Theater: OSE - Orgasm System Error at the Avignon Off Festival

Our project: to present the play OSE - Orgasm System Error at the Festival Off d'Avignon in July 2022, to make it known and to be able to play it then more widely in France. We did it!!! The rental of the theater is financed: see you in Avignon! But we still have time and the crowdfunding continues. We would like as many people as possible to hear about the play and come to see it. By reaching our new goal of 9000 euros, we will be able to afford the services of a press officer during the festival. What is the play about? After 38 years of silence, without warning, the orgasm bursts into Melusine's life. But... Why had she never come before? She was in a relationship. When she tells her Raymondin the news, he quits. Too bad for him, she'll go back to the seventh heaven by herself. But when she tries to renew the experience, it doesn't work anymore! SYSTEM ERROR. So she sets out to find her lost orgasm. No, we're not just talking about sex How is it that Melusine has so little information about her own pleasure? How is it that nothing around women encourages them to experience what feels good? The image of women's bodies is everywhere. Yet, we don't talk about them as sexual beings. They remain objects, rarely subjects in sexuality. When Claire, the French one, told her personal experience to Patricia, the Lebanese one, we were convinced that sharing this intimate episode would open a space where many would find themselves as human beings. When we wrote this four-handed piece, we expected to encounter cultural differences in our relationship to sexuality. But beyond the borders, we found the same taboos, the same social injunctions addressed to women: "be discreet", "take care of others and not yourself", "a woman cannot live without a man", "be a sex bomb - businesswoman - ideal mother, all in one". When Melusine discovers her full potential as a woman through pleasure, she is disoriented and finds herself expelled from this "straight path". OSE is a woman's frantic quest to understand what cuts her off from her own intimacy. Finally, exhausted, she abandons herself to her own vulnerability and meets her true power. The text's commitment is to dare to say out loud what everyone else keeps silent. It is a question of making visible the sexual pleasure of women with freshness and audacity, without ever falling into vulgarity, and with much humor. We often hear that "female pleasure is complicated". This play helps women, as well as men, to approach the subject in all simplicity. And even with a lot of fun. Who is OSE - Orgasm System Error ? Claire Deguernel, co-author and performer of OSE - Orgasm System error, has renewed her passion for theater in Beirut after several years of work with Doctors Without Borders around the world. In parallel, she has never stopped practicing theater and dance in various forms. OSE is her first play as a solo author and performer. Patricia Nammour, co-author and director of OSE - Orgasm System Error, is a Lebanese actress, director and author. She is the leading character in the Lebanese adaptation of the series "Un gars, une fille". Before emigrating recently to Croatia, Patricia adapted in Beirut two plays by Carlotta Clerici "Tonight I ovulate" and "What remains of a love". She also co-founded and directed the "Atelier du Je", a personal development workshop that has produced a collective creation every year during its 12 years of existence. A one-woman show born in Beirut In 2019, the play sold out every night for a week at Studio Zoukak, a major venue for Lebanese contemporary creation. "An ode to pleasure, masturbation and sexual autonomy with humor and pedagogy," enthused the newspaper L'Orient Le Jour. The Covid has slowed down the diffusion of the play but this time it's ready to tour in France, starting with the Avignon Festival this summer. A self-produced play For us, the theater is the mirror of our society and of our most intimate being. It must be able to exist in all its diversity to allow everyone to recognize themselves in it and to be this lever of change and - dare we say it - of revolution, at least of mentalities. Since the creation of the show, we are in self-production to be free to speak about female pleasure, a subject which still seems subversive today, as incredible as it may seem. We have not yet found a producer who agrees to support the play in its entirety. So we are carrying this play ourselves because we are convinced of its quality and its necessity, and we are not alone: it exists thanks to the support of a whole network of professionals and theater lovers who believe in it with us. Why participate in the Avignon Off Festival? With the crisis in Lebanon, it is something for us to present a Franco-Lebanese play at the festival. The desire to celebrate the theater is even greater. And then in these Covid times, we missed so much the exchanges and the contact between artists and spectators. The Avignon Off Festival is a real showcase for independent theater in France. For a theater company, participating in it is a stepping stone. It is an investment that has a cost but generates important benefits: - Diffusing the play to the public - To give notoriety to the play (in the press, on social media) - Show it to programmers who come to Avignon to discover new plays and program them in their venue the following year Presented in Avignon, the play considerably increases its chances of touring in France, in different places. Who supports OSE - Orgasm System Error ? The Compagnie La Petite Main is our administrative structure. Caroline Le Lausque, its artistic director, immediately believed in our project. The play has already been selected by the Cabestan team to be programmed at the Théâtre Le Grand Pavois, a beautiful 70-seat theater, which creates the intimacy required with the public for this unusual show. Like most of the Off Festival venues, the theater is a rental venue.