During this work phase, the company Les Encombrantes opens its stage: we will see scenes being created, trials, failures, discoveries. This is not a finished show, it’s a moment of research, at a human level, where we are invited to watch, feel, and sometimes recognize a bit of ourselves. No need to know about theater. No need to be feeling well. Just come as you are. With LOURDE, we aim to create a show that speaks about depression from the inside, without medical discourse or didactic explanation, but through sensitive experience, the body, image, and humor. Starting from our experiences, we transform an invisible illness into shareable stage material. The storm becomes the central metaphor of the show: a force that crosses, overwhelms, disorients. It allows us to approach depression as a phenomenon that is both intimate and collective, not reserved for a specific category of people, but capable of affecting everyone — children, adults, the elderly — at different moments in life. By diverting familiar forms (TV show, weather report, quiz), LOURDE creates an accessible, playful, and reassuring framework that opens up discussion without dramatization. Humor plays an essential role here: it acts as an entry point, a space for breathing and complicity, making it possible to speak where it is often hindered. Designed as a family-friendly show for ages 6 and up, LOURDE can be shared with family, with children, but also with vulnerable or isolated individuals who lack spaces to share what they have gone through. It also addresses the elderly, often excluded from contemporary narratives about mental health, even as they are strongly confronted with it. We conceive LOURDE as a tool for meeting and discussion, a support point to open the conversation, create connections, and remind that vulnerability is not an individual weakness, but a deeply human and universal experience. During this work phase, the company Les Encombrantes opens its stage: we will see scenes being created, trials, failures, discoveries. This is not a finished show, it’s a moment of research, at a human level, where we are invited to watch, feel, and sometimes recognize a bit of ourselves. No need to know about theater. No need to be feeling well. Just come as you are. With LOURDE, we aim to create a show that speaks about depression from the inside, without medical discourse or didactic explanation, but through sensitive experience, the body, image, and humor. Starting from our experiences, we transform an invisible illness into shareable stage material. The storm becomes the central metaphor of the show: a force that crosses, overwhelms, disorients. It allows us to approach depression as a phenomenon that is both intimate and collective, not reserved for a specific category of people, but capable of affecting everyone — children, adults, the elderly — at different moments in life. By diverting familiar forms (TV show, weather report, quiz), LOURDE creates an accessible, playful, and reassuring framework that opens up discussion without dramatization. Humor plays an essential role here: it acts as an entry point, a space for breathing and complicity, making it possible to speak where it is often hindered. Designed as a family-friendly show for ages 6 and up, LOURDE can be shared with family, with children, but also with vulnerable or isolated individuals who lack spaces to share what they have gone through. It also addresses the elderly, often excluded from contemporary narratives about mental health, even as they are strongly confronted with it. We conceive LOURDE as a tool for meeting and discussion, a support point to open the conversation, create connections, and remind that vulnerability is not an individual weakness, but a deeply human and universal experience.
Source: Nantes Métropole