Pierre Albert-Birot
Pierre Albert-Birot (1876 – 1967) was a French avant-garde poet, dramatist, and theater manager.
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[edit] Early life and writing
Born in Angoulême, he moved to Paris in 1894. There he attended art school and befriended Gustave Moreau. He worked for five decades as a restorer for antique dealer Madame Lelong. He began writing after he met the musician Germaine de SurVille in 1913.
From January 1916 to December 1919, Albert-Birote edited the avant-garde art magazine SIC, an acronym for Sons Idées Couleurs (Sounds Ideas Colors), which featured writings by Futurists, Surrealism, and Dadaists.[1]
His first volume of poems was Trente et un Poèmes de Poche (1917). His novel Grabinoulor appeared in 1919.
[edit] Theater
Albert-Birot directed the first performance of Les Mamelles des Tirésias (Tiresias's Breasts, 1917) by Guillaume Apollinaire, a friend who had also been a contributor to SIC. He went on to compose numerous plays of his own, including Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard); Les Femmes pliantes (The Flexible Woman); and L'homme coupé en morceaux (The Dismembered Man). [2]
In 1929 he founded his own theater, Le Plateau, in which he produced his own series of short performance pieces entitled Pièces-Études.[2]
[edit] References
- ^ Ars Libri Ltd. (2011). "Dada and Modernist Magazines". Dada-companion.com. DADA Companion. http://www.dada-companion.com/journals/per_sic.php. Retrieved 27 December 2011.
- ^ a b Forman, Edward (2010). Historical Dictionary of French Theater. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. p. 22. ISBN 978-0-8108-4939-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=9pz5Smxi-KsC&pg=PA22. Retrieved 27 December 2011.
[edit] Further reading
- Pierre Albert-Birot: A Poetics in Movement, A Poetics of Movement (1997) by Debra Kelly.
[edit] External links
- Covers and excerpts from all fifty-four issues of SIC, scanned and archived by the University of Iowa library
