La Gouineraie

Rébecca Chaillon, a dyke from the city, and Sandra Calderan, a country lesbian, are a couple on- and off-stage. In this joyful, intimate performance, they attempt to deconstruct, dissect, and analyse what it means to ‘form a family’.  

Together, they invite the audience into their home-in-the-making. While Sandra makes frantic attempts to build as many little homes as possible from scrap wood, city girl Rébecca comes to give the countryside a chance. Surrounded by building materials, wrestling with wallpaper or objects from their daily lives, they think about what each person's position could be within their new home and family. 

In a cheerful, intimate performance, we witness their different attempts to recreate the perfect family, between different moments of celebration, loneliness, fantasies, failure... One by one, they ask each other questions about inherited family, invented family, chosen family. Without really offering solutions, but by encouraging the audience to join in the investigation. What are the ways of forming a family when one is White, lives with her ex, their children, and her ex's new family, while the other is Black, urban, and spends more time in the theatres of France and Navarra than in her own flat?  

Drawing inspiration from our TV-series culture, they find pleasure in remixing traditional, patriarchal, White, hetero 'family models'. And they explore how far we dare to colour outside the lines of an intergenerational family system. As in a television series that spans several seasons, their reflections can go in a different direction at any time. 

• Rébecca Chaillon, born in Martinique, is involved in the activities of feminist, queer, and anti-racist collectives. In her artistic practices, she makes room for personal emancipation, deconstructing assumptions, mixing and overlapping identities, and acting against discrimination against minorities and post-colonial populations in the French art world. From 2005 to 2017, she worked in the Entrées de jeu theatre company, directed by Bernard Grosjean, and in 2006 she founded La Compagnie Dans le Ventre. Chaillon writes for theatre and cinema, creating performances, short films, and documentaries. She is an associate artist at the Théâtre de la Manufacture in Nancy, and at the TnBA, Théâtre national de Bordeaux en Aquitaine.   

• Sandra Calderan, an author, actress, and director, conceives her poetic writing as a physical gesture: a physical effort that she wants to transfer to the stage, where her poems can gather all their true strength. In 2013, she founded La Compagnie des Hauts Parleurs, with which she created a first performance, Envol, and a second, Just Us. Poetry is at the heart of her politically engaged practice, tirelessly tracking down the stories of forgotten, wounded and luminous lives. For several years, she has collaborated with Cirque Queer, the MONSTRA / Lucía Soto company, Compagnie ERANOS / Flor Paichard, Lou Trotignon, Rébecca Chaillon, and La Compagnie Dans le Ventre.