Ces Filles qu'On Attend

What marks does childhood leave behind? What battles shape the lives of the strangers we pass in the street? Nobody has simply strode across three hills to lounge in a meadow; childhood leaves its traces on adults the way brambles leave marks on a knee. And that is when things go more or less normally. But what happens when it slips? When something seems not to fit, seems out of the norm, when difference is felt as early as the school playground. The weight of a body that is judged, the slowness of a thought that gets singled out, the chaos of a home you leave every day with your little schoolbag on your back.

To write Ces filles qu'on attend, Claudine Galea, together with the show's three performers, met young women of Saint-Denis as they grow up.

She gathered their words – sometimes sparse, sometimes rough-edged – and shaped them into a text in which she traces, at breakneck speed, three heroic stories of teenage girls. She listens to them walking the streets in the present tense and encourages them to head straight for their future.

Elsa Granat directs these three life paths and continues her research into the place of the child in our societies, the last link of the vulnerable. The show, begun three years ago at the initiative of Julie Deliquet as part of the L'Équipé·e festival, went on thanks to the fieldwork carried out by the performers and the author. This season, a director takes it up to bring it to completion, showing that theatre can today be created collaboratively from real life. A playful chain like an exquisite corpse, telling the story of these exquisite living women.