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A production exploring the life and work of an iconic wartime insurgent will be performed tonight as part of an annual music festival.
The show, called ‘Claude Cahun: Reflections’ will take place at the Jersey Arts Centre on Friday 17 May.
The production is part of the International Liberation Music Festival, organised by Music in Action, which showcases international performers and includes 36 events over a period of ten days.
Claude Cahun, whose real name was Lucie Renée Schwob, is celebrated for her surrealist and androgynous self-portraits.
She created groundbreaking art that challenged societal norms alongside her stepsister and partner, Marcel Moore (real name Suzanne Malherbe).
Pictured: Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore relaxing and enjoying the views at their St Brelade home La Rocquaise. (Jersey Archive)
Blending the story of the lives of the couple before the Occupation with a musical soundscape by Boulanger, Gershwin and Joplin, the evening promises to capture the spirit of the time and the inner world of the French surrealists.
The production will see actress, writer and producer Flora MacAngus accompanied on stage by violinist Harriet Mackenzie, cellist Urska Horvat and pianist Anna Tilbrook and also incorporating an extract of a theatre-piece about the artists' lives and work.
Claude Cahun was born as Lucie Renée Schwob in 1894 in France to a family of distinguished Jewish publishers.
She spent many childhood holidays in Jersey and Brittany, where she developed a fascination with self-portraiture.
Cahun attended the University of Sorbonne in Paris and adopted the gender-neutral pseudonym Claude Cahun
Pictured: The surrealist photographer enjoyed posing in the grounds of La Rocquaise. (Jersey Archive)
Although Cahun refers to herself as "elle" (she) in all her own works, she said: "Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me."
Her work often explored themes of gender fluidity and surrealist reflections and aimed to challenge the patriarchal gaze and the sexualization of the female form.
Her artistic influence was latterly recognised by David Bowie, who created a multimedia exhibition of her work in the Gardens of the General Theological Seminary in New York in 2007.
During the early 1920s, she settled in Paris with lifelong partner Suzanne Malherbe, who adopted the pseudonym Marcel Moore.
The two became step-sisters in 1917 after Cahun's divorced father and Moore's widowed mother married, eight years after Cahun and Moore's artistic and romantic partnership began.
The pair lived together in Paris's bohemian community before moving to Jersey in 1937 to escape the rising antisemitism.
Cahun and Moore became village eccentrics, wearing trousers – a rare sight in the 1930's – walking their cat, and making art together.
They settled in St Brelade in a house called La Rocquaise overlooking the bay. The house went up for sale for £10m in June 2022.
Pictured: Claude Cahun (Lucie Renée Schwob) and Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe) are buried in St. Brelade's Church's cemetery.
When the Nazis occupied Jersey in 1940, Cahun and Moore joined the French resistance.
They used disguises to infiltrate German gatherings and distributed anti-Nazi propaganda by listening to the BBC on an illegal radio and translating the broadcasts into German.
Despite the immense risks, they continued their resistance activities for four years until the Nazis raided their home.
They narrowly escaped a death sentence and were imprisoned in St Helier until Jersey's liberation on 9 May 1945.
Cahun and Moore are buried together next to their home La Rocquaise in St Brelade's Church graveyard.
Tickets for tonight's show can be found HERE.
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