CURREnT
LES GLACES from Rébecca Déraspe. Sélection of Luxembourg in Avignon. Théâtre le 11. Avignon
When Noémie learns that her son has been accused of rape, her past comes crashing back. She decides to break her silence and confront her two childhood friends who assaulted her 25 years ago. As everyone begins to speak out, each person’s life is suddenly turned upside down.
Following the success of Laurent Mauvignier’s *Ce que j’appelle oubli*, presented last year at 11 • Avignon, Sophie Langevin once again explores human relationships. With subtlety and a touch of humor, *Les Glaces* tackles the issue of consent. Without judging or excusing, this ensemble piece reveals a multitude of perspectives and an unexpected sense of sisterhood.
"With this production, I’m continuing work that is essential to me: examining the forms of violence that permeate human relationships. Where do they come from? How do they take root in our bodies, in our silences, in our gazes? And above all, how can we collectively deconstruct them? I’m convinced that speech and theater allow us to open a window to speak out, acknowledge, and set ourselves free. "
The play won the Michel Tremblay Prize (2023), which honors the best dramatic work in Quebec, and the Best Production Award at the Lëtzebuerger Bühnepräisser (2025), Luxembourg’s performing arts awards.
Selected for “Luxembourg en Avignon 2026” with the support of Kultur | Lx – Arts Council Luxembourg, the City of Esch, the Pablo Picasso Cultural Center in Homécourt, and the Luxembourg Ministry of Culture.
Text by Rébecca Déraspe / Directed by Sophie Langevin / Video, assistant director Jonathan Christoph / Lighting design by Jef Metten / Set and costume design by Peggy Wurth / Sound design by Pierrick Grobéty and Rozenn Lièvre
Starring Lydia Indjova, Renelde Pierlot, Juliette Moro, Amandine Truffy, Francesco Mormino, Thomas Gourdy, Bryan Polach
An Escher Theater Production / Co-production by JUNCTiO
Selected for “Luxembourg en Avignon 2026” with the support of Kultur | lx – Arts Council Luxembourg, the City of Esch, the Pablo Picasso Cultural Center in Homécourt, and the Luxembourg Ministry of Culture
WHEN AND WHERE?
July 4–23 at 10:30 p.m., no performances on July 10 and 17 At Théâtre Le 11 • Avignon, 11 Boulevard Raspail | 84000 Avignon
Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes
Reservations:
https://www.11avignon.com/fr/les-glaces
IN WORDS, I LISTEN TO SILENCE - dance piece and poetry by Anise Koltz
Concept and production Sophie Langevin & Yuko Kominami
Choreography and performance Yuko Kominami
Voice and direction Sophie Langevin / Scénographie, Lights Hervé Coqueret
Sound Emre Sevindik / Vidéo Ghazi Frini
A Productio by JUNCTiO
Co-production Théâtre National de Luxembourg, Opderschmeltz - Dudelange Cultural Center, National Literature Center, French Institute of Luxembourg
Support TROIS c-L- The House of Dance, L'Association Victor Hugo de Luxembourg, Le Ministère de La Culture de Luxembourg
Anise Koltz opens up the world of the unconscious and the conscious in each of her poems, drawing out the tension between them. She brings us closer to the void of silence, where death attempts to establish itself as a barrier to words and the living world that speaks and disrupts them. And where does God fit into all this? Beckett is so close—they share a common theme of explosion, the destruction of the world, the meaning of life. But is there one, in this world born of the unspeakable? And today, as the world seems to be on the brink of a new destruction of our humanity, these words capsize our present.
We are going to grapple with this poetry of insurrection.
The first time I encountered Anise Koltz's poems was when I was looking for a poem for a project to explore through dance and calligraphy. I came across one of her poems, which I really liked. I looked for another poem by her, liked it a lot, and one after another, I read more and more, and became a fan. When I was little, I used to write haikus (short poems consisting of three lines, originating in Japan), and this allowed me to appreciate the act of capturing a fleeting moment, which extends to infinity, as well as the space that surrounds it.
Infinity, as well as the space between the lines that resonates with everything. The feeling I had when reading Anise's poem brought me back to that sensation. Her idiosyncratic poems, which appreciate, feel, wait, and remain steadfast in a refreshing and courageous way, give me enormous emotions as well as a key to something unknown, important, and very familiar. For me, there is an immediate connection to the study of my original dance form, Butoh. One aspect of Butoh is the exploration of words (images), sensations, and movement. The Butoh score is composed of words after words, images after images (like a poem). However, it does not follow a usual path, but attempts to deconstruct the mechanisms of language and “constantly expands the stifled passage between meaning and sensation.” (Kuniyoshi) to reveal a very intense and inevitable here and now. - Yuko Kominami
“Just as life is surrounded by the silence of birth and death, every poem by Anise Koltz also ends in silence.” Evelio Minano Martinez. It is around these silences that we will construct the form. Textual silences as empty spaces. In the space created by Yuko Kominami and myself, the form will oscillate between voice and body in chance and expected encounters. At the edge of the stage, sound and image will open up other spaces, like the multiple dimensions offered in Anise Koltz's poetry.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
THE ORCHID LAMENT
The Orchid Lament
Conceived and directed by Sophie Langevin and Stéphanie Laruade
The Orchids’ Lament is a literary audio walk where 14 orchids await on the windowsills of homes in the Grund and Clausen neighborhoods, inviting you to listen.
with the authors: Nico Helminger, Cécile Hupin, Sophie Langevin, Fida Mohissen, Antoine Pohu, Jean-Philippe Rossignol, Karin Serres, Elise Schmit, Florence Sunnen, Ian De Toffoli, Sofia Teillet, Stéphane Guislain Roussel, Hyam Yared
“Among the nation of plants, I am undoubtedly a special representative: having started far away, I have also arrived far away, as no other flower has done, it seems to me. I gave you beauty, then helped you to understand how life evolved - to understand that we plants are alive, just like you.” *Alessandro Wagner - Making love like an orchid.
La Complainte des Orchidées is a journey into the intimate world of nature, the city and its inhabitants, through stories told by these flowers installed on the windowsills of houses. These mini urban gardens will be unveiled all along the Alzette valley.
Altars of nature telling the world.
Along the way, the stories of these orchids will be told.
This project is a literary, botanical, poetic and climatic stroll along the banks of the Alzette and its unknown corners, listening to orchids.
Orchids are the sentinels of our homes, our spectators. They see and hear everything. Inside and out. Like us, they are alive. Today we invite you to listen to them, to observe them. These orchids speak, and they have stories to tell. They are from here and from elsewhere. They respond to the world around them, resilient yet always alert to the climatic and social upheavals of our time.
FESTIVAL D'AVIGNON / CE QUE J'APPELLE OUBLI
Text Laurent Mauvignier /Direction & set design Sophie Langevin /Dramaturgy Youness Anzane /Actor Luc Schiltz / Sound and stage design Jorge De Moura Choreography Emmanuela Iacopini / Costume & Accessories Sophie Van Den Keybus / Lighting & stage management Jef Metten / Assistant directors Jonathan Christoph, Denis Jousselin / crédit Bohumil Kostohrzy
A JUNCTiO production / Coproductions CAPE (Centre Culturel des Arts Pluriels Ettelbruck), Kinneksbond (Centre Culturel de Mamer)
A man enters a supermarket. In the drinks aisle, he opens a can of beer and drinks it. Four security guards appear, surround him and take him into the storeroom. There, they fall on him and, in the middle of the cans, beat him to death. All for nothing. A narrator takes over the story. In a sentence that never ends, he addresses the brother. He puts words to the unthinkable. He seeks to understand the mechanisms that produced this tragedy. How people can die for nothing. He tries to make the victim's feelings heard. He goes through what his life was like; a marginal life that leaves no trace. Like perhaps those who faced him. We navigate between the blows - which the victim can't escape and which make a dull noise - and his life outside and the world around him; his family and those of the security guards and society, which in a way perhaps participated in this.
Through this story, the narrator holds up a mirror to our contemporary society, and at the same time succeeds in connecting us to humanity, in the midst of the isolation produced by individualism and blindness to otherness.
And you come out alive.
(... ) my death is not the saddest event in my life, what's sad in my life is this world with vigilantes and people who ignore each other in dead lives like this pallor, this death all the time, every day, that it finally stops, I assure you, it's not sad like losing the taste for wine and beer, the taste for kissing, for inventing destinies for people in the subway and the taste for walking for hours and hours (...)* * What I call oblivion - Ce que j'appelle oubli
Notes
"Today, in a context of accelerating competition and growing inequality, which fosters the impression that there is no society or state, only a war of all against all, individuals are directly exposed. (...) This negative reaction to the existence of the other, where envy mingles with a feeling of humiliation and powerlessness, is spreading and deepening." Pankaj Mishra, The Age of Anger, 2017
"A terrible increase in mutual hatred and an almost universal irascibility of everyone toward everyone else." Hannah Arendt, Political Lives,1956
I discovered Ce que j'appelle oubli when it was published. It was a shock. I felt shaken. A chilling sensation of brutality in action. Paradoxically, through this violence, I felt a hand being extended to me, like a great fraternal consolation. Ce que j'appelle oubli plunges us into a dizzying back-and-forth movement of noise, blows and crashes, where suspended breathing is close to suffocation.
Since the publication of this book, written a few months after the murder, the world has become even harder. Societies are fractured, a muted, systemic violence is beginning to emerge, borders are being created, walls are being erected, a kind of mistrust is emerging between people; between those who do not belong to the same social classes. Fear creates rejection, fear distances. This state of distrust leads to judging others who are not the same. To despise those who fail. It's urgent to take care of the human world, the one that connects us, and to deal with its ills. Luminous and desperate against the “little” barbarism in action, this text has the benevolent power of a vital impetus to ensure that humanity does not sink into an inability to look at others and welcome them.
Laurent Mauvignier has the words to console us.
As with the character of Mona in Agnès Varda's “Sans toi ni loi”, who freezes to death in a ditch, Laurent Mauvignier reconstructs this man's journey in a fragmented way, each new piece retracing a piece of his destiny, that of a marginal who was once part of society, but is no longer. Perhaps by choice. And as with Mona, this “freedom” disturbs and upsets, perhaps triggering the boundless hatred that has fallen upon him. We'll never know.
why you despised me ?
(... ) they've all lowered their eyes because they've got work to do and lawns to mow or trains to catch, children to pick up after school, and also because they're hoping to escape their own misery, what I call misery, from all the misfortunes when on the way it's a guy like him they come across, naked as a nightmare, his filthy face lit up by their headlights instead of the animals at the end of a wood, on the embankments - and they all lower their eyes or avert them to ward off the jinx that sticks to others(... ). * Ce que j'appelle oubli - Laurent Mauvignier
Not long ago, I came home quite late and in the small hall, under the mailboxes, a woman was sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor. The neon light came on and she woke up. There I was with my key, ready to open the second door. I was going home to warmth. I couldn't ignore her. I couldn't ignore her. I talked to her, she told me her story, her misery, and I invited her to come and sleep in the warmth. It was the first time I'd ever done that. I offered her something to eat, then she took a bath. The next morning, I had to wake her up. We went out and she took to the streets again. One day, she came back to ask me for money. And when I saw her again, I realized that I'd wanted to forget her.
And I felt like crying.
For me, Laurent Mauvignier's text has the power of a song for all those who are forgotten, against this brutal world that gives poverty and marginality the color of rejection.
1147_ce_que_jappelle_oubli_dossier_artistique__junctio2025.pdfROOM'S PORTRAITS
Portraits in room is situated in the continuity of The apartment which did not sleep. These performances reflect on the intimate captured in a place and a suspended temporality. As if time could stop and be recomposed in another way.
This short form (+/-6 minutes) offers, through women's portraits, to observe, to listen to our time upset by a world in conflict, an acceleration of time, an impossibility to transform our model of society. A society torn by extremes and by the loss of the collective. And, a society in which the reference points are questioned, pushed around, notably on the question of gender which modifies our interior metronomes and the intimate scale.
A society on the alert.
A double movement is searched here: first, the writing which reveals the human contradictions, our ambivalences, our frailties, our power. Then these movements towards "the other" to which the spectators/observers are invited are reinforced by the position they occupy. At a short but constrained distance since they see-listen-observe through an interstice, or in the privileged position of being alone in a room with the performed figure. They become accomplices of the story that can be their own. This proximity and the necessary solitude is reinforced by the text played with headphones.
In these paintings, the decor is part of the story. It is even from a scenographic element that the narration begins and that it is written. Like a mise en abîme through a place, a space. The place as an echo to the scenographed body.
Extract
(...) She wore her old shoes, which she'd been carrying around for a long time and which looked just like her - a step, then. That night to. Stop the destruction of her daughter. Disintegration, she had said to herself that very morning, watching her sitting in front of her breakfast and suddenly understanding that body as falling, inside, like a block of ice detaching itself from a wall, the sound ricocheting off the horizon to infinity. In front of the bowl of cereal her daughter was staring at, unable to swallow. The flakes suddenly became stone and cement like the icy tiles of that night. Freezing like the unspeakable. Frozen like the muffled scream. That of the petrified throat. She had perceived it that morning in the silence of the room, suddenly torn apart by the barking of the neighbor's dog. She had suddenly seen her daughter disappear and become a shadow of her former self. And then she had heard the sound of that mute cry that could not be heard because it could not be spoken. The screaming sound of the silence of the child who doesn't know that what's happening isn't happening. But she does know that this thing crosses a boundary; that of her intimacy, which she cannot yet name because she is still only a child.