5 feminist and queer shows to see at the National Theater of Strasbourg

“Burlesque, poetry and emotions. » Opening last month with Au Palacea familiar drag show with the theater and featuring female figures who have marked the lives of the three main performers, TNS set the tone for its season.

She will be as phenomenal as it is originaland you will have to review everything you thought you knew about this institution. The TNS evolves : glitter and heart in pink neon… he dares.

Behind ? The desire, the need, to come together: between the audience and the stagebetween creators and spectators. Living and doing together. We open up the two, and we show stories that we heard and saw – until then – so little.

And it feels good.

If we want “reinvent a model for public theater”Caroline Guiela Nguyen – the current director of TNS and her school – explains « thatit is high time that our theaters are places of equality. Of equal esteem ». “I’m not afraid of the mainstream, of pop culture, I’m not afraid of the present. For me, it is also what constitutes a basis, a common culture, what holds us together.” she says in the pre-season booklet.

In this 2024-25 program: 19 shows, 60% of which will be performed by women. If some will not have missed going to see the first (Teara great choral story around the little hands that bring haute couture to life, by Caroline Guiela Nguyen), we extend the selection with some back-to-school favorites.

“Beretta 68”: cutting men into pieces

Creation of the FASP collective from the TNS school (and born from carte blanche in 2023), Beretta 68 brings to the stage a feminist message, inspired by the famous SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas (American radical feminist made famous after her attempted assassination of Andy Warhol in 1968).

The bias of the FASP? Take this radical essay seriously.

In a setting of a “strange disused laundromat”we discover a “first sharp and dangerous creation which questions women’s right to violence and recalls the power of theater to act”. A question about women’s activismhis speeches and his means.

With the story of a fight: that of a clandestine and misandrous female group desiring “cut men to pieces”. Like the acronym of SCUM Manifesto invites them [« Society for cutting up men » ou en français : « Société pour tailler les hommes en pièces », ndlr].

Inhabited by the eight creators of Beretta 68the voice of Solanas meets theirs, more contemporary, as well as those, differently radical, of « Virginie DespentesChristiane Rochefort, Marcia Burnier, Jacqueline Sauvage, Maria del Carmen Garcia, from the Marthe collective ». Look at itpowerful key to discover until October 18.

“Unconditional”: unconditional freedom

From November 5 to 15the TNS will welcome another women’s tray with Unconditional by Kae Tempest, London poet/student, un spectacle musical directed by Dorothée Munyaneza.

The starting point: a women’s prisonwhere two fellow inmates (Chess and Serena) not only share the same cell… but also a love and a complicity interviewed, shaken by the upcoming release of one of them: “How can we continue to live apart from each other? »

A piece that we are told “upsetting”Or “the original language and songs of the poet [/la poétesse] meet the movement and the gaze of the choreographer to take us into a story of love and friendship where the possibility of being free, of being oneself, unconditionally pulses. »

In this prison: four European and African performers (actresses, singers, dancers and performers) from Belgium, France, Switzerland and Tunisia. To carry this story… but also that of all these women “incarcerated for killing a violent spouse, partner or husband” : “The history of gender-based violence is sadly relevant today. »

« Le Ring de Katharsy » : ready player one ?

From November 20 to 29it’s the original Katharsy’s Ring which will settle in TNS, in “a large-scale stage device”gray and monochrome.

In the design and staging, a former student of the TNS school: Alice Laloy, Who will reveal to us a distorting and disturbing mirror of our society, “Continue.”[vant] his research around half-human, half-puppet hybrid presences”.

Inspired by video gameshe stages here “a conductor, two singer-actors, six circus acrobats and dancers” in a strange game, sort of Sims sauce Black Mirror. A tournament in three rounds where “players”, their “avatars” with multiple lives and “supporters who encourage on command thanks to a teleprompter where everything is written in advance”.

“And at the helm of this dystopian body-object-machine system? Katharsy, a global and virtual entity that plays with the limits of reality and lifet. » But as the director herself explains: “Ultimately, the game turns out to be a means more than an end in itself: the means of bring about a revolutiontion ». To the wise.

The raw theater of Laurène Marx: “For a while be little” and “I live in a house that does not exist”

By the end of November, the TNS will give the word of the unclassifiable Laurène Marx (author and performer), with two shows : For a time be little (from November 26 to 30) et I live in a house that doesn’t exist (from December 3 to 7). Two creations in collaboration with Fanny Sintèscircus artist, actress and director with whom she created the Cie Je t’accare.

In the first, the artist – herself a non-binary trans woman and activist – will deliver a sad stand-up that grips the guts on the “the journey of a trans woman and the violence that accompanies it”. The story “summons and injunctions of all kinds, medical procedures, permanent attacks, processes of invisibility at work, discourses and rules of a profoundly heteronormative societyeh ».

More than a story, « un manifesto, a resumption of power over the intimate words of trans people”.

In the second, Laurène Marx confronts “the naivety of the children’s tale” to “the brutality of the direct prose so characteristic of [son] writing ». An immersion into the psyche of Nikki, a person suffering from personality disorders…

To find “his lost calm”she must face the inertia of the psychiatric system, dive back into his childhood traumaset “survive a world where neuroatypical people still have no place”. If the very subject of this show rarely finds its place in the theater, “this room is their refuge”.

A spectacle ultimately in the image of this season at TNS : si Laurence Marx « vi[t] in a house that doesn’t exist”, our Strasbourg theater promises to be more welcoming and closer to reality than ever.

A place to live, a place to explore, express ourselves, and hear stories that resemble us, bring us together or open doors to other homes. With the key: curiosity.