Des roses et des violettes

In a solo performance and intimate collaboration with Matthieu Hocquemiller, Violette Guillarme shares a reflection on mental health and care. This performance traces Violette Guillarme’s experience as a mother dealing with the medical treatment of her daughter and weaves a narrative between personal and social vulnerabilities. The experience of hospitalization was chilling, far removed from the care we would have expected and deserved. We found ourselves confronted with a punitive policy of mistreatment: an anachronistic medicine that seemed to have come out of a nineteenth-century cupboard, when a patriarchal and sadistic order sought to “correct” women’s bodies. The desire arose to create from this concrete experience, to make something that overflowed reality, to create something collective from our wounded intimacies. Roses and Violets puts into words and performance the need for repair, as a celebration of vulnerability and the fragile beauty of being alive. Of the beauty that makes us beings of connection: connections to ourselves, between us, connections to our bodies, to the women who came before us, to the ghosts that haunt us and to those who care for us. Cast Concept, choreography and set design: Violette Guillarme and Matthieu Hocquemilller Text: Violette Guillarme, Lily-Rose Zamboni and Matthieu Hocquemilller Performed by Violette Guillarme