Mille Zhongand Alissia Pervozvanski-Dangles are performing their show Le Grand Soir as part of SHIFT + SPACE at London’s Theatre Deli this evening. The show is described as a high-energy celebration of Performance Art, Communism, Intergenerational trauma and Daddy issues. With so much to delve into there, we thought we should invite both in for a pixelated pint to find out more about the show.

You can catch Le Grand Soir tonight at Theatre Deli from 7:30pm (45mins). Tickets are available through the Venue’s Online Box Office.

Jake: Hi Mille & Alissia, you describe Le Grand Soir as a high-energy celebration of Performance Art, Communism, Intergenerational Trauma and Daddy Issues – tell us about what inspired you to create a piece surrounding these themes and what you found at the intersection of them all.

M&A: Hi Jake! What started this whole show is the random way we met each other, became friends, and realized how much our Dads were similar, giving us very specific, weird, common experiences that we hadn’t encountered in someone else before. We found joy, quiet understanding and new perspectives in this bond, linking us – a non-binary mixed French and Chinese drag performer and a lesbian French and Russian circus artist and theatre-maker – in ways we didn’t expect.

Both our Mums are French, both our Dads live abroad in their country of origin, now capitalist but with a heavy communist background, both live with another family of their own, both are struggling to understand some of the things that matter to us and make us who we are – arts, queerness, communities. We truly believe that one of the things we need today and that performance shows can bring to us is this sense of community, of belonging despite apparent differences: that is why we started working on Le Grand Soir.

What we found at the intersection of this is our need for tenderness and forgiveness: beyond all the jokes, beyond all the pain, there is a clarity in what we choose to forgive and what we don’t, that help us – and, we hope, the audience – bring more peace in our relationships, and within ourselves.

Jake: The piece blends performance art, physical theatre, dance, Russian pickles, and Chinese Insults – give us an insight into your creative process and how it has been working together.

M&A: Alissia lives in Paris, Mille in Lyon: so working together has meant a lot of whatsapp calls, random texts and pictures at unruly hours, and trains – just like how our friendship works. To tackle the delicate subjects of Le Grand Soir, we really wanted to create a special relationship with the audience, so we turned to performance in the sense that it interacts with the audience and take it into account as individuals and as a community, brought together for a moment in this room.

So we worked on interactions, performance protocols, intimate writing, and took a lot of dance breaks that ended up in a full choreography because we cannot stand still for too long or we explode. We had a lot of back and forth in writing, and we are building a process of trials and errors (and yes there has been and will be errors) in understanding how we can work with our intimate lives, especially in complicated, evolving political circumstances, and infuse our show with them without hurting us or the show.

But we also had a lot of fun throwing ourselves in each other’s arms and exploring each other’s culture, learning how to badly pronounce words in Mandarin Chinese and in Russian, and we think it brought us even closer together as individuals.

Jake: What are you hoping the audience might take away from the experience, if anything?

Alissia: I would love this performance to give more visibility to queer friendships. It became so rare to see those relationships not ending up actually being love stories on stage. I hope telling our story can also be a way to say how healing queer friendships can be, how strong and powerful they get when they stand together through political, social and cultural hardships. That they are a big and beautiful community of people who share a common fight. Queer friendship has its own kind of love. 

Mille: I hope the audience can take away a certain sense of serenity, the one that comes from facing an emotional hardship, understanding it deeper and if not coming to terms with it, at least compromising with it. I hope the audience also takes home sensations, images and bits of stories about the joy, complexities and beauty of being mixed – not in a fetishizing way, but in a “this is the shit that we have to deal with and we do” way.

Jake: Tell us about how the show has ended up being performed at Theatre Deli and about your relationships with the other creatives involved.

M&A: We’re actually French (shocking, we know) and based in France, so the story of how we ended up at Theatre Deli is quite a journey. We’re part of a dance-theatre company back in France, and we have been struggling with creating queer shows there for several years now. When we had the first ideas and excitement around Le Grand Soir, we thought: they’ll never let us do that in France now.

So, thanks to Mille’s connections with the drag scene and a bit of the theatre scene in London (which is an entirely different story, that starts with a Welsh boy and a Chinese drag king), we said to ourselves “you know what, fuck it, let’s write it in English, French, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, let’s break genre barriers like the shows we love in the UK, let’s do it in the UK”. So we applied to a bunch of programmes and got in Shift+Space at Theatre Deli. The team was a little bamboozled to discover that we were absolutely not living in London, but they rolled with it, we booked our Eurostar tickets, and here we are!

Jake: Given the themes of Binge Fringe, if your show was a beverage of any kind (alcoholic, non-alcoholic – be as creative as you like!), what would it be and why?

You: A strong, bittersweet in a comforting way, black tea.

A reminder – you can catch Le Grand Soir tonight at Theatre Deli from 7:30pm (45mins). Tickets are available through the Venue’s Online Box Office.

Image Credit: Jeanni Dura