Rébecca Chaillon, struggles and delusions – Liberation
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The performer’s new show, “Black Card Named Desire”, joyful chaos bordering on fantasy, develops a deep reflection on the representation of black women.
The pieces that pound the colonial imagination, we see (and fortunately) a pretty package today. There are above all, pedagogues, didactics, who tell us what to think, in a very learned way, with a lot of seriousness. Sometimes there are some that stand out. Black card named desire, new show by the young director Rébecca Chaillon on the representation of black women overturns our bearings on the subject because she thoroughly plays the card of the baroque, potashery, carnivalesque diversion, fatty laughter that stains, scatophilia.
On the chaotic stage, the numbers follow one another without stopping, going from a choreography on Aya Nakamura to aerial acrobatics or a session of lyrical singing. It twerks until exhaustion and it mischievously reads the classifieds advertised in Amina, “the magazine for African and Caribbean women” : “Sweet African pearl would like a new start for a serious relationship that can lead to marriage, please only European and serious man. The others abstain.”Here, the eight black performers do not dwell on the socio-historical foundations of racism but subvert with inventiveness and fierce humor the supposed stereotypes they are still too often relegated to: the housekeeper, the nanny, the ultra-sexualized dancer … The discourse on their exotic beauty goes through the mill of parody. A nod to the calendar: we obviously think with …