Violences

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 payed 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. At the occasion of these presentations, Violences is also streamed live from the theatre, allowing this investigation to be accessible beyond boundaries and travel possibilities.

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The performance on 14.05 will be dubbed in Sign Language of French-speaking Belgium (LSBF)