It seems like the end of Patrice de Bénédetti’s layered writing process, which has guided the trilogy up to now, from a small story to an important one, from his father’s nudging to the words of the great Jaurès (Jean, solo pour un monument aux morts), from the brother’s luminous outbursts in a stadium to the millions of stars in the eyes of the children from poor neighbourhoods (Vous êtes ici). Can you really distance your own story from History when it comes to your own mother and a “life trajectory that is nothing spectacular or extraordinary”? How can you avoid “speaking for a woman” and her challenging circumstances when you are a male dancer?

And yet, this is the portrait of a woman born in 1953, in the working-class neighbourhood of Saint-André, in Marseille, with two sisters and a brother, who meets Jean at the age of seventeen and becomes mother of a certain Patrice, three days before her eighteenth birthday. By staging it around a bench, which acts as both a prop and a partner, and a narrative that draws on stories, the writer and choreographer explores the ability to forget oneself for decades, and the notions of courage, survival instinct, strength, self-sacrifice, and, in the end, faith. “Like my mother, faith is discreet but tenacious, written in the margin, but indelible. Like my mother,” he writes in his working notes. Once again, it is a magnificent intimate and autobiographical work, transcended by tenderness, finesse, dance and movement.