June 1942, shortly before the raffle in Vél d’Hiv in France. Mado is 10 years old; she crosses the dividing line between the occupied zone and the free zone with a group of strangers, without her parents. The group is accompanied by a smuggler, who Mado’s mother previously paid with some expensive textile. She crosses the border at night, and takes a train alone to Vichy, before being welcomed by a peasant family in Auvergne for several years. Starting from the story of Mado, her grandmother, Léa Drouet transports us in her new creation, Violences. In it, rather than representing direct violence, the artist works in showing the conditions that make it legitimate. Alone on stage, inside a sandbox, she builds and undoes architectures made of walls, landscapes, borders, through which the storytelling evolves. With a dramaturgy of resonances, the story of Mado rebounds in recent events – the story of Mawda, a 2-year-old Kurdish girl shot dead by a Belgian police officer in 2018 – that echo what contemporary violence and its forms of resistance can be. If usually sand is what absorbs all traces, often erasing traces of violence too, here it also holds the promises of future configurations, which Léa Drouet, alluding to a child who plays, experiments and presents before our very eyes.

50 minutes
in French with English and Dutch surtitles

+ talk after the show on Friday with Maël Galisson, journalist and member of the Groupe d'Information et de Soutien des Immigré-es an moderated by Camille (in French)

This performance is also programmed at Théâtre Varia from 8.02 to 11.02.

Léa Drouet (1982, Villeurbanne, France) is a director and actress. She has a degree in stage direction from the Institut National Supérieur des Arts de la Scène de Bruxelles (I.N.S.A.S.), and has been living and working in Brussels since 2010. Her work takes different forms and flows between installation, theater and performance. She founded VAISSEAU in 2014, a production house that tries to adapt to already existing styles and formats and to those still to come. Despite the diversity of styles, a constant interest in certain questions is clearly perceptible. What is a group? What is the aesthetic of these diverse human organizations? How can we address this in the realms of the senses, sounds, bodies and material matter? How to share aesthetic experiences that translate these different relational organizations? As she is closely involved in the alternative music scene in Brussels, Léa often collaborates with a range of musicians. She also likes to surround herself with artists who combine several disciplines. Since June 2020, Lea Drouet is the artistic coordinator of Atelier 210 in Brussels. She is currently working on her next performance, J'ai une épée, which will have its premiere in May 2023 during Kunstenfestivaldesarts.
http://vaisseau-leadrouet.com/
https://www.instagram.com/leadrouetvaisseau/

Maël Galisson, journalist and member of the Groupe d'Information et de Soutien des Immigré-es. Since 2015, has been doing research on exiled people who died in the France/Belgium/UK border area. He has been documenting the results of his research in a database that lists and maps the victims of the France/Belgium/UK border.
https://www.gisti.org

Camille Louis is an artist dramaturge, co-initiator of the international collective kom.post (of researchers, artists and activists) and a doctor of philosophy, teaching at the Universities of Paris 7 and Paris 8. Her research is situated at the crossroads of art and politics and is embodied in various dramaturgical proposals that always aim to modify the conditions of perception of what we call "action" and of whom we count as actors. She has been collaborating on the dramaturgy of Léa Drouet's work since 2017, particularly for Boundary Games and Violences.

Conception, writing, interpretation: Léa Drouet | Dramaturgy: Camille Louis | Set design: Élodie Dauguet | Original music: Èlg | Assistant director: Laurie Bellanca | Light design: Léonard Cornevin | Lighting control: Suzanna Bauer | Production, distribution: France Morin, Cécile Perrichon – Arts Management Agency | Production: Vaisseau | Coproduction: Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Nanterre-Amandiers Centre dramatique national, Charleroi danse, La Coop asbl | With the support of: Actoral – Festival & Bureau d'accompagnement d'artistes, Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles Service Interdisciplinaire, Wallonie-Bruxelles Théâtre/Danse, Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles Paris, Shelterprod, Taxshelter.be, ING, Tax-Shelter of the Belgian Federal Government, SACD, Institut français | Residencies: Kunstencentrum Buda, Charleroi danse, [e]utopia, La Bellone, Montevideo