Your new creation stems from a long-held desire: to give a voice to your brother Christian, who is deaf by birth. It is structured around three axes, moving from the personal to the political…
François Gremaud
At the origin of the project is a political impulse. Because he is deaf by birth, Christian has gone through a series of extraordinarily painful professional experiences. He grew up in a world that did not give him the place he deserved. It’s all the more violent given how politically engaged he is in advocating for his community. It’s also all the more unbearable because we are very similar, both physically and in our personalities. I will never be able to repair that injustice, but I felt the need to do my part. That is the true starting point of the project: a political attempt—almost a temptation. A very naive desire to try to fix things, to create a performance with my brother and to share that joy with him. This theatrical and political proposal immediately excited him. It is fundamental for the Deaf community, as well as for people “with disabilities”—and more broadly for marginalised individuals—to be able to express themselves and to be understood in a world that is largely made up of hearing people.
The question of writing then arose. What kind of hybrid language are you in the process of inventing?
The need to find an artistic form for this political project led me down a different path. It’s a path that has been deeply transformative for both my brother and me. I have writing habits that are tied to the fact that I am a hearing person. I write in French, using my own way of articulating language. In my performances, there is often wordplay rooted in a verbal tradition based on homophony, sound shifts, and phonetic double meanings. However, French Sign Language (LSF) operates through spatiality, iconicity, visual morphology, and simultaneity. Of course, there are forms of humour and linguistic creativity in LSF, but they do not correspond to “wordplay” in the traditional French sense. Christian expresses himself in a language that is entirely different from ours, with its own structure, syntax, and codes, its own way of articulating thought in space, in 3D. LSF is not a gestural adaptation of French, but a fully-fledged language, highly visual. I’m becoming increasingly aware of this throughout rehearsals, and it’s changing everything for me as an author. Working with my brother forces me to accomplish a shift, and it is precisely this shift in perspective that the show seeks to provoke: no longer reducing Christian to a notion of deficiency, but instead revealing a complete presence and a powerful language. At first, I thought I would tell his story and that of LSF, along with the discrimination they have faced. Gradually, I began to write a third story, the story of the show itself, working towards real equality by trying to avoid the perspective of the hearing “majority” on Deafness. Mon Frère emerges from an experience that combines poetry, humour, and the expressive power of LSF, and is addressed to both Deaf and hearing audiences. The stage design is very simple, as in many of my solo shows. It’s a sand-coloured dance floor, like a blank page on which the story will be written. But this time, it is my brother Christian who occupies the space of the stage. I will stand to the side, stage left.
This creation is also an act of love for Christian…
It’s called Mon Frère, so it is inevitably about fraternity, not in its gendered sense, but in its broader meaning: sorority, a humanist gesture, the love of others… But it is also about my love for theatre and its capacity to keep resisting, again and again. Mon Frère is a gesture of love for that art form, and for French Sign Language (LSF), which I am rediscovering. This language engages the entire body. And the body is what I love in theatre; all bodies, whatever they are. Finally, it is a gesture of love for life itself. My brother often says that what fundamentally defines him is his vivacity! That force that keeps him alive and allows him to always get back up when he falls. We share this unshakeable joy for life.
Mon Frère is an act of joyful resistance.
I truly hope that people will discover my brother’s extraordinary personality—not in the sense of being better than others, but simply extraordinary as a human being, without labelling him. I would like this recognition to be part of a broader gesture, one in which everyone is able to express themselves on stage and be understood. I’m proud to create joyful works. I hope that this project, which addresses difficult subjects—injustice, discrimination, violence—will show that it is always possible to rise again, and that what is truly beautiful is us, all of us, the living. Joy is more necessary than ever. It is a full-fledged act of resistance.
You are challenging a number of preconceptions by overturning notions of validity and strength…
You are pointing to something very important. Our use of vocabulary is that of hearing people. It is shaped by a ableist perspective, which implies a relationship of inequality with Deaf and hard-of-hearing people. From a Deaf cultural perspective, deafness is not experienced as a loss, but as a different way of organising the world, a specific sensory, linguistic, and relational modality. Deaf people do not define themselves as “disabled,” but as members of a linguistic minority with their own way of existing. Like most discriminated communities, whether through racism or gender inequality, they have a long history of resistance: a vital need to think the world differently, transforming vulnerability into strength, affirming a desire for equal coexistence—and sharing ways of doing so.
Interview conducted by Sylvie Martin-Lahmani in March 2026