Here Be Lions

An exploration of the world of multi-handicapped children in a hospital, translated by award-winning playwright Neil Bartlett

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For two years Stéphane Olry sporadically shared the daily life of the patients and caregivers at the hospital for multi-handicapped children in La Roche-Guyon. Children aided by complicated apparatuses, children without access to language whose inner life remains unknown for us. How can this troubling andnevertheless joyous journey at their side be related?

Stéphane Olry plunges us into a thick fog. Deprived of vision, the spectators are surrounded by voices, intonations that are sometimes documentary, sometimes mysterious and shapeless. They weave a landscape in which the concrete environment of the work and relationships at the hospital is turned upside-down by the sensitive experiences of the dancers and “child-bodies”. Probing a world deemed inaccessible, to attempt to fill a blank space. Like the Latin cartographers who wrote in the spaces of the yet unexplored deserts: hic sunt leones, here are the lions.