While in this high-tech and socially networked era, everything is linked, we lose the opportunity to really get to know the other.  In La Forteresse du Sourire two adjacent apartments symbolise this situation in modern society – contrasting lives only separated by one curtain. Here the spectator gets to know two different environments : on the one side you see a group of cheerful hedonists, on the other a taciturn family, in which dementia and infirmity make a silent entry. Symmetrical households, situated in the space of a handkerchief, which will influence each other without the persons crossing each other. And then the daily bubbles burst.

Kurō Tanino, the great master of Japanese theatre, pictures the human soul with humour and a sense of surrealism. As a painter, an author, a director and a psychiatrist he likes nothing better than to mix his four vocations in a unique style. He founded his famous theatre company Niwa Gekidan Penino, which has toured world-wide, when he was still a student. In their plays, strangeness, loneliness and difference are evoked as spectres. But at the same time, Tanino shows how our unique lives, however different, are connected by an invisible thread. In his work the commonplace becomes exceptional. 

Programmation outside the walls of La rose des vents in Roubaix
Coproduction Japan Foundation, Festival d'Automne à Paris
In partnership with the Maison des Cultures du Japon in Paris