Unexpected conflict, uncontrolled communication and the myth of female rivalry… The altercation between Inès Reg and Natasha St-Pier during rehearsals for Dance with the stars has transformed over the days into a real soap opera to follow on social networks and in the press.
What really happened between Inès Reg and Natasha St-Pier? Who insulted who? Were threats made? Will we one day see the images of the altercation that everyone is talking about? All these questions and many others have been agitating the small world of television since last week, fans of Dance with the stars on TF1, and even go a little beyond this framework.
“Television is part of a common heritage in our society”, analysis from the HuffPost Céline Ségur, specialist in information and communication sciences and researcher at the research center on mediations at the University of Lorraine.
“It’s an element of social interaction: what happens on TV is one of the things on which you have to have an opinion,” she summarizes. “It builds us, it strengthens our identity.”
It is therefore not so surprising that the “affair” has generated so much passion on social networks, to the point of now being widely discussed by the press. “When there is a fight in a media schoolyard, it ends up on social networks,” analyzes Véronique Reille-Soult, crisis communications specialist, on BFMTV.
Inès Reg and Natasha St-Pier were both violently targeted there. “The excitement is not that important,” tempers Véronique Reille-Soult, but “there is a polarization of positions, a cultural side of the clash, which is revealing itself even more strongly, out of step with the concept of the show itself.
Unexpected conflict, uncontrolled communication
Because Dance with the stars although it may be a competition, the competitors usually face each other with fair play and good humor, on the floor to the sound of a cha-cha-cha tune, rather than in the police stations. And then, unlike many reality TV shows, the program is not built around arguments between protagonists. Dance with the starsit’s not The people of Marseilles. The emergence of this unexpected conflict in a rather consensual program adds a little salt.
“It’s not specific to television, but exceptional situations like conflict attract and interest much more than banality,” explains Céline Ségur. “There’s something happening, there’s action.”
The story between Inès Reg and Natasha St-Pier also escapes the usually hyper-controlled communication of TF1. After a first article in The Parisianwhich revealed the altercation between the two candidates, each decided to deliver their own version of the facts, in stories on social networks.
It was Inès Reg who came out first, on the night of Sunday to last Monday, with a very long story, rich in details and emotions, in which she denounces an underlying racism in Natasha St-Pier’s reaction. Accusations that the person then disputed on her own Instagram account, explaining that she felt “in danger”. Enough to flesh out this story and pique public interest.
“What is interesting is that the protagonists (told their version) in terms that would not have been asked a few years ago, with undoubtedly sincere emotion on each side,” notes Véronique Reille- Soult. “Emotion is what moves the most, it’s what creates the ‘buzz’, it’s what makes you want to position yourself and react, to defend yourself or attack, depending on which side you want to position yourself on.”
“An appetite for the idea of backcombing”
Surprise, emotion, twists and turns… All the ingredients are here to captivate while waiting for the next story or the next bonus Dance with the starsscheduled live this Friday, March 29.
Especially since this conflict between Inès Reg and Natasha St-Pier is part of the myth of female rivalry, well anchored in society and in pop culture, analyzes Racha Belmehdi, author of Rivalry, feminine name, a feminist reading of the myth (ed. Favre).
Disputes and other antagonisms are certainly not the prerogative of women, but where men choose to fuel these rivalries, as Booba and KaarisRobbie Williams and Gary Barlow, or the brothers Gallagherwomen often try to defend themselves against it, like Selena Gomez and Hailey Bieber.
However, “they would have us believe that women, by definition, would be driven to rivalry, as if it were something natural, innate in them,” believes the journalist.
In the case Dance with the stars, this attraction for conflicts between women, to whom we “more easily attribute the idea of hysteria”, thus leads to obscuring “a third participant in this story”, Anthony Colette, the dancer of Natasha St-Pier . “He is part of the story, he was part of the altercation, he also left a handrail at the police station, and yet, he is completely evacuated from the story.”
“The only people we focus on are the two women,” she notes. “Because we really have an appetite for this idea of backcombing. Everyone takes out the popcorn, everyone has an opinion.”
Everyone is speaking out… except TF1, which has remained silent until now. Crisis meetings were organized, according to information from BFMTV, to decide how to manage this crisis during the bonus. Dance with the stars scheduled for this Friday, March 29. The idea of staging a reconciliation of Inès Reg and Natasha St-Pier is being considered. Not necessarily enough to put an end to the controversy.