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.