Production Company: Le Collectif Wow! Writer: Florent Barat. Composer: Sébastien Schmitz. Directors: Florent Barat, Sébastien Schmitz. Sound engineer: Michel Bystranowski.

SYNOPSIS:

In Dire Need of a Caress is the self-portrait of a woman in which she recounts her life from her first love to the long exile she takes in order to survive.

In this radiophonic odyssey told by the female narrator accompanied by a chorus, we follow her as she becomes a wife, then a mother before she eventually loses everything. Alone and broken, she struggles not to sink. While she ultimately fails, she never gives in, fighting relentlessly, mostly against herself.

This drama is an invite made to the audience to close their eyes and go deep down into themselves; to dive into this radiophonic poetry and let themselves go with the waves; to drift along with this woman as she overcomes her inner storms, facing her inner animal: an injured wolfess on her way back to her pack.

This piece, of which the textual backbone is an original poem written in french rhymed alexendrines, was originally created as a live radio drama which we performed twice before the Covid19 crisis emerged and the lockdown put all our live activities on hold. Nevertheless, we decided to take advantage of this situation and make a „studio” version of In Dire Need of a Caress. To do so we extracted a few sequences out of the live recordings we had, and rerecorded the vast majority of the play in a bizarre dispersed home studio situation (all of us being locked-down in different places – some in Belgium, some in France). We then edited and mixed this new material back together to give this drama a miraculous second life.

In Dire Need of a Caress is the first of a set of self-portraits. Five first-person poems originally written in French rhymed alexandrines that, collected under the generic title of (And You,) Where Do Your Tears Come From?, depict the story of one family.


English text (click)