Photographs found on the Internet show them as two charming little girls, seemingly indistinguishable from the children of their time (the 1910s in England), with their satin bows in their hair and their lace dresses. Except… From photo to photo, Daisy and Violet Hilton always appear together, glued together, in the same position. And with good reason: joined together, they were irremediably, from birth, Siamese twins, joined at the bottom of the spine.
Their extraordinary story could only attract the actor-writer-director duo of Christian Hecq and Valérie Lesort, with their taste for monsters and the strange, marginalized beings rejected by society. The fate of the Hilton sisters is therefore at the heart of their new show, created at the Théâtre des Célestins in Lyon before going on tour throughout France.
And as this destination is also emblematic of the society of the spectacle that developed at the beginning of the 20th centurymy century, with the rise of the circus, cabaret, musical comedy and cinema, is also the opportunity for this indescribable duo to play with forms as they please, happily transgressing the boundaries of good and bad taste: a theatre of monsters.
Exposed from age 3.
Daisy and Violet were fans of the fairgrounds from the very beginning, having been exhibited from the age of 3, for commercial purposes, by their adoptive mother, Mary Hilton. And from then on they never left the parallel universe of the show, Moloch, which attracted them and then sacrificed them, in this America which they joined in the mid-1910s. They knew how to sing and dance, they were pretty and they were very successful. First in travelling circuses, then on the Broadway stages, before Tod Browning (1880-1962) made them appear in his famous film. monsters (The monstrous parade), in 1932.
The story is clearly a blessing for Valérie Lesort and Christian Hecq, who place it, frame by frame, in a world of circus and cabaret where the characters seem to be cut directly from the red velvet curtains that envelop the stage. The tone is immediately set by the two Ringmasters who open the performance, twin brothers who set the theme of the double, which will extend throughout the show.
And as always with them, there is no shortage of ideas and surprises abound. Shadow theatre, animated objects, musicals, striptease, magic, codes of silent film and horror cinema… Christian Hecq and Valérie Lesort reinvest a whole folklore of the circus and the fairground show, especially since they are joined by another unclassifiable great of the contemporary scene. creation, the magician and clown Yann Frisch.
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