La Convivialité, a show that laughs at spelling, for an online performance at the FIAF

Arnaud Hoedt has long dreamed of discovering New York. By a funny twist, it is the coronavirus that will allow him, with his friend Jérôme Piron, to perform for a New York audience, but without stepping into the big apple. The two actors will play their show “La Convivialité” for the FIAF, but for an online performance, on April 22 at 5pm.

The idea is of Courtney Geraghty, the artistic director of the FIAF, to try to make survive a cultural season in the middle of the coronavirus crisis. She therefore invited for a “zoom-show” this duo of Belgians who make people laugh with the most unexpected subject: spelling. Former teachers of French, they imagined this spectacle that the French language is undoubtedly the only one in the world to be able to produce. And it works: for the past two years, they have been circulating throughout France – and elsewhere in the French-speaking world – to make people laugh at the incongruous devotion of our culture for spelling. They also became columnists on France Inter.

It all started, says Arnaud Hoedt, “When we were teachers and we wanted to transmit what our linguistic studies had taught us – that the complexity of French spelling has nothing to do with respect for the language. We realized that it was impossible, that there was a crazy attachment to these rules simply because people confuse language and spelling. " Along the way, Hoedt and Piron have become standard-bearers for the simplification of spelling, but they are above all actors who play with talent on the absurdity of spelling dogmas. We learn, in passing, that Molière wrote “misantrope” without “h”, that the Byzantine rules of the past participle agreement used with the auxiliary had meaning when the copyist monks were the only ones to write and that the sacro – holy etymology is often only a pretext to create a gap between the elites and the people. But above all they make people laugh, both nostalgic for dictation and those traumatized by the cedilla.