Cultural Actions

Once upon a time… at home!

Bringing fairy-tales to your house

“I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible” Oscar Wilde

Fiction is something we all need. From the youngest age, each of us has the innate ability to escape into the world of our imagination in response to hearing a story being told, whether we are at home or at school. According to the environment in which we find ourselves, this link might have been severed and the path to finding this instinct once again requires a process of initiation and teaching. During the 2020 lockdown, Dramaticules came up with the idea behind the Once upon a time… at home! programme. From March 2021 onwards, Dramaticules set off in search of the most vulnerable members of the community in order to bring them together in a convivial atmosphere, whether in the context of a family home, or among the inhabitants of a block of flats or neighbourhood. Today, this tale-based project based has been implemented across the Établissement public territorial Grand-Orly Seine Bièvre, extending to the Val-de-Marne and Essonne areas.

The objective of Dramaticules is to recreate a space for dialogue and intergenerational exchange through staged-readings in socio-cultural centres, community centres, libraries, day centres, primary schools, junior and senior schools, as well as private homes. It gives individuals the opportunity to discover some of the best-known tales that literature has to offer us – Perrault, Grimm, Andersen, Tolstoy – and to (re)affirm the place of reading aloud as a possible source of leisure.

Sharing these timeless and universal tales offers the possibility of rich debates and exchanges on subjects of the utmost importance, such as the place of the child within the family structure and what fiction tells us about the real.