Devenir [Becoming]

Documentary object theatre
For ages 11 and up | Duration: 1h05
Premiere: 8 November 2022 at Théâtre de Laval – National Puppet Arts Centre

Summary:

The company continues its sensitive exploration of archives, turning this time to teenagers’ diaries. Over three years, the artists collected a large body of writings through calls for testimonies, archival research, and residencies with teenagers past and present. These stories, deeply personal and singular, resonate with the emotions of that period when we transform ourselves and shape who we become.

Friends in middle school, lovers in high school, Katell and Matthieu already shared a passion for music and theatre in their teens. After losing touch, they meet again twenty years later around a stage project nourished by these intimate writings. Texts, objects, notebooks, collages, and songs drawn from incandescent lives bring their own adolescences back to the surface.

These constellations of destinies become the basis of a performance that weaves together acting, music, live manipulation of images and objects, and video creation. The piece speaks to the part of adolescence that remains within us—in our lives as well as in our memories—so that we may keep on becoming.

“By writing, I feel I’m making myself, that I’m in the process of shaping myself.”
(Hugo, 15)

Adolescence sets lasting lines of force, and the diary becomes a secret workshop of transformation.

The project begins with an intuition: adolescence crystallizes determinisms that endure into adulthood. In this turning point, we craft ways of being—postures, personas, masks—in order to be legible to others. The diary holds this craft: fears, strategies, impulses, contradictions, dreams, loyalties, anger, desires for love, and desires for elsewhere.

Sharing intimacies opens a social question, and the stage becomes a space for collective feeling.

Diaries are written in solitude, while also revealing what we write together about ourselves and about others. By giving these writings a stage, Devenir brings intimate narratives into common: a quiet shift from “I” toward a “we” made of voices, objects, songs, and images.

Two performers move through a montage of traces, and the performance weaves text, music, image, and manipulation.

The piece assembles fragments: diary voices, quotations, notebooks, papers, objects, and images projected and created live. Music and song enter the story as forms of address and memory, alongside text and manipulation. The stage becomes a montage workshop where traces are rearranged, answered, and displaced.

The educational pack extends the performance, offering practical tools for teachers and cultural mediators.

The educational pack provides ways to prepare and support a visit to the show: activities before the performance, proposals after the show, and resources around diary writing, documentary object theatre, and choral analysis.

Education / outreach contact: mediation@ciebandepassante.fr

The collection goes beyond the stage, and the Devenir(s) webdocumentary builds a living memory of teenage self-narratives.

The documentary material gathered around teenage self-narratives extends beyond the stage work and continues to grow through territories and encounters. To host, organize, and circulate these traces, Thomas Daveluy, Benoît Faivre, and Camille Baroux developed a webdocumentary: a space to deposit, explore, and connect documents.

More information on the dedicated page: Devenir(s) — Participatory Creations

Documentary songs extend the diaries, and music becomes another form of archive.

Actor and composer Maxime Kerzanet set many texts from the collected diaries to music. These compositions shape the performance and draw a sensitive landscape in which the singing voice becomes a way of inhabiting other people’s words.

An album of documentary songs continues this work, co-produced by Cie La Bande Passante and Hé Ouais Mec Productions. Release: April 2024 (physical edition with booklet, and streaming platforms).