"I'd like to be able, one day, to say 'popular culture' without having to add 'in the noblest sense of the term'."

Following her young audiences production The Mermaids' Belly, Aurianne Servais continues her exploration of autofiction at the crossroads of theatre and live music. In Blood for Blood Johnny, she lends her voice to the words of a community of fans she met while developing the performance. By taking on a virile figure who embodies a taste for spectacle and excess, she playfully challenges our assumptions: yes, a woman can wear leather and command as much power as Johnny, leaping from a helicopter into the Stade de France.

What is your connection to Johnny Hallyday?

Johnny has always been part of the musical landscape I inherited from my mother. Ever since I was a child, music has played a major role in the moments we shared together. French chanson is something that brings my family together.

From the moment I discovered Johnny, I was struck by the grandeur of his concerts. What fascinated me then, and still does today, is how he never seemed to place limits on what he could do on stage, while remaining profoundly sincere. He was the first singer I knew who could fill an entire stadium. As a little girl, I told myself that one day I would do a stadium tour like Johnny Hallyday.

What troubled me, however, was that the only model I saw was a man. Even as a child, there were many things in that highly masculine world—rock music, bikers, leather, spectacle—with which I could not identify. It felt as though there was no place for me there.

As I grew older, what stayed with me was Johnny's music and what he represented for his fans. The day he died, my mother and I were pulling an all-nighter watching films together. Around five in the morning, television programming was interrupted by a breaking news announcement: "Johnny Hallyday has died." We spent the entire day watching the coverage. Neither of us slept. I was deeply moved by the way this community came together to pay tribute, celebrate, mourn, and above all support one another through their grief. That was when an idea began to take shape, eventually leading me to create a performance about Johnny Hallyday's fans.

You met fans as part of your creative process. What place do they occupy in the performance?

What mattered most to me was giving this community a voice and placing their stories at the centre of the work.

I began with documentary research into both Johnny's life and his fan community. I read books, watched series, interviews and documentaries, listened to podcasts, met collectors, and visited exhibitions. This allowed me to start gathering testimonies around themes I wanted to address in the performance: fatherhood, stage persona, addiction, violence, relationships with women, grief, and more.

I then developed an interview protocol and set out to meet people willing to talk about their idol. I also interviewed every member of the creative team: Raphaële, who plays electric guitar; Jeanne, who plays drums; and my assistant Nelly, who even designed an interview for me so that I too could be interviewed.

From there, we began our stage research, creating material from all the voices we had gathered—our own, those of the fans, and those of people close to Johnny.

Once the research phase was complete, I wrote the text using their words, their images, and their favourite songs. In the performance, the voices of the three characters—Jo, Raph and Michelle—are composite voices that bring Johnny Hallyday's fans to the stage and allow them to be heard.

How do you convey the tension between the intimate experience of having an idol and the collective identity of a fan community?

In the story, Joséphine, the central character, cannot come to terms with the loss of her idol. Her grief is deeply personal. It is tied to her childhood and to the place Johnny occupies in her life. Yet eight years later, she remains unable to move on.

The answer she eventually finds comes through a tribute band. It is through the two women she meets, through their shared experiences of music and their different views of Johnny, that she is finally able to let go. Together, through solidarity and collective experience, they help one another through the mourning process.

Each of the three women has her own intimate relationship with Johnny, her own understanding of his career and what he represents in her life. Yet together they form a group. Something emerges from that tribute band: an identity, a shared energy, a common presence. That is what I wanted to explore through these three characters—the interplay between individuality and community, personal experience and collective identity.

What I love about documentary storytelling is that the more intimate and personal a testimony becomes, the more universal it often feels.

Although the performance is rooted in the world of Johnny Hallyday's fans, every audience member can recognise something of themselves in it. More than a performance about Johnny Hallyday, it is a performance about love, the need for identification, the desire to belong, and the freedom to be who we want to be while being accepted as we are.