The Lady from the Sea

Love is rarely expressed without experience and yet our ability to experience it in the present is often challenged by a struggle to win against ghosts and memories lurking from the past. Ellida, Ibsen’s heroine has to free herself from thoughts of the return of a mysterious sailor to whom she had once been betrothed, if she is to find peace and distance herself from the shadows of regret that stop her from truly loving her husband. The singer Camille fell in love with the play and the character of Ellida, “How could I not identify myself with this woman who is ahead of her time and who manages to free herself from her own fantasies and speaks for real love and even for creation itself?” Being fortunate to have a singer who is also a writer to interpret the role, Claude Baqué combines his theatre with music to express the double life of Ellida and give another substance through song to this “body of tears” to which Camille/Ellida escapes when she abandons herself to the solitude of the sea within her.