The DAINAS (all letters pronounced), are Latvian folk poems about love, sorrow, and ancestral tales. They pay tribute to an ancient oral tradition.

In the play, Dimitri Doré composes a narrative where legend and reality intertwine, at the heart of a fiction co-written with Jonathan Capdevielle. Based in part on the performer’s personal memories, dreams and fixations, the work is inspired by a personal story. The story of a Latvian child adopted by a French family in Reims. Between intimate memories and fantasised visions, the play brings the audience through the metamorphosis of a being who becomes a clown and a dancer to question memories, explore questions of identities and examine lineage and filiation.

Through the rhythms of traditional Latvian songs, DAINAS tells the stories of a quest for identity and a tribute to founding one’s origins.

« The life of a person is not what happened to them. But what they remember and how they remember.”
Gabriel Garcia Màrquez, Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

Trained at the École supérieure Nationale des arts de la marionnette, Jonathan Capdevielle is an author, director, and actor. He has taken part in numerous creations as a performer and/or collaborator, amongst which with Gisèle Vienne, with whom he worked closely from 2000 to 2015. After creating several events/performances, he began developing his own work in 2009, with the solo Adishatz/Adieu, which blends autofiction, narratives and intimate stories, drawing on imitation and references from popular culture. He continued in the autofictional vein with the piece Saga, premiered in 2015.

Born in Latvia, Dimitri Doré was adopted by a French family in December 1998, when he was just 18 months old. He grew up in Reims and, after his high school diploma in 2016, he moved to Paris to study acting at the Éponyme Theatre School.
A year later, he met director Jonathan Capdevielle, with whom he regularly performs. His first play with him, À nous deux maintenant (2017), is an adaptation of the crime novel Un Crime by Georges Bernanos, and the start of a fruitful collaboration. He then went on to star in Rémi in 2019, a play for young audiences based on the novel by Hector Malot, in which he plays the role of the young Rémi. In 2023, still with director Jonathan Capdevielle, he played Scipio in Caligula. In September 2020, he starred alongside Isabelle Huppert and Lars Eidinger in the movie À propos de Joan, directed by Laurent Larivière. He appeared in Bruno Podalydès’s La Petite Vadrouille, released in summer 2024, and starred in Paysage après la bataille, a short film by João Paulo Miranda Maria alongside Hafzia Herzi. He also worked with Canadian director Alexandre Dostie on his latest short film, Boa.