Highlighted by the film On the wire, which will be broadcast in preview in Clermont-Ferrand on Monday October 14, the national association Le Rire Médecin is also present in Puy-de-Dôme. Created last February, the local group includes five professional clowns who visit hospitalized children.
Before its national release on October 30, On a thread will be screened at the CGR Le Paris, in Clermont-Ferrand, Monday October 14, at 8 p.m., in partnership with the Le Rire doctor association which inspired the scenario
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In Clermont-Ferrand, Pierrette Bonnefont is the regional artistic representative of the association. A member of Le Rire doctor for 30 years, the actress-clown initiated the creation of the Puydômois group.
Doctor Laughter, what exactly is it?
It is an association of professional clowns created in 1991 in the Paris region by Caroline Simonds, who is herself a clown. From two people at the start, the association has grown to welcome people from the world of clowning, theater and singing and to train them to work with hospitalized children. In the association, actors are recruited, trained and paid.
How did the association arrive in Clermont-Ferrand?
I have been part of the association since 1994. At the time, there were eight of us in the Paris region and today there are 150 in France. When I returned to Puy-de-Dôme, my region of origin, I really wanted to set up Le Rire doctor there. I started by creating the Bille en tête association, on the same model, to work in the pediatric departments of Estaing hospital, in Clermont-Ferrand. After a year of existence, Bille en tête was “adopted” by Le Rire doctor and the group launched last February.
Who makes up this local “troop”?
There are five of us performing arts workers who work two days a week in the general pediatrics and child surgery departments of Estaing hospital. All the actors are trained with caregivers for theory, in relation to the organization of the services in which we intervene and to children’s pathologies, and with courses for artistic practice (clown, magic, singing, puppets, etc.).
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A health center for children and parents in Clermont-Ferrand
How do you intervene?
We arrive in civilian clothes to meet the caregivers who give us all the information about the children, their age, their state of health, their mood of the day, if they have care or an intervention planned… Then, we get dressed and we goes into the rooms adapting our artistic proposal to each child. Always in duo and always improvising.
For us, each room is a blank page.
We do tailor-made. For a baby who is going to sleep, we sing a soft song and leave quickly. For a tired child, we can offer something minimalist with puppets or cuddly toys. For someone else who needs to decompress, we will make music, have a water fight or make a mess… The objective is to create a situation where the child laughs and to put him at the center of our improvisation. Of course, we involve the family when they are there!
What feedback do you have from these interventions?
The parents whisper a little word of thanks in our ear. Caregivers find that children are more relaxed. We are also in the process of setting up care support to distract children during a blood test or catheter insertion. But the most concrete thing is live, we see that we make children and their families laugh in a place where we don’t expect to laugh.
For his first feature film as a director, Reda Kateb – who has also been sponsor of the Le Rire Docteur association since 2020 – was inspired by the book Journal du Docteur Girafe by Caroline Simonds, clown founder of Le Rire Docteur, and by Doctor Bernie Warren.Comments collected by Maud Turcan
