La Relève

A new cycle

Radio live – La Relève, a new cycle of stories from around the world brought to the stage by the Radio live collective.

The show takes two forms

portraits (1h15)
intersecting narratives (2h10)

Following on from the Radio live project they have been running since 2013, in which around fifty young people of more than 30 nationalities have shared their stories, Aurélie Charon and Amélie Bonnin (co-founders, with Caroline Gillet, of the documentary show Radio live) are opening a new cycle in this unique collective and international project, which has given rise to friendships and long-term dialogue between committed young people from all over the world: La Relève.

A new stage form, with filmed images in which the faces of previous generations and those of the next enter the story.

They are between 20 and 30 years old on stage. But between 6 and 85 on screen.

We like to provoke encounters that shouldn’t or couldn’t have happened. We have created a community of committed young people who take it in turns to tell their stories.

They haven’t prepared anything. They trust us.

From these first 10 years of meetings and documentation, for the radio and for the stage project, we have kept sound and video recordings, photographs, compiled drawings, archives, traces and memories around their stories.

Today we’re filming in the homes of those we know, bringing their landscapes, their families, their parents, their grandparents and their countries to the stage.

A new generation is also entering the scene: those aged between 11 and 20 today.

They don’t have the same perspective as their elders on the conflicts they’ve lived through, their desires for the future, their parents’ generation…

La Relève is already writing its own story.

We are no longer the only ones to question them: their world questions them.

The dialogue between the spoken word on stage and the film footage has been reinvented. The trips we have made for this show have enabled us to collect previously unseen video material, to provoke and record exchanges between the generations, so that we can see and hear different points of view on common histories, shared territories and a society on the move.

La Relève is presented in two different ways: as a choral piece in which two ‘characters’ tell their stories; and as individual portraits, each of which can be seen as an episode in a series.

The designers

Amélie Bonnin

Amélie Bonnin’s work straddles the border between different disciplines. After studying graphic design in Paris and then Montreal, she trained in screenwriting at the Fémis. Depending on the project, she uses writing, video and drawing to shape stories.

She has directed two documentaries, La mélodie du boucher (Arte) and La bande des Français (France 3, co-directed with Aurélie Charon).

In 2021 she wrote and directed Partir un jour, her first fictional short film, a musical comedy starring Bastien Bouillon and Juliette Armanet, which won numerous festival awards (Audience Award and Best Music Award at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival; Critics’ Award, Audience Award and Best Actor Award at the Trouville Off-courts Festival; Opening Film at the Festival International du Film Francophone de Namur (…)).

Partir un jour

Alongside her projects as writer-director, she continues to work as Artistic Director, designing the layout for the magazine La Déferlante.

Aurélie Charon

A producer at France Culture, she hosts Tous en scène, le magazine du spectacle vivant (Saturday 8pm) and coordinates the radio creation space L’Expérience (Sunday 10pm and as an original podcast).

A graduate of Sciences Po Paris, Paris III and New York University, she has been producing documentary series on committed young people for Radio France since 2011, including Underground Democracy in Gaza, Tehran, Algiers and Moscow. She has undertaken a long-term project on French youth with Une série française (2015 France Inter), Jeunesse 2016 (France Culture) and the film La Bande des Français made with Amélie Bonnin for France 3 (2017). She recounts her travels in the book C’était pas mieux avant, ce sera mieux après, published by Éditions L’Iconoclaste.

France Culture

With Caroline Gillet and Amélie Bonnin, she created the ‘Radio live, une nouvelle génération sur scène’ project, to bring her documentaries to the stage. With Mathilde Gamon, she set up Radio live production.

Download the file