A good title a little wave may at first sight

A multidisciplinary festival, a great permanent show, a trip to the head, the soul and the heart of an artist All this at once, if Patrice Chéreau, visiting the Louvre this fall for three months - after Pierre Boulez and Umberto Ecco - succeeds the bet live in the Parisian Institution. The Director in any case fully invested. Far from considering this "entry to the Museum" as an honorary tribute to his work, it apprehends it as a new milestone in its work.

"The faces and bodies..." A good title, a little wave may at first sight. But if you look at it more closely, it sticks perfectly to the State of mind of the artist today. Trained very young Arts (a painter father, a mother artist, frequent visits to the Louvre), Patrice Chéreau favours "image" in its first staged - scenography shock, high aesthetics making emergence the meaning of the text. Then the theatre becomes more human, more carnal, more about the gesture, body, face of the actor. When it back to Phaedrus, one of his last performances, it is this that is remembered: the mi-hommes mi-dieux beings who is meddlesome, intersect, and then remain a moment in abeyance, as wonderfully ephemeral clay statues.

Chéreau will live the Louvre with skin, bone, blood in the veins and beating hearts. To lead to a "single narrative", said. "Something that would be around the desire of the flesh." It all begins with theatre: it is by identifying the places that he felt the urgency to "Dream of autumn", by Norwegian Jon Fosse, a play about desire and death, in a cemetery. What beautiful tomb will be show Denon (reinterpreted by Richard Peduzzi, his regular scenographer for theatre of the city and the other rooms where the show will be replayed December)!

Later, in the same place, it will rise in collaboration with Thierry Thieû Niang "night just before the forests", first play tragic and abundance of Bernard - Marie Koltès - Romain Duris embodying this man dying, who speaks to delay his death. The program, a reading of "Coma" of Pierre Guyotat, and a spectacle Opera "In der kindheit frühen tagen", from the "Wesendonck Lieder" by Richard Wagner (sung by Waltraud Meier). Dance music: the body will be in Majesty in three evenings signed Mathilde Monnier, Boris Charmatz, Thierry Thieû Niang Chéreau don't forget he is also Director. The film will be at the Party (with his own works, an evening Steve McQueen and a selection of films stories (Bergman, Gus Van Sant))

The faces and bodies are also displayed on the walls of the Museum: the Director made his "market" of art - a skirmish shock of disparate works, gleaned at the Louvre, Orsay and Beaubourg: Rembrandt exposed to Nan Golding, Titian to Bacon, Courbet to Picasso (Room Restout). The expo "behind the images" (in the corridor of fowl) will allow to discover "universe" of Patrice Chéreau (sketches, projects of setting him or Peduzzi, preserved since its inception). Beautiful-book illustrated co-published by the Louvre and Skira Flammarion ("The faces and bodies", 176 pages, 35 euros) is a wonderful introduction to this artistic voyage out of the ordinary.