Elsa Wolliaston, 77, hates interviews. The choreographer born in 1945, in Jamaica, prefers encounters, with all the unexpected things that invite themselves in the moment. The interview that the dancer and actress gave us in Cannes, on May 23, 2022, the day after the screening of Magdala, by Damien Manivel, where she plays the main role, could be called “Elsa’s knee”. It’s very cinematic and that’s good. That day, her knee was a little blocked, bruised. She is sitting in the small garden of her hotel in Cannes and does not move too much. We ask the reception for a block of ice cream, the boss brings a bag full of frozen croissants, which he then hastens to put back in the freezer…
Perplexed laughter, what a delicate attention! We think of the clients who, the next morning, will dip a pastry into their coffee after spending a few moments, separated by a thin plastic film, against the choreographer’s skin. The anecdote is not to displease the pedagogue of the movement, who advocates in her courses the” intention ” and the” Warning », giving rise to dance from everyday gestures, which are amplified to the sound of percussionist Bruno Besnaïnou’s djembe, or Jean-Yves Colson’s drums.
It is the same magnetic presence that the choreographer offers in Magdala – presented in the Cannes parallel section of the ACID (Association of independent cinema for its distribution). This essay revisits freely – and without genuflection – the last days of Mary Magdalene, distraught with love and grief after the death of Jesus. Inhabited gesture, gait slowed down by her own fatigue, Elsa Wolliaston illuminates the distress of this woman who sinks into the luxuriant forest to which the 16 mm film confers a soft and velvety texture.
“You have to learn to be”
Himself from dance, Damien Manivel, filmmaker of the tiny gesture, had already entrusted roles to Elsa Wolliaston, in his short film The lady with the dog (2010), then in his fourth “long”, The Children of Isadora (2019). ” In Magdalathe greatest gift that Damien gave me is that he stole my soul, it’s an African way of speaking: it means that he The choreographer born in 1945, in Jamaica, revisits the character of Marie Madeleine in the magnetic “Magdalah”by Damien Manivel. When I saw myself on the screen, I cried like a Madeleine. What can I do after that? », she asks herself in a slightly broken, almost childlike voice. In the cinema, she has already played a shrink in kings and queen (2004), by Arnaud Desplechin, a card drawer in Victoria (2016), by Justine Triet, and again quite recently a clairvoyant in Drop of gold, by Clément Gogitore – also presented at Cannes at the Semaine de la critique, in a special screening (soon in theaters). She refuses to have an agent, does not look for roles but examines the proposals made to her.
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