With his piece Black card named desireRébecca Chaillon offers a striking 2h40 experience where eight Afro-descendant women perform around the questions of intersectionality that inhabit our societies.
Performed more than sixty times in Europe since its creation in 2021, Black card named desire owes its name to a suggestive 90s advert for French coffee brand Carte Noire.
Before the start of the play, black and mixed-race women of Afro-descendants from the audience are invited to sit not on the stands, as tradition dictates, but on sofas, on the other side of the stage. While some preferred to refuse the offer, others joined in the fun and quickly, the sofas filled up. The audience is thus divided in two, with “the others” permanently in its field of vision, behind the stage. For my part, I was seated on the side of the stands.
This experience can be life-saving, according to Rébecca Chaillon, who maintains that non-mixing allows you to “highlight your different perceptions” by organizing a “meeting” of these two audiences. Throughout the show, we witness the audience’s reactions and emotions towards us, which reinforces the words of the performance, as if we were seeing the show through their eyes.
Accompanied by seven performers with varied talents (poetry, dance, circus and even ceramics), Rébecca Chaillon stages her body with unwavering commitment. Black card named desire is an extraordinary experience that challenges the codes of theater.
Playing with prejudices
Rébecca Chaillon spares no prejudice in her piece. Fatou the babysitter amazes by bringing back colorful fabrics from her country and speaking “African”, while white men are looking for the “exotic” woman who will correspond to their fantasies. The director exclusively offers her Quebec audience puns like “Cacanada” or “poo-tine” during a dinner party around the poop.
The public is even invited to participate in riddles during a pseudo-game show where mimes representing the famous brand of rice Uncle Ben’s (still on sale), Will Smith and even the white saviorism. Between embarrassment and laughter, the public gets involved in the game, not escaping a moment of unease when the genocide is mimed.
Although the duration of the piece may seem very long, it reflects what it addresses: a complex history, perpetrated across generations. Some scenes can sometimes be trying. The same actions are repeated for more than half an hour, pushing us to the limit. This discomfort forces us to reflect on what has been happening since we arrived in the room.
The body at the heart of desire
In Black card named desire, it is above all the body that is showcased through a real reappropriation of it. Starting with the white cream which covers Rébecca Chaillon’s naked body and which she gets rid of from the start. Throughout the piece, the performers attempt to exorcise the postcolonial desire that white people still have for the bodies of black and mixed race women.
To deconstruct the stereotypes of which Afro-descendant women are still victims, Rébecca Chaillon decides to use food as a tool of emancipation, also echoing her previous performances (The stomach in the skin, 2011). It uses foods formerly grown by black slaves such as coffee, cocoa and tobacco. The latter are staged in a provocative manner, running down the bodies, dirtying the clothes and the stage. But the experience does not stop there, it is multisensory and the smells of chocolate reach our nostrils.
Black card named desire is a true epic. A performance which disturbs, which shakes, which stirs and from which we cannot emerge indifferent. The piece is presented as part of the FTA at Usine C until Sunday May 26.
