AFFECTS - Creation 2026

It is a unique project that Céline Garnavault and Thomas Sillard have recently experienced on stage in Châtellerault (Vienne), where it was hosted in residency. A project about emotions, which is particularly close to her heart. Over several creations, the duo has debated the relationship to objects, considering it "a political space." From this starting point, a whole questioning about the relationship to power, to the collective, and thus to oneself has emerged. Winner of the "research and creation" project call from the DGCA (2025), the company is being supported in its approach by three researchers: Dinaïg Stall and Julie-Michèle Morin from the Formes group at UQAM in Montreal and Emma Merabet from the Passages XX-XXI laboratory - University Lyon 2. Artists and academics are working on a project titled Listening to Objects. Facing oneself In this encounter with oneself, Céline Garnavault has particularly focused on the relationship we have with our affects, our emotions, often constrained by a series of injunctions. "The construction of our relationship to emotions is still very gendered. Little boys are quickly told to hide them, to keep them deep inside, while little girls, and women, are assigned to manage those of others before their own." This is, once again, a subject whose political dimension is evident. From one's ability to manage their own emotions, or not, to being overwhelmed by them and dominating them, Céline Garnavault has chosen to give them form, a physical reality. "In fact, everything started for me from the image of the rejection pellets of birds of prey. What they cannot 'digest,' they leave outside of themselves." It was then in 2019, the research and creation process was launched. "I wanted to engage the imagination of the body and repressed emotions, those that we somatize, that we hide, and that, sometimes, we are afraid to confront throughout our lives." Wool Objects Thus, it was about welcoming these emotions on stage, giving them form. "During a residency in Oloron-Sainte-Marie, I had the chance to meet an artist who works with wool, from sheep to the realization of very contemporary forms. The wool, with its different mixed shades, was like the rejection pellets I had thought of. I had found what would give body to my emotions. And then, the image was beautiful; I was going to become, in a way, the shepherdess of my emotions." Thomas Sillard then had to work, with a roboticist, on how these emotions would be able to come to life on stage, move, react, and interact. On stage, the research continues. The emotions have, depending on what they carry within them, very different reactions. Céline Garnavault will attempt to "manipulate them, reassure them, and sometimes allow them to express themselves, to open up to me." As for the great emotion, present on stage, which she dominates with her size, it is "a buried emotion, like a legacy, that has worked on me and scared me a bit for as long as I can remember. I circle around it, to better define it; I don't know how to approach it. Throughout the performance, this woman on stage will undergo a real transformation. Her emotions lay her bare; they consume her. There, before us, she will open up, be more present, prouder, and emancipate herself in a broader and less complex relationship to her existence. From this project, which will be accessible from the age of 14, Céline Garnavault and Thomas Sillard suspect that it will open up long discussions after the performance. "We can see it well," says the actress and director, "the performance speaks, in the background, of the emotions unique to each person. We have seen, during the residencies, spectators project their own affects onto it." There is still much work to be done by the team at La Boîte à sel, to work on movement, but also on voices, "thought of as deep echoes, or as polyphonies." A beautiful project should therefore see the light of day next autumn.