Stéphanie Hills, bilingual celebrant in France

Welcome!

Looking for a bilingual English/French celebrant in France who’ll perform a ceremony that’s a wee bit different?

 

Wanting an open-minded, imaginative multilingual celebrant who’s up for non-traditional ideas and for creating a fun but meaningful, beautifully-written ceremony?

 

In Paris or in another lovely part of France?

 

Just the two of you?

 

You and a couple of pals?

 

Two hundred friends and family and a menagerie of pets? 

 

Let’s do it!

 

Your story

Do you want an engaging multilingual celebrant who’s very happy to do the offbeat thing, creating an eclectic, non-traditional, inclusive ceremony that’s nothing to do with what-you-do, or what’s-done, but instead is all about what-you-in-particular-really-want-to-do, and au diable with convention?

Whether you met online or at a planetarium or in a café or at a midnight movie or at work or on an Indian train or waiting in a queue for a sandwich or in the sea or on a rusty Spanish stair; and whether you’ve been together two weeks or two years or twenty, you’ve got your own unique love story. 

Let me tell it, in one, two, three or more languages!

 

Why am I a celebrant?

Because I’m really nosy… well, not just that 🙂

But people’s stories are endlessly fascinating. Love itself is a pretty freaky phenomenon, whether you think it’s something that exists independently in the universe or it’s a really amazing biological algorithm.

I love words and I know loads in different languages, and I love stretching my linguistic muscles

I love writing about anything from the solar wind to mushrooms to deserted graveyards to weird and wonderful love stories

And I’m a good listener

And life can be tricky, so let’s celebrate the great stuff!

And bilingual?

I create bilingual and multlilingual ceremonies in Paris and all over France.

It’s like weaving a tapestry.

Writing ceremonies is always like that – the celebrant listens, listens and listens some more to the couple. She takes the many threads of their story; the intuition that she brings to it, from talking to the couple in-depth and by analysing their answers to the many, many questions she asks them; on top of these, she brings to her ceremony-writing a whole lot of creativity and inspiration, and finally, when everything is in place, she spins a ceremony.

But when that ceremony is to be spun in more than one language, the bilingual celebrant needs to think about how to make the whole simple in its complexity, clear in its construction; above all, as with every kind of ceremony , how to ensure it makes sense. And that’s not always straightforward. However, as a very creative, tenacious, inventive and highly-skilled multilingual celebrant, I relish the challenge!

Like the weaver who places motifs in certain places of their creation, as a multilingual celebrant I use the metaphors best suited to the particular language; I say the crucial things in both or every language of the ceremony, but I do so in a dynamic fashion that doesn’t slow the pace; and all the time I’m knitting the languages together to produce a harmonising, mesmerising pattern that draws everyone in, leaving nobody out in the linguistic cold!

I do French/English – both or either – plus I’m very happy to create a ceremony that’s tri- or even quadrilingual, adding Spanish and or German or Portugueuse to the pattern.

 

Inclusivity

Inclusive is a great word and one that’s used a lot at the moment. What I mean when I say that I create inclusive ceremonies, is that I don’t care what sex/non-binary/genre, colour, ability, orientation in any sense, age or nationality my couples (and very occasionally, and delightfully, triples) are. There are so many ways to be different from one another, and that’s fantastic. All that matters to me is that my couples are hung up on romancing, as one deliciously unusual and unclassifiable creature put it. So if you’re a couple of kooks looking for a multilingual celebrant in France to join you in symbolic, eccentric, gorgeous matrimony, I’m your girl! (Unfortunately I can’t provide Bowie himself but you could always walk down the aisle to him. Type-thing.)

Non-traditional French or Francophile couples:

Outrageous, totally original French writer Colette and her 15-years-younger lover, Maurice Goudeket … and previously, her Missy, and Natalie Barney, amongst so many others 

Sylvia Beach and her great love, Adrienne Monnier, both translators, publishers and founders of ground-breaking Parisian bookshops 

American writer and inveterate Wort-salade-ist Gertrude Stein, and her bidie-in, Alice B. Toklas, who cooked really weird meals, though perhaps no one ate them

George Sand and Chopin (whatever their relationship was) 

The unfortunate trio of Verlaine, Rimbaud, and absinthe 

Spectacular philosopher and feminist, Simone de Beauvoir, and café-skulker Jean-Paul Sartre 

Whatever you think of Emmanuel Macron, it is undeniable that his relationship with Brigitte Macron – née Trogneux, and current Présidente of La Fondation des Hôpitaux in Paris – is non-traditional in the sense that she was his French teacher when he met her as a schoolboy, and that he’s twenty-two years younger than her. Gloriously, they still seem absolutely besotted with each other  

and so on and so on and so on. France is unofficially very welcoming to non-conventional coupling.

NB. I don’t know if Colette ever loved anyone as much as her cats, though. 

NBB. Nobody has ever asked me to marry them to their moggy.

 

 

 

Reviews

  • “Thank you so much for yesterday, Stephanie!!! I need to tell you that all the guests LOVED it and kept asking us if we knew you personally, since the ceremony was so personal. They also were very impressed with the flow and the smooth switching between languages. It all went above and beyond my expectations, thank you so much from the bottom of my heart!!”

    Anna, bride

  •  La cérémonie de Stéphanie était tout simplement magnifique et le jonglage entre les langues était parfait.

    Sabine, franco-allemande et mère de la mariée

  • “I don’t know how you did it, but you somehow captured *them*”

    Mamta, mother of the bride

  • “Dear Stephanie, thank you so much for all of the hard work and attention you put into our wedding. We loved working with you and had an absolutely beautiful wedding thanks to you. Sending you lots of love.”

    Shannon and Arthur

  • "It was incredible! It was more than incredible!"

    Johannes, German dad of the bride, just after a trilingual ceremony in German, Brazilian Portuguese and English. Followed by a big hug.

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