A black woman stands on the stage, in her hands a long metal rod from which dozens of white baby dolls hang – pierced, partly naked, partly in rompers. What sounds like a Satanist ritual is part of a theatre performance at the Avignon Festival in France. It is supposed to address the “hypersexualisation” and “exoticisation” of black women’s bodies by white men and to bring “decolonisation” to the stage. For this purpose, they are not too shy to symbolically impale French babies.
The play “Carte noire nommée désir”, from which the grotesque scene originates, was performed for the last time on Tuesday in Avignon after five days as part of the Festival Avignon – which, according to its own statements, is the world’s most important event for performance artists. It was written by Rebecca Chaillon, a black Afro and queer activist who, in an interview with festival staff, denounces that “the body of black women has been hypersexualised, objectified, animalised”, “while it is still difficult and even impossible to treat white bodies and the privileges that result from them”.
Therefore, she wants to dispel stereotypes and the “fantasies” about black women’s bodies – and she tries to do this in a rather brutal and unbridled way. At the beginning of the almost three-hour show, all black women in the audience are asked to take a seat on a sofa while the rest of the audience remains in the audience seats. Then Chaillon, dressed as a maid, begins frantically cleaning up after the white people. When she is done, she completely exposes herself and gets long braids braided by the other seven black performance artists.
Another actress, Fatou Siby, is seen by L’OBS as “a nanny who impales all the French children entrusted to her on a stake that crosses her body”. The scene has led to much uproar and outrage, especially on social media, over the aestheticising portrayal of the killing of white children. Many users called it “sick” and “racist”.
Apart from the accusation of racism, perhaps it is precisely this shock that Rebecca Chaillon wanted to provoke – at least she also strains the nerves and limits of her audience in other scenes of her play. According to the magazine Le Figaro, there is a scene in which the actresses run through the hall and take away the bags of individual visitors. At one performance, an elderly man allegedly refused to give up his bag and was then harassed and accosted by the actress, saying he did not understand the play. According to Le Figaro, some audience members then left the auditorium and – incited by the actress – were called “fascists” by other visitors.
In one of five performances of the play, a white man allegedly hit one of the performers during that very scene, the bag snatching, according to the Francbleu newspaper. There were also “racist” remarks such as “We are at home here!” in three of the five performances.
The festival management condemned the “racist” attacks on the performance artists – even the relatively harmless remarks made during the performances. What they did not condemn, however, but protected under the guise of art, was the staging of impaled French children.
Symbolische Aufspießung weißer Babys bei „empowerndem“ Theaterstück – Apollo News (apollo-news.net)
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