Within your company La Bocca della Luna, you create philosophical performances for children and general audiences. How did you come to combine theatre and philosophy?
I grew up with a father who was a philosopher, and he passed on to me very early a love of questioning and doubt. In 2014, I happened to come across an article about philosophy for children. It mentioned Laval University in Canada, one of the only universities in the world to offer specific training in this field. The principle is simple yet profoundly powerful: as soon as a child is able to form sentences, they can develop complex thinking. That idea struck me. I then followed this training remotely. There, I discovered the concept of a “community of inquiry”: adults and children sitting in a circle, discussing a topic together while drawing on different thinking skills. I found this practice both challenging and enriching. During this training, I started to reflect on my next show. At the time, my plays were not necessarily aimed at young audiences. Meeting many children, observing their reasoning, and at the same time discovering Wolf Erlbruch’s picture book The Big Question, in which various characters wonder about the meaning of life, all led me to deciding to take the plunge. I created The Big Why, inspired by this children’s book. This work brought me immense joy. Other productions followed, created with the same approach, at the crossroads of theatre and philosophy. In them, we explore contemporary themes such as language, gender, and the climate crisis. These projects are aimed at younger audiences, always with the intention of speaking to adults as well.
Nous ou le paradoxe du hérisson is the seventh show in your cycle Les enquêtes poétiques (Poetic Investigations).
Since the beginning of this cycle, launched in 2014, each creation has been developed in close contact with children. We run philosophy workshops; we talk and think together with them. Their words and their reasoning become the raw material for our projects. These encounters have led to genuine artistic epiphanies and, on several occasions, have marked decisive turning points in our plays. Each poetic investigation begins with a question. In Les Tactiques du Tic Tac, we explore time. In Bleu pour les oranges, rose pour les éléphants, the focus is on gender. In Le Nom des choses, we deal with language. Nous ou le paradoxe du hérisson raises the following questions: what makes a family? What does it mean to be part of a family? What happens to me when an other arrives? When we say “we,” what do we actually mean by it? What brings us together? This show offers a reflection that is playful, poetic, and full of humour on how connections are formed, or fail to be formed: with our families of origin, with chosen loved ones, and with all kinds of people. The question of connection is fundamental, because it is what sets us in motion. Feeling connected to other human beings can change our choices and our behaviour. It transforms the way we act. The subject of this play came from a simple observation: around me, family models are diverse—single-parent families, same-sex parents, blended families, shared living arrangements that become homes. And yet, in many stories created for young audiences, the heteronormative family still largely dominates. There is a gap between what children experience and the imagination offered to them. Between plural realities and fixed representations, I felt there was a space worth exploring.
Among the sources for this creation is the essay Accueillir. Venu(e)s d'un ventre ou d'un pays by Marie José Mondzain.
In this book, Marie-José Mondzain writes: “Being born biologically is not enough. One must also be adopted. In this sense, every infant is an adopted child. It is another way of thinking about our bonds and of directing our gaze.” During our discussions with the children, we realised that they had a very narrow view of adoption. For them, being adopted meant having been abandoned by one’s parents. Marie-José Mondzain’s essay invites us to imagine our relationships not as natural and self-evident, but as acts of welcoming. For her, we are all, in a certain way, adopted. We are born somewhere; we are welcomed by adults, yet we do not know one another. It is not because a child shares my blood that I truly know them. Biology can sometimes make us believe that we control the relationship, which is not true. Thus, the question of adoption can be raised in all relationships, whether familial or otherwise.
Do you think it’s time to reinvent the stories we tell on stage, both for adults and for younger audiences?
With Nous ou le paradoxe du hérisson, we invite audiences to collectively rethink the boundaries of what a family can be. It is important that the stories we tell are constantly reinvented so that they reflect our ever-changing world. This does not mean we should abandon fairy tales or older narratives. But it seems necessary to offer new forms of storytelling that resonate with our contemporary reality and with the diversity of lives we lead today. I like the idea of telling non-prescriptive stories; stories that do not assign roles, that do not map out predetermined destinies, and that do not impose a fixed way of thinking. This openness seems just as important for children as it is for adults. On stage, I believe it is essential to keep questioning, to keep shifting perspectives, and to keep imagining other possibilities.
Interview conducted by Vanessa Asse in March 2026