monologue and songs about love
The theater collective Polyformers brings the autobiographical and only published text of the French author Marcelle Sauvageot (1900-1934) to the stage in their play "Almost entirely yours - monologue and songs about love". They deal with topics that are already astonishingly prescient in the author's words.
This includes the ongoing need for discourse and struggles for gender equality as well as overcoming heteronormative models of life and love. The piece reflects how much has changed in the last 90 years since the text was published and which aspects remain relevant.
Polyformers integrate Sauvageot's text into their performance and combine it with songs, foreign texts from feminist literature and interviews with young women of today. The main character of the play, similar to the author herself, has to say goodbye to her lover due to her illness. Shortly after her stay in a sanatorium, she received the news from him: "I'm getting married, our friendship will remain."
The protagonist, initially romantically in love, reacts to these farewell words with a series of texts. Her response, titled "Do you think this is necessary?", begins a literary exploration of love, relationships as a social construct, and ultimately oneself. The never-sent and posthumously published letters, written between November 7th and November 24th, Written in December 1930, Sauvageot's deep understanding of social inequality and structural dependencies in a world characterized by patriarchy.
At the same time, they represent an attempt to find self-empowerment in their own language. Finally, the protagonist manages to direct her gaze beyond all social constructions and role models to the conditions and possibilities of love as an interpersonal experience: "Isn't the one for whom one was created the one for whom one assumes that one is created?"
Independence and determination go hand in hand with self-criticism and doubt. Both are presented as part of the process of self-discovery and preservation in the face of heartbreak. The breaks and twists of a phase of life are revealed and primarily serve to radically deconstruct love and its social framework.
- Programme in German