The gift of tears

The gift of tears refers to the spiritual ecstasy that inspired Norman poet François de Malherbe to write his famous text Les larmes de Saint-Pierre. Writer Zadig Hamroune transposes this ecstasy to the one that transcends us in the face of art. He draws on his autofictional diptych, La nuit Barbare and La Nuit Baroque, to invent an incarnation of aesthetic vertigo.

"We are left with art if we are not to perish from truth", wrote F. Nietzsche in his unfinished work The Will to Power. The Gift of Tears is a celebration of the arts and aesthetic emotion. We all cry. Of joy, of distress. Sometimes in ecstasy. Tears are quintessential. Our innermost being is distilled in them. How can we understand the world we live in? Through the experience of art and books, another world opens up to us. On stage, Jérémy-Loup Quer, principal dancer with the Paris Opera, plays a young man haunted by his double, the Baroque painter Caravaggio. Introduced to poetry, dance and music, he yields to the territory of tears in a quest marked by encounters. For him, art becomes a friendly world, enabling him to reconcile with himself and with others. This hybrid piece, combining dance, reading, video and music, is experienced like a ritual, when art borders on the sacred.