France sommeil

In 2019, the Pôle Emploi department responsible for monitoring jobseekers' searches will change its name to Dynamisation through accompanying and controling. On 1 January 2024, the agency itself changed its name to France Travail. Faced with these semantic facelifts, what voice and what reality do jobseekers have?

Initiated by Studio Ganek and the fruit of a collaboration between the Théâtre de l'Élysée, UFCS-FR Formation Insertion, and artist-performer Agathe Chevallier, France Sommeil is a collective creation by a group of people being professionally integrated about their relationship with work.

The project will bring the artist and the public together in a series of workshops combining reflection on our relationship with work and performance. These workshops are organised in three cycles and will culminate in a performance on 12 March 2025, at 19:30 at Théâtre de l’Élysée.

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La chambre de compensation

La Chambre de compensation is a performance played at the Théâtre de l'Élysée from 30 October to 1 November 2024, which introduces the France Sommeil project.

La Chambre de compensation is a 45-minute performance inviting the audience to experience, in a reclining position, a sensory journey through financial movements, to see finance as something other than an intangible phenomenon. In the same spirit as a Feldenkrais session, the sequence is guided live by the voice of a hidden performer, and uses object manipulation and breathing to take the audience into a state of half-sleep listening. Although it does not attempt to explain the financial system, the performance uses mental images to explore the curious similarity between the lexical field of finance and that of the state of the body.

THANKS to the SUBS for hosting the creation (2022).

agathe chevallier

Agathe Chevallier is an author, sculptor and performer.

She writes performance scripts and creates situations that condition the audience's listening skills and shape their attention. To achieve this, she uses “somatic” techniques used by dancers and the manipulation of objects.

Performances are systematically conceived in-situ, based on the qualities of the space or its social context. The work plays on the codes of mediation by stripping it of its didactic aspects, preferring to slip in singularly coded or ambiguous messages.

The texts lead the audience to activate their bodily awareness and invite them to navigate within mental images that refer to broader systems (monetary circuits, voting bodies, wrestling positions....).

Attentive to the way in which the image is created rather than the image itself, she uses the polysemy of words to cross lexicons and invite the construction of new representations.

practical information

Schedule of workshop cycles :
- From 10 January to 7 February: discovery of works (literary, visual, cinematographic and theatrical) and collection of testimonies, gestures, postures, ideas and stories that could feed into the collective writing
- From 14 February to 7 March: discovery of techniques and places to begin the collective writing of the script
- From 10 to 12 March: the collectively written script is staged by the artist-author and a playwright.

- On 12 March 2025 at 19:30 : performance at Théâtre de l'Elysée (duration : 1h).