In a desire to overthrow the myths, to break down received ideas around difference and the challenges that accompany it, Elie Marchand, author and co-founder of the feminist company for children and young people Libre course, offers with Mermaid sisters a proposal freely inspired by the mythical universe of these sea creatures.
It was actually after meeting a professional mermaid — yes, there is — that the idea for the piece emerged in the designer’s mind. “In fact, there is a movement that has grown a lot in recent years, it’s called the “mermaid” […] which is the action of personifying mermaids […] me, the one I met, it’s Claire […] she does aquatic performances, […] snorkels, opens his eyes, even swims lipsing underwater and, when I saw that, it opened up an incredible slice of my imagination. Oh ! Yes, OK, it’s not just a fictional character, there are people who have embodied it, ”says Elie Marchand with a well-felt wonder on the other end of the line. In parallel with this mermaid story which will serve as a premise for its creation, the idea of talking about transidentity germinates. “I started writing this play in 2017 and, at the time, there were very, very few plays on this subject, and even fewer for young audiences. I thought the figure of the mermaid was interesting with this theme, because mermaids don’t have genitals. […] We often associate them with femininity — it’s true that they often have a female bust, but not always, there are also newts — so I saw there a possible gateway to broach this subject with the children. »
Elie Marchand thus tells the story of Charlie, a junior diving champion who trains in the pool. Leaving the locker room, he drops a lipstick which will be picked up by Agnès, a child amputee after having experienced a boating accident. “There is a kind of pact that is made at that time and, in the end, a forced meeting becomes a sincere meeting of friendship. The two characters will both overcome their challenge and achieve the dreams they had,” explains the author. If friendship helps them to move forward, each of the characters is also inspired by icons of the waters, real mermaids such as Annette Kellermann, creator of synchronized swimming, and Sylvia Earle, oceanographer, first woman to have touched the bottom of the sea. ‘ocean. “I went into a more embodied mermaid figure […] And that was also what I found interesting, to overthrow this myth and show other possible interpretations, to put my little grain of sand in this big gear that is the figure of the mermaid, ”underlines Marchand.
Push the limits
Like his previous pieces — in the lead, Story of a shoe in which the poet Anne-Marie Alonzo was an icon — Elie Marchand continues with Mermaid sisters this desire to abolish borders a little more, to offer subjects, characters who, through their humanity, will be able to ensure identification with young people. Here, the creator likes this idea of inviting children to a story that features under-represented people, as embodied by Charlie who questions his identity. “In 2017, when I started the project, as soon as I named the premise, when I talked about transidentity, adults immediately had preconceptions or concerns about it. Can we really talk about this to young people? How can we talk about it? Will they understand? I had the intuition that the quest of these two children is to free themselves from the gaze of others and to push back their limits. And that is a quest that everyone has, at one time or another in their life. […] With these characters [trans et amputé]their difference is more marked, but their quest is one that everyone has”.
This desire to reach young people and awaken in them this desire to push back the limits, to go after their desires is also revealed a lot in the path taken by the author. Without wanting to present the suffering that accompanies the challenges overcome by Charlie and Agnès, he favors on the contrary the luminous side of this approach, a path that opens onto freedom.
“Giving yourself the right to be free, the right to live in the world as you are, is something that is very important to name. Of course, I am also part of the trans community, so there are things that are very personal. But even apart from that, I have always been very sensitive to these stories and to the representation of difference in works of fiction where, often, when it is represented, we are going to put the story of suffering” and the difficulties that emanate from it, he says.
It’s a lot to try to deconstruct this frozen straitjacket, this entangled image that prevents free living, and which tends to associate marginality with suffering, that Elie Marchand writes. For him, what counts even more than staging the difference is to offer a positive and luminous life story, and not only the challenges surrounding the theme. “Without saying that there are no challenges — I’m fully aware that there are — I think it’s important to represent works in which different people are happy too. It’s not just the story of suffering. »
Mermaid sisters thus wants to be a word for the freedom to be, a piece that opens on the right to be oneself, without constraints. “It’s hard to exist when you’re different, that’s for sure. [Au départ], we tell ourselves that it will be easier to comply, to do exactly what is expected of us, but it catches up with us. We can offer young people not to need to hide and to experiment, to be free. We lose less time, ”he concludes gently.