Interesting stuff in Alizée related articles
 

Hello, everyone!

I was reading some of Alizée's interviews and found a couple of interesting things.
I'm talking about two questions she was asked for this megazine:

https://i.ibb.co/FmTJNXJ/423195.jpg

Here is the translation of the first one:

I don't know if this might sound obvious to some of you, but it seems quite revealing to me: she didn't just want to devote her life to dancing, she actually wanted to be a dance teacher! Obviously this is a 20-year-old interview and she also said "in the beginning", so a lot of things might have changed. But now I'm even more convinced that the dance studio was not a second best but a well-thought choice. Moreover I think Greg's parents were dance teachers as well and he said that he loved that job, so they should be pretty proud of themselves.

The second question is probably a little more intriguing:

This means that she actually knew what she sang. We don't know if Mylene was completely clear, but I presume she made Alizée understand what the purpose of the lolita image was. And back then Alizée might have been naive, but I think also intelligent. I think she was mature enough to glean how things work in those environments. Moreover Mylene often asked her opinion on various topics, so I guess Alizée was conscious of what she was doing... I think she had a lot of fun by playing that role. At least at the beginning.


Um, did I choose the right section for this thread?

I think it's a very good place for your post. Yes she did mention years ago before Dals came along that she'd like to open a dance school. Of course with every job comes work, so nothing comes easy in life, but now she gets to share that idea with someone she loves. The dance school is a love of hers and it's also work. It's not Hollywood or Paris, but she's shown us time and time again she enjoys the simple things in life such as the beauty of Corsica and family much more than the glitz of those other places.

Whatever the future holds for her, career-wise, I think it’s wonderful that she is doing something she’s wanted to do for a long time. How many people can say that? So often in life people have dreams when they are young, and those dreams get put aside for a multitude of reasons. Life may go on successfully and happily, but those original plans just never happen. And so Alizée, after having the successes she has had, is actually living a life she’d hoped for early on. Perhaps she’ll eventually tire of the dance studio or decide to try something completely different or return to singing. But it will always feel good, to her, that she did get to experience doing something she’d always wanted. I think this is a great way to live a life so that, looking back, there are few regrets.

To be sure, the things we want in life may not work out the way we want them to and with Alizee, maybe the dream life of managing a dance studio was more work than she imagined. We all dream of a life of sitting back in a cozy chair and eating Bon Bons, but we realize eventually that even for those who live the life of the privileged, life is not a box of chocolates.

She had the early success with Mylene Farmer. She suffered failure after failure after she left MF. To most singers, that would have been the end of it. They would have been delegated to the role of one hit artists or in Alizee's case, an artist whose success depended upon MF/LB.

But then Dals came along and the world was shown that she's not a one trick pony and to this day, fans around the world are waiting to view the next chapter in the story of Alizée.

I think you are so right...and I have a strong feeling she still has a lot to share with the world!

Call it destiny or call it luck, or maybe a bit of both, but without Alizee's professional and personal failures, she probably would not have achieved that early wish of being a dance teacher today.

After she moved back to Ajaccio, she was it seems in constant company with her good friend Pierre Antoine (Dancerman1). He opened up a dance school in Ajaccio. I wonder if they thought of opening one together. I'll have to check to see when he opened it up. If it was after the Dals offer came along, you could understand her not joining up with him or maybe she just hadn't given up on her singing career yet.

Edit:

Well apparently his dance studio is called Chez Mademoiselle Pierantoine. Maybe they had an argument over whether the studio should be called Chez Mademoiselle Pierantoine of Chez Monsieur Alizee?

I know when it opened is in are archives somewhere, but I can't find it.

I just looked up the number of dance schools in Ajaccio and there are a number of them. How many of them can a small to medium sized city like Ajaccio support? :confused:

Back when Alizee was hanging out with Pierre, I don't think she had the credentials and experience at that point to teach dancing. Appearing (and winning) in DALS gave her credibility, and her name recognition warranted that the studio would be called A&G, not G&A.

In my walks around Ajaccio, I saw several dance studios and I had wondered when she talked of opening up one how a place not that large could support so many schools. But when I visited the dance studio, I saw she's in an area with numerous high rise apartments around it so it seems she's in a good location, student availability wise.

Before Greg and Alizee opened their studio but were talking about it, I did a search on Google Maps for dance studios in Ajaccio and was astounded to find a dozen or so. I didn't believe Ajaccio was big enough to support that many, and thought G&A would be foolish to open another. Well, as we see they have been very successful. Since Scruffy raised the issue again today, I did another search and found the number of studios significantly reduced. I wonder if Gregg and Alizee drove the others out of business. Even so, I counted 8 studios still remaining today. I'm amazed that Ajaccio can support that many. The city has a population of 66,245. Dance students would make up a small percentage of those under the age of 20, I don't know how to calculate that number.

I live in San Antonio, Texas where the population is 1.5 million with 19 dance studios.

That breaks down to 1 studio for every 8,280 people in Ajaccio,
and 1 studio for every 79,000 people in San Antonio.

Evidently, there's a dramatic cultural difference. San Antonio is in the Bible Belt and there seems to be a church on every two or three blocks. Storefront churches that service congregations smaller than a couple hundred people are popular. San Antonio is also host to several of the largest televangelist ministries in America. The Baptists believe it's a sin to dance and they make up the majority of churches in San Antonio. Perhaps that explains the discrepancy between the two cities.

I imagine it's like any other business. If you deliver value better than the other businesses, you win. It looks like lately they carved a niche by teaching kids how to ballroom dance. Still, there can't be a lot of money in it. Corsica has a higher unemployment rate than France as a whole, so the dance studios are really competing against each other for whatever customers are out there with expendable cash.



I come from a Baptist background and lived around Houston for 30 years, so I can speak to this topic. The SBC (Southern Baptist Convention) doesn't really micromanage the culture of member churches, so basically the leadership of the church does that. There is a lot of variance in culture from church to church. Some can be extremely strict, but I found this to be the exception and not the rule. Basically they condemn the "bump and grind" type dancing you might find young people doing in nightclubs. Dancing with your spouse or types of dances which require "minimal" contact such as the two step or ballroom dance don't cause any concerns in my experience. I have also had the pleasure of visiting a black Baptist church, which was a very lively experience. Lots of dancing while they are singing.

Besides, the more you tell young people that they can't do this or can't do that, the more likely they want to do it. :w:

Yep:rolleyes:

I've been amazed at the ability of AAm members to hunt down minutia on Alizee. I've mentioned a number of times how impressed I am by their ability to determine the very rock she sat on and the creek in which the rock existed and where in the world all that was. If you're interested in this sort of detective work there's a great documentary on Netflix titled "Don't F**k with Cats" in which amateurs using nothing but the Internet solved a murder in Canada. They were able to predict that a guy who tortured cats and posted the movies on the Internet was about to advance to murdering people. They figured out his identity, analyzed his psychology, and tracked his movements around the world. They figured out that he had murdered a guy in a Canadian town before the police in that town knew a murder had taken place. This is not fiction, it really happened.

This is not from an article but it may be interesting anyway.
According to spanish Wikipedia, Alizée is also known as Princess of French Pop. I presume this name is only used in Mexico, but it's nice :]

https://i.ibb.co/Gd52ztK/Screenshot-20200503-122303.jpg

Happy Birthday to Maestro Laurent Boutonnat

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsjH_...iGaJHvbKOBcXBs

Happy birthday Laurent!

Here is what the poster of that video said about it.....

"Here is an instrumental demo by Laurent Boutonnat, which has never been finalized. We immediately recognize his style (rhythm, instruments, chords, melody). Listening to the sounds used, we note that some are identical to those of "Moi ... Lolita" and "L'Alizé", titles that Laurent had composed in 2000 for Alizée. The piano notes also recall Alizée's first titles. This demo is therefore probably a drop from the album "Gourmandises" ..."