Dramaturgic details:

• Imagination and reality coming together through memories;

• Medical chronology and reports;

• The point of view of the close ones;

• The discovery of the self.

In Hurler à la Mer, the line between fantasy and reality is blurry; the play intends to explore the duality between the idea of HIV and its reality, sometimes making the “pill” easier to swallow, and sometimes harder to.

Note of intent:

 The play contemplates why after almost 40 years since this virus has started to spread, the social gaze upon HIV has hardly changed, even despite the progress modern medicine has made in increasing the quality of life of patients and evening the life expectancy of an HIV-positive individual to that of an HIV-negative person. The play demonstrates how one gets over the difficulty of living with this disease in 2021. What goes through a patient’s mind when they get diagnosed? How does one mourn the life they imagined for themselves… and how does one maintain the hopes to run up that hill and get a second chance at life? How can information about the scientific progress on HIV help broaden the minds of society? These questions are what Hurler à la Mer aims to dissect.

Hurler à la Mer is a play created by Nina Fafchamps and Mathilde Leroy, directed by Isuf Kovaci and choreographed by Mathilde Bosquet. Nina, formerly known as Jérôme, tells her story through this piece, she shares the sad reality of most HIV-positive people: rejection, guilt, fear, shame.  Hurler à la Mer is a project that mixes dance and theatre to tell the story of an HIV patient in his first-year post-diagnosis. It’s about how he seeks refuge in dance, how he expresses his sorrow through his body. How can art make him feel alive at a point in his life where he feels nothing but dead? This play has a trail to blaze, through love, respect, and knowledge.

This project does not claim to be every HIV+ person’s experience, it is one story amongst many others, but this story may allow people to learn how to protect themselves, get information, hold their head up high, and leave fear behind.

Premiere

The premiere of Hurler à la Mer has been continuously postponed in light of the COVID-19 measures. The first shows in the La Boverie museum in Liege were scheduled for early June 2021, however, considering the ongoing uncertainty around the opening of cultural venues, the Board of the Collectif Les Bastards has decided to postpone the physical premiere of Hurler à la Mer until September 2021.

The creative team of Hurler à la Mer has faced several hurdles when bringing this project to existence. Several actors had to drop from the project as their life situations would change throughout the pandemic (e.g. following the latest postponement, it became clear that one of the actors would have progressed too far in her pregnancy and would have been unable to dance at the time when the show was envisioned to premiere). Moreover, there is a concern that the venue that was happy to welcome the project will be unable to fit the show in their new programme for fall 2021. Despite all the obstacles mentioned above, Collectif Les Bastards is working hard to deliver the show as soon as the public health situation allows for it.