worlds. Actors and singers are psychologically very different. The former have the text as their only basis for their work, without a conductor or music. They have to create their own score, based on rhythm and intonation. The latter, on the contrary, sometimes protect themselves behind the score. My entire work is then to lead them to free themselves from this artificial protection, to step out of their musical shell in order to build a stage presence.

Do I have a personal style, a signature that would recur from one production to the next? It is difficult to say. The productions follow one another but are never alike. Each new production presents me with a new challenge. I like starting again from scratch, as if it were the very first opera I were directing.

Ultimately, this question does not interest me. I am wary of artists who claim to have a style. I prefer to speak of temperament: because a production is first and foremost about my relationship with the performers. I am facing them and I communicate my ideas to them, with my personality. I try to establish clearly the direction in which I want us to go. Then I encourage them to find their own way to get there.

To use a metaphor, it is a little as if I asked you to go to Milan, but you could go there by train, by car or by bicycle… What matters is simply getting there.

I tell them: “Feel free, let your imagination and your desires run free.” The singers I work with have already embodied these characters in other productions. They have played them countless times. Above all, I do not ask them to wipe the slate clean. It is important to make use of what is already there, to draw on this awareness.

I want everyone to feel responsible for what they are doing. In the end, they are the ones who will go on stage, not me. So I tell them: “You must be satisfied with what you are doing, proud of what you are doing, and enjoy yourselves.”

More than anything, I hate it when a performer finds themselves on stage without knowing why, when they do something simply because the director has asked them to.

That is what I mean by style: it is this relationship that I try to establish with the singers that determines the way I tell stories.

Driven by his father’s spectre to avenge his death, Hamlet emerges as a great tragic character, unable to exist on his own and to build a life independent of his parents and their fate. His impossible liberation from the father figure complicates his bond with his mother. As his father’s heir, Hamlet is confronted with the Freudian situation of Oedipus, torn between filial love and sexual desire.

Rossini was just 24 years old when Duke Francesco Sforza Cesarini, impresario of the Teatro Valle in Rome, commissioned him to write a new opera. The young Italian composer, who had already written some fifteen operas was obliged to work to an extremely demanding schedule: the premiere was supposed to take place just two months later.

By the time the librettist Cesare Sterbini had signed his contract only a month remained, during which time Rossini wrote the music in parallel with the text as fast as the very best transcribers.