Photo : Jean-Louis Fernandez
Le Mauvais Sort • A show by Céline Champinot
Prepare for a surreal, wild cabaret ride that flips romantic clichés on their head with irony and mischief. This is a riotous take on heartbreak that transforms your deepest sentimental ruts into a joyful, unpredictable performance piece.
La Maison des Métallos (Paris 11th)
About
La Maison des Métallos hosts Le Mauvais Sort, a performance by Céline Champinot that examines the complexities of love through a burlesque cabaret lens. Featuring four archetypal characters—a police officer, a journalist, a doctor, and a singer—the show explores human desire and social power dynamics in a biblico-pop ritual. Suitable for audiences aged 14 and over, the performance is fully wheelchair accessible and offers specific support for blind or partially sighted patrons. The event runs from December 8 to December 12, 2026, with showtimes varying by day, providing an irreverent look at our modern romantic experiences.
On this post-apocalyptic stage, a police officer, a journalist, a doctor, and a star singer cycle through burlesque sketches, love songs, magic tricks, and stripteases. These four archetypal figures of power, both familiar and grotesque, reenact the symptoms of our romantic passions until they reach an intimate collapse. For it is indeed these yearnings of the heart—in their most frantic form—that lie at the center of this biblical-pop ritual. Irrepressible desire serves as a counter-spell cast against a world order obsessed with controlling bodies and imaginations. Passionate love in all its subversive power is capable of disrupting roles, shaking hierarchies, and cracking the structures of Western domination.
In this cabaret of broken hearts, where the ghosts of our love stories surface, Céline Champinot does not seek so much to conjure away these passions as to test their full scope, better to shift our perspective. What if, within this collapse, there lay an unexpected possibility—the chance to see other ways of being in the world emerge?
Céline Champinot leads us into the yo-yo inherent to the state of being in love, with all its excesses and extremes. [...] Full of reversals and changes in tone, Le Mauvais Sort plays tricks on us and invents expiatory rituals to purge our heartaches, and to turn our unhappy romantic experiences into the breeding ground for a jovial and irreverent carnival.
Marie Plantin, ScenewebAround the show
Cabaret Workshop (WED. DEC. 2, 2026｜6:00 PM—9:00 PM)Duration 3h
Open to all, from 15 years old
Price 10€
Reservation recommended
Accompanied by Céline Champinot, enter the world of cabaret and explore the effects of the gaze and representation in a collective performance experience. Through this practice, you will observe how these forms transform as soon as they are looked at, and how the gaze constructs power, desire, or disturbance. The gaze is no longer merely passive: it becomes an active element of the stage.
Echoing her production Le Mauvais Sort, this workshop by Céline Champinot proposes to collectively build, "on sight," a small cabaret using simple gestures, attempts, and brief actions. Gradually, these ordinary gestures become acts, transformed by the act of being replayed, observed, and staged.
The workshop relies on the triangular relationship between the performer, the play partner, and the audience, in order to foster listening, interaction, and the construction of collective forms rather than individual performance. Everyone is invited to give play to the other as much as to oneself.
Finally, you will experiment with what it produces to play the audience in front of an audience, and how this shifts roles, places, and expectations.
Between acting, disturbance, and self-staging, this workshop invites everyone to explore the codes of cabaret in a collective, sensitive, and playful approach.
In partnership with Peuple & Culture
Duration 3h
Price 8€
Reservation recommended
The Maison des Métallos, in partnership with Peuple & Culture, invites you to a reading circle workshop around the book Désirer la violence: Ce(ux) que la pop culture nous apprend à aimer (Desiring Violence: What Pop Culture Teaches Us to Love) by Chloé Thibaud.
Who hasn't cheered at Beatrix Kiddo's revenge in Kill Bill? Melted at the meeting of Allie and Noah in The Notebook? Sung along at the top of their lungs to Grease? Since the cartoons of our childhood, we have been taught to desire the bad boy archetype, to dream of the mapped-out scenarios of romantic comedies, to hope to experience the "stolen" kiss.
Pop culture constantly and insidiously influences our behaviors and our romantic relationships. Yet, these fascinations and other preconceived notions often turn out to be toxic. This essay invites a profound and bold reflection on the sexist and sexual violence that hides behind our favorite entertainment.
The reading circle (arpentage) is a method for discovering a book together. It is recommended not to read the book beforehand! The Métallos team will bring a copy, cold drinks, and treats for a friendly moment of sharing.
Explore the set and the world of the show through a tactile tour of the stage, specially designed for blind and visually impaired people.
Post-show talk (THU. DEC. 10 after the show)Discuss with the artistic team after the performance.
Spectator warm-up (FRI. DEC. 11｜7:15 PM)Take a moment for yourself before the show, a time of transition between your daily life and the theater. Accompanied by Marine Désessard, share some movements, breathing, words, or knowing glances to let go and better embrace the performance.
Our take on this event
Le Mauvais Sort invites you to a broken-hearted cabaret where sketches, songs, and magic tricks collide to process heartbreak. Céline Champinot uses these performances to challenge Western hierarchies and the control of bodies, turning personal suffering into a vibrant, subversive carnival. The show is intended for ages 14 and up and takes place between December 8 and December 12, 2026. Performances on Tuesday, December 8, Wednesday, December 9, and Friday, December 11, start at 20:00 and run for 1:35. Performances on Thursday, December 10, and Saturday, December 12, begin at 19:00.
Tickets are available at three price points: 25€ for full price, 15€ for reduced rate 1, and 10€ for reduced rate 2. The venue is fully wheelchair accessible. Furthermore, a tactile tour of the set is available on Thursday, December 10 at 18:00 for blind or partially sighted audience members, followed by an artist talk after the performance.
Additional events include a cabaret workshop on December 2, a group book reading session titled 'Désirer la violence' on December 9 at 18:30, and a spectator warm-up session on December 11 at 19:15, designed to help audience members transition into the show's atmosphere.
