K Samka

A portrait of Ilka Schönbein by Marinette Delanné
Editions de l'Oeil
A book by Marinette Delanné and Naly Gérard,
With 100 photographs black and white & colour of Ilka Schönbein’s shows

Photographs by Marinette Delanné
Texts by Naly Gérard
Preface by Didier Bezace
Subject matter : contemporary puppetry and performing arts
Genre : photography book
Number of pages : between 132 and 192
Publication of the book February 2017

Un théâtre charnel ("A theatre of the flesh")
For more than twenty years, Ilka Schönbein has been creating shows, the titles of which express her energy, her melancholy and the stuff they are made of: Metamorphoses, The King Frog, Winter Journey, The Old Woman and the Beast, Or Else I’ll Eat You...
Here are mingled her consummate puppet artistry, her talent as an actress (almost a contortionist, she was trained as a dancer), as well as her sense of humour, her sombre world and her influences – the fairy tales, the east-European culture (She has called her company "Theater Meschugge", "Crazy Theatre" in Yiddish)...
All this combined serves a visually unique theatre and makes of her one of the most fascinating stage artist of our time.
And twenty years ago, during the street festival of La Flèche, the photographer Marinette Delanné saw, for the first time, one of Ilka Schönbein’s shows: "I remember my discovering a work made of sensations, of sensuality, of flashing impressions; its countless "metamorphoses". At that very moment I recognized an artistic work liking nothing else. And I knew that this work was becoming essential for me, I knew that I wanted to begin to serve it, in order to pay tribute to its beauty, to its humanity. Then I started following her..."
This book presents the fruit of this amazing fellowship, as the years went by, through pictures that are, at the same time, those invented on stage by Ilka Schönbein and the pictures caught by the sharp look of Marinette Delanné.
The texts by Naly Gérard, expressing the link between the two artists, go with these photographs that tell marvellously a singular and haunted art and a great artist.