What is the starting point for each of your creations?
Vanasay Khamphommala
The first impulse behind my writing is often a bad idea that refuses to go away, an impossible question. For example, the original version of Je te chante une chanson toute nue en échange d’un verre took place in a private apartment. It brought together the protocols of a dinner party and anonymous sexual encounters, while placing an artistic gesture at the heart of the exchange.
My creations often begin with this kind of intuition. To explore it, I draw on approaches shaped by my background as a scholar and researcher. Philosophy, sociology and history all feed into the development of a project. But alongside this intellectual research is a search for sensations, as though certain answers could only emerge at the point where thought gives way to perception.
In Je te chante une chanson toute nue en échange d’un verre, as in several of your performances, bodies become places where gaze and desire are negotiated. What interests you about this exposure?
The relationship between desire and creativity. This question lay at the heart of L’Invocation à la muse, created with Caritia Abell for the Festival d’Avignon in 2018 as part of Vive le sujet ! Tentatives. The performance consisted of improvising a poem during a domination session. It led me to a central question: how can eroticism become a creative force? What new erotic imaginaries can the stage bring into being?
In several performances, including L’Invocation à la muse and Écho, I explore the co-presence of bodies, their exposure, and the tensions and desires that circulate within a shared space, while also questioning the place and involvement of the audience. The stage becomes a space where relationships are negotiated, displaced and reinvented.
For me, theatre is never a place of demonstration. It is a field of research where the body—shaped by desire or memory—becomes something to think through as much as something to experience.
Your work frequently returns to the question of transformation and fluid identities. What feeds this ongoing exploration?
My relationship to the world, to the way it changes and changes me in return. Questions of identity are always relational: they are less something we think about than something we experience. Literature also plays an important role here: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which have accompanied me since childhood; Shakespeare, for the way his theatre brings tradition and subversion into dialogue; and, more recently, Paul B. Preciado, whose Manifeste contre-sexuel I recently produced a new translation of.
As a Franco-Lao trans woman, this exploration is also deeply personal. My family's history is tied to colonial and postcolonial history, particularly the migrations linked to the revolutions in Southeast Asia during the 1970s. Like many children born into a context that favoured assimilation, I initially rejected my Lao cultural heritage. But that memory returned almost like a phantom limb, as though a part of me had always existed without my being fully aware of it. Gradually, it became a source of inspiration for my sensibility, my thinking and my artistic work.
In both of these works, singing seems to become a way of entering into a relationship with the other. What can it communicate when words alone are no longer enough?
One could say that words belong to the realm of reason, while singing belongs to emotion. But what interests me goes beyond that opposition between speech and music. What interests me is our social—and therefore political—use of the voice.
Whose voices do we fail to hear? Which voices are we taught to silence? And what is it, within our own voices, that we sometimes refuse to listen to?
Singing transforms the space of listening between performer and audience, especially when working with popular repertoires or outside the usual expectations of virtuosity and excellence. It shifts the focus: the aim is no longer to admire a performance, but to create a particular quality of presence and relationship. Singing opens up a shared space where something of the social bond can be replayed, displaced and questioned.
But this also requires us to move beyond certain conventional uses of the singing voice, which can neutralise its transformative power just as much as ordinary speech can. What interests me is not the voice as a display of mastery, but the voice as a place of presence, disturbance and relationship. The voices that move me are those that escape the sole mastery of discourse. By singing, I try to become audible in another way: as a body that is affected, vulnerable, in relation to others—literally and figuratively laid bare.
Interview conducted in May 2026.