Households Connections

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Household entertainment.
General public (from 8 years old and up).

Is the life of a couple just a series of days spent together within the harmonious framework of a model life? In the case of Séraphin and Cabotine, it is more like a house of cards, seriously threatened by the winds of sentiment that never stop blowing. They do their best, however, to live up to the model. But their true triumph is that they are incapable. So they instead invent a series of catastrophes to the total delight of the audience.

For adults, a story about a couple. As for children, they will follow the antics of a clumsy bumbler who provokes a series of catastrophes, each one as unpredictable as the last.

This show is reminiscent of silent films such as Jacques Tati’s « Monsieur Hulot » and those of Buster Keaton. Actors, puppets and machines each have a role to play.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Authors and scenic design : Jean-Claude LEPORTIER and Catherine KREMER
Coach: Stephan PASTOR (Compagnie Tendances Sud)
Acting director: Stefano FOGHER
Sound: Thomas RIDARD
Designer/Stage design: Jean-Claude LEPORTIER and Catherine KREMER Costumes and creation of inflatable structure: Magali LEPORTIER
Lighting designer: Didier BRUN
Actors: Catherine KREMER, Jean-Claude LEPORTIER

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS :

This show is staged in a theater
Black box + black floor (dance floor)
Length : 1 hour 10 mn
Number of spectators : 300 maximum
Stage area : width : 12 m (min : 10m) depth : 8 m (min : 7m) height : 4 m minimum
Set-up : 8 hours – Strike : 2 hour
People on tour : 2 actors (couple) + 1 stage manager.

Press reviews :

    Enchanting is a good way to define Household Alliances by the French company Coatimundi. It is staged in a delightfully surrealistic way but not without nostalgic moments and startling scenes.

    A couple celebrates the wife’s fiftieth birthday in a lop-sided, very off-kilter kitchen. It’s a day that aspires to being different but which appears to be, basically like all the others, drowned in daily dullness. Then the ritual of the meal begins when the husband is only focused on his work and his wife, who would like to be noticed more; it is ingested between misunderstandings and misconceptions. He leaves, obsessed by clients who are always trying to call him. She dreams of a different life and love while listening to the magical voice of Edith Piaf on the radio.

    The present arrives; a large red box containing a strange machine to assemble. It’s a sewing machine which seems endowed with life and does not hesitate to lewdly seduce the dumbfounded wife. Here’s a magical tool with which you can sew a beautiful, flowered dress to help forget the gloominess and give the strength to make audacious decisions like that of going for a lovely walk, finally alone, for a secretive encounter. At the moment the husband waits and decides, in order to ease his pain and anguish, to do the housework with the vacuum cleaner which he leaves unattended; just when she returns she becomes sucked in by the mouth of the appliance. He jumps in to save her but it will be hard, very hard to work it out since, in this overly-expanding object, there is a monster.

    Household Alliances is a very, very beautiful show that does not need words and that lives and pulsates thanks to a whimsical and top-notch creation. The aura of the fifties sends us into a suspended time where profound emotions and pangs of the heart are expressed without foregoing irony and amusement. One of the rare shows for children, extremely sophisticated, that knows how to speak with a subtle complexity about these different expressive levels. Audience members of all ages are invited to read and interpret; each one with his own supply of knowledge according to his own sensitivity.

NICOLA VIESTI (Torino)