Their names are Capucine, Garance, Justine, Mégane and Sofia. They're cooks, dancers, singers, rappers, tennis players and fashion archivists. Feminine" girls and "tomboys", with a sensitive man in the middle. These rebellious, self-seeking young women are Marie Mahé's generation as she sees it. Kaaris questions Chopin, before Rihanna gives way to an opera by Léo Delibes. The director invents a fiction in which spectators are transported into worlds where the mechanisms of virility are dissected and pushed to their extremes, in order to extract all their fragilities. In a direct address to the audience, brimming with feverish humor, it's all about the construction of identities, clichés and bridges between the sexes. Viril(e-s) sheds light on pieces of lives, thoughts in the making, others in the process of deconstruction, putting certainties and doubts up for debate. So many individual narratives forming a common whole. Interwoven, they " stir up society by refusing to accept its injunctions ", allowing " to confront the viewer with something he or she still knows little about: difference and otherness, by breaking down the prejudices that shape the way he or she looks at things. "assures Marie Mahé, whose ambition is to " take up and draw on what's left of the old to find our modernity ".
After studying Art History and Archaeology, Marie Mahé entered the Equal Opportunity preparatory class at the MC93, then the École supérieure d'Art dramatique in Paris. On graduating in 2020, she wrote her first short film, About the Koran, and won the Talents en Court award at the Jamel Comedy Club. That same year, she founded the DTM 9.4 company, with whom she staged her first show, DNA. In 2021, she was a finalist in the Planches de L'Icart one-woman stage competition with a text entitled Bataclan, which she performed at the Théâtre du Gymnase Marie-Bell. She plays in Dom Juandirected by Tigran Mekhitarian at the Avignon Festival. In 2022, she wrote and directed her second creation, Viril(e-s), which won the Prix Théâtre 13 for young directors.
" By extrapolating the clichés of "what's masculine" and "what's feminine", Viril(e.s) recounts, with humor and tenderness, the inevitable episodes that the social sphere forces us to endure. " La TerrasseLouise Chevillard, 07/2023
distribution
TEXT AND DIRECTION MARIE MAHÉ
WITH DÉBORAH DOZOUL, MÉGANE FERRAT, CAPUCINE GOURMELON, SOFIA HARMOUMI, ILYES HAMMADI CHASSIN ALTERNATING WITH SEBASTIEN KHEROUFI
SCENOGRAPHY ISABELLE SIMON
LIGHTING DESIGN EDITH BISCARO
COSTUMES MARIE MAHÉ
ARTIST PAINTER DOCTOR BERGMAN
photo credit : capternestpastromper
production details
PRODUCTION COMPANY DTM 9.4 / COPRODUCTION THEATRE 13 / WITH THE SUPPORT OF SUPPORTED BY THE CITY OF PARIS, ADAMI, FONDS D'INSERTION POUR JEUNES COMÉDIENS DE L'ESAD-PSPBB, ESCA - STUDIO THÉÂTRE D'ASNIÈRES, SACD, SPEDIDAM / WITH THE ARTISTIC PARTICIPATION OF JTN AND THE SUPPORT OF THÉÂTRE STUDIO D'ALFORTVILLE / IN FRENCH ONLY ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TO COMPAGNIE MADANI AND COMPAGNIE ZIRLIB / EXECUTIVE PRODUCTION MATRIOSHKA PRODUCTIONS
BIG SCENE
as part of the OFF European conference on violence against women