CAROLINE NIN: THE HIGH PRIESTESS, PHILOSOPHER AND DIVA OF THE PARISIAN CABARET!
By Maximillien de Lafayette
To fully understand Caroline Nin, the woman and the "Femme Fatale", the psyche and inner world of Nin which contains and transcends one million worlds of visions, fantasies, shadows and lights of a golden vanished era and maybe a new and daring one to discover....
To
understand this complex woman; singer, entertainer, philosopher, teaser,
rebel, poet, artiste and Diva, one should realize that Caroline Nin's universe
is bigger than the one we live in, a world of her own, quite inaccessible
to those who are limited by factual time and space, defined by what
"regular" people see and believe and touch if they are unable to feel.
This woman's universe is intensely complex, rich and dramatically charged and
inhabited by people or memories of places, stories and people who once
upon a time fashioned a world of drama, human tragedy, fantasies, extravaganza,
poetry, adventures, scepter of Mata Hari, "Les Années
Folles", escapades on "Les Grands Boulevards", fatale encounters and
street's melancholy on "Rue Le Pic", extravaganzas of Mistinguet, tragedies,
rise and fall of "La Goulue", Josephine Baker, Jane Avril, Dalida,
Gribouille, joys and sorrows of Piaf, jokes of Fernandel, stolen pieces of life
in the voice of Barbara, Juliette Greco and Line Renauld, radiant smiles of
Maurice Chevalier, prostitutes and "trotteuses" shoes and high heels
squeezing in dark alleys, dialogues with existentialists, Jean Paul Sartre,
Proust, André
Gides, Aragon, Prévert,
Paul Eluard, Sacha Guitry and Kafka, and perhaps encounters with
dissipating shadows of Marlene Dietrich, Eddie Constantin, Jean Gabin, Toulouse
Lautrec, Lucienne Boyer, Bruant Aristide, what's left from "Le Chat Noire" and
visions of visions of a real and a unique world of humans, women, gigolos,
"seigneurs", "raconteurs"
"music",
passion and adventurers which existed a few years ago and rapidly vanished,
never to re-appear again......This is the cosmos of the superb Nin.
Unfortunately a world to give in to for McDonald double cheese burger, Nike shoes,
rap-crap music, so-called fast , angry and stylish Japanese cars, large highways
without warmth and character, intimidating, immense and cold supermarkets
and rush-rush frightening corporate and unmerciful stock markets and
hostile takeovers , and mobile/cellular phones everywhere are reconditioning our
existence, redefining priorities and reshaping the human landscape, our taste of
music, new ideological concepts, the size and importance or our "portfolio", how
fast and how high an elevator can go, how many companies we can swallow....this
is the world we live in today. This is the absurd and alarming world we live in
everyday and which replaced the World of Yesteryears; the World of Caroline Nin,
one of France's greatest contemporary cabaret singers.
"When I sing Cabaret, I try to be as creative as possible with arrangements, melodies and lyrics. I like to tease the audience both theatrically and musically. Although some of the repertoire is often old-fashioned, my vision of cabaret has always been modern'. wrote Caroline Nin.
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