Le Repas Des Gens - De François Cervantes

Radiant-Bellevue welcomes Le Repas des Gens

At Radiant-Bellevue, we are honored to open our doors to Le Repas des Gens by François Cervantes, a theatrical invitation to share time and attention around a table that becomes a stage for memory, tenderness, and the everyday heroism of ordinary lives. In our house, the piece unfolds as a communal moment rather than a demonstration, shaping the room with a gentle intimacy that encourages listening as much as looking. The dramaturgy, at once precise and hospitable, assembles fragments of stories that arrive like courses, each one nourishing the audience in a different way. We have configured our hall to bring spectators closer to the performers, so that the breath of the voice, the weight of a pause, and the ritual of serving and receiving can be felt directly. As presenters, we are drawn to the way this work lights up the shared space between strangers; it is theatre that dignifies presence, revealing how the simplest gestures—offering a seat, asking a question, holding a silence—can generate a feeling of belonging that lingers well after the evening ends.

François Cervantes and his living theatre today

Le Repas des Gens is emblematic of François Cervantes’s enduring commitment to a theatre that listens before it speaks. For several decades, he has cultivated a language where the poetic and the documentary intertwine, crafting performances that meet audiences at eye level and invite them to recognize themselves in the tales of others. In recent seasons, his work has continued to deepen along two fertile lines: the meticulous attention to individuals encountered in the world—workers, neighbors, passers-by whose stories deserve the precision of the stage—and the collective experience created when those stories are offered publicly, with care and craft. He and his artistic companions maintain a robust presence across France, alternating touring with periods of immersion and creation, so that each new project keeps a living connection to the places and people it meets. From our vantage point at Radiant-Bellevue, this continuity is felt in rehearsal as much as in performance: the piece grows with the city it visits, absorbing its rhythms. Hosting the team behind Le Repas des Gens, we recognize an artistic practice that values time, craftsmanship, and proximity, and that trusts an audience to attend to nuance—the quiet turns of thought, the shy humor, the warmth that rises when a room starts breathing together.

Presenting Le Repas des Gens at Radiant-Bellevue also means shaping an environment where spectators can let the performance move at the tempo of real encounter. Our technical team has devised a soft-edged acoustic field and a lighting design that favors faces and hands, allowing the articulation of the performers and the life of the audience to intermingle. Seating is subtly reoriented to reduce the distance between rows, and the foyer opens early to extend the sense of welcome that the piece celebrates. We see this event as part of a broader conversation in our season about hospitality, attention, and the ways theatres can be civic rooms as much as artistic ones. The show’s refined simplicity—its trust in speech, in listening, and in the shared ritual of gathering—aligns with our mission to bring discerning, human-scale creations to the region. In our auditorium, Le Repas des Gens becomes a portrait of a community assembled for an evening: the city’s voices meeting the artists’ care, the stage becoming a table, and the hall becoming a place where difference sits side by side without friction. We are proud to host François Cervantes and his collaborators for this occasion, and to offer our audience an experience measured not in spectacle, but in the lasting clarity it brings to what we share.

Le Repas Des Gens - de François Cervantes dans d'autres salles à Lyon