Your work often focuses on the reconstruction of a journey, of an investigation. How did that go for Affaires Familiales?
Émilie Rousset: I immersed myself in family law courts, meeting specialist lawyers and litigants in different European countries. Divorce, parentage, violence, inheritance: each person comes with their own way of making or unmaking the family. My approach begins with meeting, listening, and gathering. In this process, my expectations meet reality and shift as a result. I let emerge what resonates with my concerns, my sensitivity, and what the theatrical framework can accommodate. For this play, I wanted to capture the space where speech is formed between the intimate and the legal, the path where personal narrative and law intersect. I also wanted to explore the friction between law and activism.
What does the judicial institution say about our society?
In family matters, political issues are embedded in concrete life experiences. Domestic violence, the rights of LGBT+ families, the struggle for gender equality… all have names and faces. Judicial archives are a collection of life stories of anonymous individuals who make History. We inherit a very traditional vision of the family, which remains a vehicle of power relations, between adults and children, between men and women. Reactionary politics fiercely cling to this vision. But this order is shifting. It’s cracking. And justice sometimes follows. Sometimes it leads. Sometimes it resists. I expanded my research to other European countries to see how different laws and policies shape our intimate stories. With Affaires Familiales, I invite the audience to think of the family not as a private matter, but as a social project. And to remember that we all have the power to act.
Did you end up interviewing mostly female lawyers by choice? How did you build your corpus?
It wasn’t a choice at first, but a reality on the ground. Family cases are neither the most prestigious nor the most lucrative, and it is often women who specialise in these cases. When I saw this imbalance in the interviews I had gathered, I didn’t try to correct it. Assembling a selection of archives is always a subjective act, as there are infinite possibilities. Here, it is also an act of creation: I keep the words that resonate with me, and I choose people who hold strong commitments. And what matters to me on stage afterwards is not to faithfully reproduce an identity, but to convey a voice, an energy, a stance.
How do you then pass on this documentary experience to the rest of your team?
This is a play we have been working on for several years, with a constant back-and-forth between the stage, documentary research, and writing. We collectively watch the raw footage of the interviews, and some parts are performed in their entirety before being edited. This allows us first to test the theatricality of the speech, with its images, its rhythm, its silences, and then to focus on choices of meaning. The final project is not to convey information but to create a moment where we can think together. During rehearsals, we work on the movement of thought, thinking speech and speaking thought, on what is heard in what is left unsaid, on the folds of language. We do not seek to reproduce the realistic context of the interview, but we reframe to find a just, active, sensitive distance from the original archive. It is also necessary that the performers embed themselves in the editing, which is yet another form of thinking: that of the play. The theatrical experience is successful when the audience encounters as much the performer, the person at the origin of the story, as the staging device.
What staging device did you choose for this show?
Very early on, I knew I would film the people I met, and that video would be a material in its own right. Nadia Lauro, the show’s set designer, imagined a setup capable of hosting these filmed archives and their reactivation. She designed a bi-frontal space, a blank page, a topology inhabited by the performers and the stories, where fragments of film are also projected. Her setup creates a geography of gazes: those of the performers, the audience, and the images. It places the audience face to face, without the protection of the fourth wall, like in a courtroom. The videos are not there to illustrate. They fragment reality, multiply it. The same story exists in several versions: that of the filmed person, that carried by the performer, and that created by the editing. This play on reflections, angles, and repetition echoes how the judicial institution also cuts up, replays, and reformulates. The stage then becomes a space of relay: of words, silences, and gazes.
Interview conducted by Marion Guilloux in January 2025.