Leslie Mannès | Our Volcanoes, Our Tenderness

As part of the Grand Luxe network residencies, Leslie Mannès will launch a new research cycle entitled “Our Volcanoes, Our Tenderness”, aimed at teenagers aged 12 to 15. This cycle will explore the ecology of social relations and the notions of cooperation and bonding, with a particular focus on gender equality. The process will alternate between laboratories involving professionals from the associative, educational, and cultural sectors, workshops with teenagers, and choreographic creation residencies. This research cycle proposes to collectively embrace creativity as an opportunity to discover and cultivate new shared imaginaries, beyond certain representations and stereotypes.

One part of this research will be the development of the choreographic piece “À nos chères”. The work will evoke women’s lineages – past, present, and future – as well as the violence inflicted upon our bodies, our loved ones and our flesh. Three women will come together on stage to urge us to confront this violence collectively, with courage and solidarity, so that it may no longer be silenced or forgotten. “À nos chères” is about traces, memory, emancipation, and hope – an ode to resistance borne with commitment and care by powerful, multiple, and complex identities ready to embark on the adventure of reinvention.

“À nos chères” is an invitation to dare to take side roads, to question our allegiances, to venture beyond the paths laid out for us, and to use love as a form of dissidence that nourishes hope for change. Together, we will dance our sorrows away, until they are transformed into joy through the power of our bodies. Against all odds, absolutely alive.