Rébecca Chaillon, a dyke from the city, and Sandra Calderan, a country lesbian, are a couple on- and off-stage. In this joyful, intimate performance, they attempt to deconstruct, dissect, and analyse what it means to ‘form a family’. La Gouineraie invites the audience into their home-in-the-making. While Sandra makes frantic attempts to build as many little homes as possible from scrap wood, city girl Rébecca comes to give the countryside a chance. Surrounded by building materials, wrestling with wallpaper or objects from their daily lives, they think about what each person’s position could be within their new home and family.

In a cheerful, intimate performance, we witness their different attempts to recreate the perfect family, between different moments of celebration, loneliness, fantasies, failure… One by one, they ask each other questions about inherited family, invented family, chosen family. Without really aiming at offering any solutions, but rather encouraging the audience to join in the investigation, they ask what are the ways of forming a family when one is White, lives with her ex, their children, and her ex’s new family, while the other is Black, urban, and spends more time in the theatres of France and Navarra than in her own flat?

Drawing inspiration from TV-series culture, they find pleasure in remixing traditional, patriarchal, White, hetero ‘family models’. With mischief, they revisit the Catholic iconography of the holy family, in a generous scenic mess that reflects their lives. As in a television series that spans several seasons, their reflections can go in a different direction at any time.

Rébecca Chaillon’s powerful Whitewashing was presented in the frame of Moving in November 2024 in Caisa.

Rébecca Chaillon will host a workshop on the 10th of November, organised by Tanssille ry as part of Focus on the Local Landscape. More information here.

Sandra Calderan has been writing poetry for many years—poetry meant to be spoken, heard, and experienced. As an actor and director, she conceives her poetic writing as a physical gesture, a bodily commitment that must be transmitted live. It is on stage that her poems acquire all their strength.

In 2013, she founded La Compagnie des Hauts Parleurs. She created her first show, l’Envol (silent theater and classical music trio), followed by a second in 2021, Just Us (poetry, dance, performance) which premiered at the Scène Nationale d’Orléans. A lighter version, Just Us, Poèmes à Cracher (poetry/music duo) is still touring. Poetry is at the heart of her work, which is engaged, political, and tirelessly retraces the stories of forgotten, wounded and luminous lives. In 2023, she created a show for young audiences inspired by Jacques Prévert’s L’Opéra de la Lune: Défile!

Within the Compagnie des Hauts Parleurs, she is also involved in numerous cultural initiatives for schools, and in partnership with libraries and theaters.

Sandra Calderan has collaborated for several years with Cirque Queer as author and director, Compagnie Monstra and Lucía Soto, Compagnie Eranos and Flor Paichard, stand-up comedian Lou Trotignon and with Rébecca Chaillon and Compagnie Dans Le Ventre.

Rébecca Chaillon is a director, author, performer, member of the collective group RER Q and Scorpio, Ascendant Taurus. Activism, debates and performing naked on stage is a second nature. Her artistic work revolves around theatre, performance, poetry and explores the domination-based relationships and the struggle against discriminations. She loves to work around the desires and the violences that act on bodies, with a lot of love, humor and food.

Founded in 2006, her Compagnie Dans le ventre, seeks to be a platform for artistic exploring of minoritized identities in our society. With a highly personal approach to writing, whose themes are at once intimate and political, she has created works taking various forms, including: L’Estomac dans la peau (2011), a solo show about bulimia; Où la chèvre est attachée, il faut qu’elle broute (2018), an athletic and artistic piece that explores discrimination through women’s football; Carte noire nommée désir (2021), an a performative piece about the construction of desire in black women; Plutôt vomir que faillir (2022), a performance about adolescence to question a world made by and for adults.

Rébecca Chaillon is an associate artist at the TnBA, Théâtre national de Bordeaux en Aquitaine, at the TPM, Théâtre Public Montreuil and is a satellite artist of the Théâtre Sorano – Scène conventionnée in Toulouse.

She is represented by L’Arche, agence théâtrale where Boudin Biguine Best of Banane (2023), Décolonisons les Arts (2018) and Lettres aux jeunes poétesses (2021), collective collections, are published.