I am not transgender,
even less transvestite.
I am a puppet,
a chimera, free and insolent
who can be
all identities
HEN (which can be pronounced Heune) is a non-gendered Swedish pronoun, entered in the dictionary in 2015.
It is used in particular in school textbooks experimenting with a less discriminating pedagogy.
HEN is the name of a hybrid character who transforms and plays male and female images with sarcasm and insolence at will.
Puppet figure manipulated by two actors, HEN is full of life, exuberant, enraged and virile diva in heels who expresses herself by singing love, hope, bodies, sexuality with a lot of freedom.
At the time of a search for identity or a desire to define everything, HEN is an extraordinary character who does not seek to be defined, standardized. It is like that, multiple, transformable.
HEN is told by mutations through a musical narrative written under impulse with insolence, irony and through original songs for the most part which freely draw their sources from the Berlin cabaret or from the current queer performative scene.
This project undoubtedly echoes a discriminated community and old struggles, unfortunately always to be reinvested politically and artistically.
This creation is the result of research in the form of laboratories on questions of identity and gender confronted with research on the origins of a subversive puppet theater.
The puppet has a complex and fascinating history in its relationship to subversion. If she was sometimes censored, she was also manipulated in the service of evangelization, as a partisan puppet in times of war (notably through the example of the Spanish Civil War), puppet in the service of a state apparatus (Soviet propaganda tool in Poland) or still a vector of identity discourse of colonialism.
But, depending on the country, the puppet was also a masked prosthesis making it possible to raise the fist towards a form of engagement. The showman-manipulator was hidden in the castle, and could take on political, socially committed or erotic comments. Often treated with humor, this fairground theater sometimes presented in the streets or in cafes was a way of denouncing and entertaining, of mocking the bourgeoisie, the owner, the police, death.
HEN received the Special Prize from the National Critics' Union in 2019
