CURE out and about with Laure Guilbert
WHEN
—
WHERE
Cercil Museum – Memorial Children Du Vel D’hiv
45 Rue du Bourdon Blanc, 45000 Orléans
LANGUAGE
FRENCH
PROGRAMME
Laure Guilbert will give two lectures on 24 and 25 January 2026 at CERCIL – Children’s Memorial Museum of the Vel d’Hiv in Orléans. Her talks focus on the life of dancer Paula Padani and are held in connection with the exhibition at the MAHJ (Museum of Jewish Art and History), on view in Paris from 13 November 2024 to 14 December 2025. The first lecture is aimed at French and German secondary school pupils and takes place as part of a decentralised cooperation agreement on memory education between the Centre-Val de Loire Region and the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. The second lecture is open to the public in Orléans.
A long-overlooked figure in modern dance, Paula Padani was born in 1913 in Hamburg. She was the last Jewish student at the Wigman School in Dresden before clandestinely emigrating to Mandate Palestine in 1936. There, she founded a dance school in Tel Aviv and created choreographies shaped by experiences of exile and by Middle Eastern cultural traditions. In 1946, she relocated to Paris and pursued a performance career in Europe and New York. At the request of the American Joint Distribution Committee, she took part in several tours through displaced persons’ camps in the American-occupied zone of Germany, dancing for Holocaust survivors and the first wave of Cold War refugees. From the 1950s onwards, she focused on teaching, emphasising improvisation and the nurturing of individual creative expression.
More information is available here.
