Agathe Charnet

Author, director, playwright and actor Agathe Charnet is artistic co-director of La Vie Grande theatre company in Le Havre, which is affiliated to the Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles for the Normandy region. Having first studied at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris, then at the Sorbonne and Université Paris-Diderot, she gained a Master’s in sociology of gender at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, before devoting herself to writing and the theatre. Since 2021 she has written for Lorraine de Sagazan’s La Brèche theatre company. In 2022 she wrote and directed Ceci est mon Corps and in 2024 staged two new productions: Naissance.s, at Théâtre de la Bastille, and Nous Étions La Forêt. Three of her nine plays have been published by l’Oeil du Prince. In 2023 she received the ARTCENA Auteurs en Tandem award.

Himono-onna: Que mettre au monde aujourd’hui (Himono-onna: What to bring into the world today?) is a dramaturgical protocol spanning academic research, collections of words, writings and theatre laboratories. It seeks to draw a sensitive, documented picture of what it means, in France and in Japan, “to choose or not choose to be a family at the dawn of the twenty-first century”. Rooted in the study of feminist standpoint theory, the project examines progress made in the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community, and studies the question of gender in the creative sector. It also explores different conceptions and experiences of marriage and romantic love, and how these can shape attitudes towards parenthood in times of financial, climate and geopolitical crises. By intertwining the lived experiences of people who appear statistically similar yet come from very different cultural backgrounds, Himono-onna weaves dialogues, connections and constructive contradictions from words expressed during interviews in the field, but also from the bodies encountered during workshops/laboratories with different publics. The proposed outcome is to write a play which can be staged in France and Japan, and produced in Japan as an eco-responsible, in situ performance.

Portrait: © Mathilda Cabezas

-1, 2 Nous Etions La Forêt – Virginie Meigné

-3, 4 Ceci est mon corps – Virginie Meigné