Hélène Patarot was born in Haïphong, Vietnam in 1954. She moved to Fance at the age of three and was raised on a farm and received a French education. She has lived in London where she has worked with Theatre de Complicite and Simon McBurney, Annie Casteldine, Greg Thomson, James Kerr, Rose English, Vanessa Redgrave, and Avalon TV. She has worked in France with Peter Brook, Dan Jemmet, Lucian Pintillier, Karelle Prignaud, and Lilo Baur. She has acted in The Bone, The Mahabaratha, Tierno Bokar, and designed costumes for The Magic Flute. Lately, she has been creating a devised theater piece in a prison titled “je suis une femme helas”. She has recently completed a cooking degree and will create a devised theater piece / restaurant project in Nice with Irina Brook. She lives in Paris with her husband and daughter.
In her residency project, Hélène Patarot explores the memory of her father’s life in a French military school in Vietnam in 1939. The initiative came from a recording that Patarot created 18 years ago, in which she interviewed her father about his experiences as a child in the French military school and as a soldier in the French army in their Northern African colonies. Patarot’s father died soon after this project, and upon listening to the tape again recently, Patarot decided to interview his companions who are still alive to complete the missing pieces of the story. Through community workshops, Patarot will assemble a multitude of stories into a patchwork that will tell a wider and universal story, with the possibility of developing the project further into a documentary theater piece.