Chansons Mouillées is a hybrid of lecture, concert and performance, created and performed by Nina Santes.

Chansons Mouillées is the little sister of the collective creation Wet Songs (2025). These two projects have the same title in two different languages: they are communicating vessels and their processes echo each other. They are two parts of a long-term artistic cycle that invites us to think of water as a driving force behind perceptive, intimate and collective transformations.

A vessel of memories and states, water is a body that flows through us, agitating us, overflowing us, mixing us with the world. ‘There are tides in the body’ said Virginia Woolf, describing the movements of our moods and affects. As an act of resistance to the generalised drying out and hermetisation of the environment, this cycle of creations delves into space, bodies and memories, in search of what emerges, flows, wets, gushes and overflows in us; what in us leaks, transpires, transgresses and dissolves.

Through different formats of pieces and encounters, this cycle creates the invention of a water collective working to re-irrigate affects and recreate circulation within and between bodies. This water collective is constantly evolving, constantly reinventing itself, spreading out, making its way through the cracks and fractures of our world, like watersheds.
The third part of this cycle will be Familles Liquides (2026), an experimental musical for children and adults.

‘Chansons Mouillées was born of a desire to share the invisible part of the creative process, in a free and intimate form that could change over time.
It’s a space I’m opening up to share what’s going on, what’s in the making, what’s taking its course.
There are so many stories, so much knowledge, so many practices, so many sensations contained in the process of creating a show. The show becomes a form in itself, the tip of the iceberg. With Chansons Mouillées I’m inviting you to dive in, to discover and let the submerged part resonate.

I’ve always been fascinated by unreleased music. Songs that don’t find their way onto albums, and are one day shared with an audience. Chansons Mouillées would be my unreleased tracks. The tracks you won’t hear or see in my pieces. It would be a place of research, of attempts, of discoveries and failures, of the mixing of ideas and intuition, the place from which my body digests and sets itself in motion. Chansons Mouillées is a kind of compost-conference-cabaret.

Between improvisation and composed pieces, the performance is structured around intimate, direct words that weave analogies, share memories, revisit history and conjure up feelings. Playing on the triviality of things, Chansons Mouillées opens up gaps of fabulation and slips between spoken, sung and danced word, to express the dryness and burn-out, the vital need for stories that irrigate, for gestures that leak out and overflow, for wet dreams that save, for laughter that consoles, for tears that wash away, for listening that transforms’.

CRÉDITS
Conception et performance – Nina Santes Création lumière – Louise Rustan Création sonore – Aria de la Celle Accessoires – Charlotte Gautier Van Tour et Nina Santes Administration, production, développement Barbara Coffy Production – La Fronde Coproduction – Théâtre de Vanves Soutiens – Interval Collective (UK)

DATES	DIFFUSION
4 October 2025	La Pop, Paris
14 June 2025	Théâtre de la Bastille, Paris
28 March 2025	Festival Artdanthé, Théâtre de Vanves
7 December 2024	Festival Grand Huit, Nantes