Pierre Albert-Birot
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Pierre Albert-Birot (22 April 1876 – 25 July 1967) was a French avant-garde poet, dramatist, and theater manager.
Early life and writing
Born in Angoulême, he moved to Paris in 1894. There he attended art school and befriended Gustave Moreau. He worked for five decades as a restorer for antique dealer Madame Lelong. He began writing after he met the musician Germaine de SurVille in 1913.
From January 1916 to December 1919, Albert-Birote edited the avant-garde art magazine SIC, an acronym for Sons Idées Couleurs (Sounds Ideas Colors), which featured writings by Futurists, Surrealism, and Dadaists.
His first volume of poems was Trente et un Poèmes de Poche (1917). His novel Grabinoulor appeared in 1919.
Theater
Albert-Birot directed the first performance of Les mamelles de Tirésias (Tiresias's Breasts, 1917) by Guillaume Apollinaire, a friend who had also been a contributor to SIC. He went on to compose numerous plays of his own, including Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard); Les Femmes pliantes (The Flexible Woman); and L'homme coupé en morceaux (The Dismembered Man).
In 1929 he founded his own theater, Le Plateau, in which he produced his own series of short performance pieces entitled Pièces-Études.