La Sirène

The Mermaid is a film directed by the care home of Monségur, on the initiative of the call for project from the Gironde department, ‘L’un est l’autre’, and the company Paul Les Oiseaux. For six months, the residents imagined a storyline with Valérie Rivière, Laurence de la Fuente, and Célie Alix, and wrote texts intended to be filmed.

We suggested to those people who are experiencing this last time of their life, to dream, using words, choreographic gestures, and images, in order to satisfy their forgotten desires or to make new ones.

The writing of the text is collective, even if the desire to rediscover the softness of the sea, dive into it again, was initiated by a resident who brought the others in her wake. How to revisit the lost sensations, the sensual touch of salt water on the skin, the dazzling blue of the Mediterranean? How to dive into it again and invent a choreography from these phrases?

We linked the residents’ text to Andersen’s short story The Little Mermaid who, speechless for loving a prince too much, speaks with gestures. From these written proposals, Valérie Rivière worked with Mrs Newton to draw this choreographic haiku, as suspended on the edge of the shore.

When we dive, the first sensation is this extreme softness that envelops you entirely and the feeling of no longer having limits, be as one with the sea, no longer knowing how to tell the difference between your body and the waves.