Between your lines

One of the strengths of theater is being able to summon onto the stage beings that everything opposes. This is what Sélène Assaf proposes to us, in a one-woman show where she embodies her two grandmothers, one Lebanese, the other French. Written from interviews and memories, autobiography is combined here with a reflection on identity and the ambivalence of standing between several worlds: what intimate answer can be given to the idea of belonging, when it enriches and divides us at the same time? Born in Paris, having grown up in Brussels and spent her summers in Beirut, the actress knows intimately the richness of multiculturalism, but also its possible tearing apart. Her life is made of geographical and emotional displacements from which she draws with power, carried by the soundtrack of her family history, between Fayruz and Billie Holiday. Embodying in turn Téta and Néné, her two grandmothers, Sélène Assaf is a delicate tightrope walker who sails between the little girl she was, the past and the present, her subjectivity, and collective memory. Questioning the tutelary female figures of her history, she weaves a dialogue with the public about life, femininity in all its complexity, men, exile, her desires, and her joys.