Mornings at the Abbey – September 24th

10am / COFFEE RECEPTION

10.30am / CONFERENCE > To flee the stench of men: Christine on the mountain tops
Mélanie Traversier, historian and actress

This reading performance is the third of the cycle “Contemporary Middle Ages” designed with historian Patrick Boucheron, professor at the Collège de France.
As an orphan, Saint Christina the Astonishing (v. 1150-1224), was revolted by the smell of males but was given the gift of levitation. She was firstly a cowherd and then a mendicant, before breaking with the world and spending the most of her life in the trees with the birds. She died at the Convent of Sint-Truiden, in her native Brabant. Attested and confined during her lifetime by Cardinal Jacques de Vitry, her extraordinary destiny places her on the fringe of medieval hagiography. The historian and actress Mélanie Traversier revisits this figure that writer Claude-Louis Combet, who dedicated a book to her published by José Corti Editions, presented her as “a challenge to respectability and common sense”.

11h30 / CONCERT  > Aval Aval
Music from the south of the Massif Central
Bòsc : Lisa Langlois, vocals, drones – Marthe Tourret, vocals, violins – Noëllie Nioulou, vocals, cello, violin – Mathilde Spini, vocals, bagpipes (cabrette, boha, 16 inches) – Elisa Trebouville, vocals, banjo, fife

Bòsc is a young female quintet from the Quercy region. They have reappropriated traditional Massif Central music by blending it with a myriad of other influences.
Members of the La Crue female collective, the five young musicians which make up Bòsc (“wood” in occitan) represent perfectly a new generation of artists who are attempting to reappropriate local folklore by blending it with other practices, coming from contemporary experimental, barqoue or improvised music. In Aval-aval (“Over there, over there”), between rhythms and drones, dances and laments, their instruments and voices make the music of clearings, thickets and forests come to life; it’s a sort of wood and bushland blues which is universal, timeless and yet magnificently current.