Pauline Ben Guigui

Pauline is a French actor, writer, and director. After growing up in Avignon, she moved to Quebec in 2014 to study political science before enrolling at the Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Montréal, from which she graduated in 2022.

Writing and creation have played a central role in her artistic journey. Her early texts, including Néoténie (published in Les écrits), explore the contemporary world through the perspective of a child. In 2023, she co-founded Le Joyeux Logis with Amélie Clément, an artistic collective inspired by her great-uncle’s hardware store in Paris, a gathering place for her family, who immigrated from Algeria in the 1960s. Conceived as a creative space dedicated to women, the collective explores themes of intergenerational transmission, isolation, and violence against women. Its first production, Le syndrome du Gisant, will be presented at Espace Libre in 2027.

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Les leçons du mardi

In seventeenth-century Paris, “bad girls” were institutionalized at La Salpêtrière: the poor, the marginalized, sex workers, rebellious women, or simply those deemed deviant. Behind the walls of this vast institution, thousands of women were deprived of their freedom in the name of moral order and patriarchy. Two centuries later, the hospital became the setting for Professor Charcot’s famous Tuesday Lessons, where hysteria was exhibited, studied, and put on display before an audience of physicians and curious onlookers.

Blending medical lecture, dance, masked performance, and theatre within a postdramatic form, Les Leçons du mardi seeks to recreate an apparatus of observation in which the “madwomen” coexist with mythical figures and contemporary feminist artists. When the apparatus shifts, the patients take it over, subvert it, and reenact their history through a series of tableaux, at times playful, at times somber.

By reclaiming their narrative, these women shift the gaze. They invite us to question the boundaries between madness, mental illness, revolt, and resistance, while examining the history of the medicalization of women’s bodies and the forms of domination, marginalization, and control that continue to be exerted upon them today.