Several productions in the 2025 programme place personal experience, vulnerability and emotional sensitivity at centre stage. This engagement with intimacy raises several questions: what does it mean to reveal one’s private life in an artistic context? What roles do the body, language and silence play? Where do fiction and truth blur? And which boundaries do we choose to, or refuse to cross?

Charles Voyer and JJ Houle of Le Théâtre Indépendant will speak about creating Le Gardien des Enfants, a piece that confronts the unspoken chaos of intimacy and the violence endured by bodies and minds in its wake. Ludovico Paladini will reflect on his debut work LovPoem, a danced memory-scape evoking the emptiness left behind by a lost love. Jeanne Spaeter will share the creative journey of Amour sous Contrat, which examines love and the systems that structure it. Céline Nidegger, who contributed to the creation of Les Corps Incorruptibles by Aurélia Lüscher, will delve into the challenges of shaping a piece around the deeply intimate subject of death in our society, and the taboos surrounding the treatment of corpses.

This conversation will be moderated by Constant Spina – author and journalist and founder of Manifesto XXI. Since 2019, his research has focused on the rise of far-right ideologies in the West and the emergence of new queer romanticisms. In 2020, he published a manifesto in Censored magazine, calling for a queer romantic revolution that places care at the heart of social struggle. His first book, Manifeste Pour Une Démocratie Déviante – Amours Queers Face Au Fascisme (2023, éditions trouble), is the culmination of these ideas: a historical analysis of fascism paired with a philosophical vision of resistance through radical queer tenderness.