JE L'AIME to Make UK Debut in London Homes via Blue Fondue
Written by Tristan Bernays and created with Sophie Larsmon, the production explores memory and reality across multiple languages within intimate domestic spaces.
This Autumn, Blue Fondue brings JE L'AIME to the UK for a strictly limited five-week season, welcoming just 20 guests at a time into a striking contemporary London home. Set within sleek, modern interiors, the evening unfolds in a space that feels intimate, cinematic and distinctly of-the-moment. Guests are welcomed in as new neighbours, helping pass round drinks and nibbles as the party gets underway, until a toast reveals the real occasion: Liv and Vic are marking their wedding anniversary, though not everything in this marriage is quite as it seems.
A glass of French wine or a cocktail sets the evening in motion, with the story unfolding alongside a delicious selection of light bites. The experience continues beyond the 70-minute performance, with guests invited to stay afterwards for a second drink, pizza and conversation. Lasting approximately two hours in total, JE L'AIME is conceived as an entire evening. The contemporary home remains part of the experience throughout, its living spaces, dining areas and details of everyday life becoming the backdrop to a story that is constantly shifting.
At the heart of the experience is a story written by award-winning writer and performer Tristan Bernays, created with Sophie Larsmon and founded by Ilma Tiki, JE L'AIME begins as a housewarming before revealing itself as Liv and Vic's anniversary, moving through memory, imagination and different versions of the past. Conversations take place across English, French, Hindi and Esperanto, while the boundaries between what is remembered, imagined and experienced become increasingly uncertain.
Food is cooking. Wine is flowing. Karaoke is about to begin. The mood is warm, elegant and familiar. Then something starts to shift. Details change. Memories begin to conflict. What begins as an intimate celebration gradually becomes stranger, more disorientating and harder to place. As the night unfolds, guests are drawn deeper into Liv and Vic's world, where the lines between memory, imagination and reality begin to blur.
Blending experience and promenade theatre, JE L'AIME asks a bigger question about our relationships. Drawing on quantum mechanics, love, memory, culture and the impossibility of ever truly knowing another person, JE L'AIME is a thought-provoking exploration of how two people can share a life, yet experience it in entirely different ways.
The five-week UK season opens in South London moves west, near Notting Hill, for three weeks then moves for its final week to East London on the edge of London Fields., Arriving as themselves, as one of only twenty guests at each performance, guests step into a world that feels private, immediate and beautifully real. Or is it?
When the evening ends, Liv and Vic's story doesn't resolve so much as multiply. What really happened? Which memories can be trusted? And if two people can live through the same moment and carry away two different truths, which one do you believe? Normal is not Universal.
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