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Traversée
Estelle Savasta
Traversée
Photo: DR
Actes du théâtre n° 86.[ imprimer ]


- 2013, from age 10.

Nour is a very young girl. A few days after her birth she was entrusted to Youmna. Youmna is beautiful and sweet. Youmna is good and smells like the wind. Youmna is also deaf.
Nour loves Youmna and wants no other mother. But she knows that someday she must return to the woman who left one day to build a better life elsewhere, a nest in a country where girls can think as they like, as wild as they please.
One day Youmna says: "Your mother has written. She's waiting for you. She has organized everything."
It's like a slap in the face, and there's nothing you can do about a slap in the face other than wait for the sting to subside, for the humiliation and anger to follow their course, until one day Nour leaves.

Why we chose this play: We were moved by this dramatic poem, a contemporary tale written with a craftsman's precision. We were caught up in the infinite story of love and freedom where the mystery is sustained to the end. The writing goes to the essential, following the fate of Nour, a docile, lucid, clairvoyant, sturdy and pugnacious character, who is both actor, observer and narrator. The simultaneity of the two voices is done in a sensitive way, bringing out the fine intertwining of the two languages - the one that speaks with words and the one that speaks with signs. An unusual way to create space onstage, as there is much mute acting. The language is simple, the phrases often short, with forceful meanings and images.
In this journey we rise from the depths of fiction to the harsh surface of reality. It lashes your face just like it pounds Nour's fate.


Characters : 2 women -
L'Ecole des Loisirs - www.ecoledesloisirs.fr/

Words from the playwright: "Traversée is a story written in French and in sign language about what ties us to each other. It's a story about what we pass on without realizing it. It's a story of filiation, journeys and adolescence. It's a story about clandestine migration."