Why did you make a simple question—“What does home mean to you?”—the starting point for this project?

At the beginning, I wasn’t looking for amazing answers. The question about home seemed almost too obvious or too banal. But that’s exactly what interested me about it: to see what people would project onto such a seemingly simple question. I very soon realized that for some home is a place you want to return to, while for others it’s something you absolutely have to leave behind. Often, it’s both at once.

What struck me was how full of contradictions people’s answers were. Even when they were talking about a personal space, they also mentioned society, rules, expectations, and sometimes fears. Home became a focal point for family relations but also for ideas, beliefs, and wider tensions. Through these personal stories, and almost despite them, something collective emerged.

But all of it remains open to multiple interpretations. When the show is touring overseas, I feel how much the outside world projects its own perceptions of Kyrgyzstan and its Soviet past onto the play. It transforms how the work is viewed, and that’s one reason why I like to leave some elements open and unexplained. I’m very careful not to speak about Kyrgyzstan like an object that can be summed up. My viewpoint is necessarily partial. It’s a pluralistic country, containing many very different experiences and stories, and I can only show fragments of it.

The action in Nest takes place in a hallway—a place of waiting and passage where bodies and voices jostle. What does this space allow you to say or do?

A hallway is not a place that you settle in. You pass through it, you wait there, you run into others without really stopping. It’s an interstitial space, a space between spaces, a boundary. You see things differently when you’re located in this kind of threshold or liminal space. I liked the idea of a space that doesn’t allow you to feel comfortable or settled and encourages different perspectives. In Nest, the audience never sees the whole scene.

This choice was important for me and the set designers, Marat Raiymkulov and Malika Umarova, because it prevents a full understanding. Stories are superimposed, cut off, and interrupted. There’s no overarching viewpoint. The hallway also creates a sense of physical proximity: you’re very close to these bodies and voices, but you can’t fully enter their space. This tension is part of the experience.

You base your work on true stories and insist on the importance of listening and capturing the silences between words and the rhythms of language. Why do you put so much emphasis on the imperfection of the speech you are passing on?

I wouldn’t say that Nest is documentary theatre, strictly speaking, but we conducted interviews with real people, which are then performed by an actor or actress. From that point on, the person becomes a character. What I want is not to manipulate, not to create an illusion, not to convey a message, but to work with what actually happens during speech: the hesitations and pauses and breaths.

This specificity is not about verisimilitude. The purpose is to encourage listening. I often wonder what theatre can make people hear rather than see. Language is always imperfect, especially when multiple languages are involved. The surtitles, translation, and communication gaps are part of the show. I prefer to reveal these limitations instead of hiding them. For me, translation is not always about helping the audience or making the show more accessible in a utilitarian way—it can also be about exploring the relationship between what is seen and heard and what is understood or lost. This means that the spectators are not simply passive receivers but active listeners who do some of the work themselves.

Interview by Philippe Couture

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