A web of roots – The director Emilie Girardin
From 1991, Emilie Girardin grew up in a tiny village in the French-speaking part of Switzerland right on the border with the canton of Bern. This meant that not only French but also Swiss German could be heard in the village. At home, the Girardins spoke English, as that was the language in which the parents could communicate. Emilie’s father came from French-speaking Switzerland, her mother from Silesia. She grew up in Bytom and then Katowice, first studied in Kraków and then moved to the USA on a Fulbright scholarship to complete her Master’s degree in psychology. It was there that she met her future husband. The two got married and eventually moved to his native Switzerland.
And so Emilie and her older sister Léa first learnt English, then French when they started school. Polish wasn’t spoken at home. Emilie Girardin explains that it was simply too difficult for her mother: “She was in a foreign place where nobody spoke Polish. She didn’t feel she could teach us Polish all by herself.”
Emilie Girardin first came into contact with the Polish language through her maternal grandparents in Katowice, whom the family visited several times a year. Whilst conversation there was also largely in English, the children on the street and the people in children’s TV programmes such as “Dobranocka” obviously spoke Polish. Emilie Girardin remembers: “We heard the language a lot and learnt words and children’s songs that our Dziadek [grandpa] taught us.”
Emilie Girardin learnt German as a second official language at her Swiss school. At the age of 17, Emilie met a young man from Bielefeld at a punk festival and her German language skills were consolidated. The relationship also took Emilie to Hamburg for the first time, the city where she now lives and works as a director on projects ranging from dance theatre to film.
Emilie Girardin wanted to be an author from an early age. She remembers that even before she learnt to write, she invented her own script and wrote stories to read to her sister. Eventually, however, she found working all by herself at a desk too lonely and decided she would rather work with people on creative projects, and so the desire to make theatre came about. Emilie Girardin graduated from high school with a focus on theatre, then lived for a while in Argentina and Brazil, where she did an internship at the “Theatre of the Oppressed” centre, which is based on the method of theatre pedagogue Augusto Boal (1931–2009).
After returning to Europe, she spent several months in Poland in 2011, during which time she prepared for the entrance exams to various theatre schools. Like her sister a year earlier, Girardin enrolled in a language programme at the Jagiellonian University (Uniwersytet Jagielloński) in Kraków. One of the main reasons for this was her desire to have more time with her grandfather, who had been so important to her and her sister as children. However, after successfully completing the language course and developing a growing attachment to Poland, Girardin moved to Barcelona to study theatre directing at the city’s Institut del Teatre.
During her studies, Girardin developed a growing interest in physical theatre and soon found herself moving away from textual theatre altogether. The Institut del Teatre was just the right place for her, as it has its own section for “physical theatre”. Girardin was able to intern with some interesting theatre makers as a budding director. She recalls: “Of course, there was also a strong fascination with the Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor and his physical theatre. His play ‘Umarła klasa’ was even performed again at the university in Barcelona.”
