Cultural Kiosk at UN Geneva & CERN

Qui a tué mon père is not a question, but an indignant statement.
In this short, implacable text, Édouard Louis observes the premature exhaustion that marked his father’s body. Through a series of fragments and observations on his father’s life, he points to the collective and social responsibilities that have left their mark on his father’s body.

After adapting Histoire de la violence, Thomas Ostermeier has invited Édouard Louis to bring his text of anger, vengeance and infinite tenderness to the stage. The author’s presence on the stage brings his autobiographical and critical approach to the head, revealing the anger, the paradoxical tenderness and the need for him to speak out.

“You can no longer drive without endangering yourself, you can no longer drink alcohol, you can no longer shower or go to work without taking immense risks. You’re barely over fifty. You belong to that category of human beings to whom politics reserves an early death”. – Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père, Seuil, 2018

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Pour un temps sois peu is a trans woman’s story told in detail, the dangerous details, the cruel details, but the real details told by someone who lived it, really lived it.

In her flesh and in her friendship. And not just another fantasised story written or performed by a cisgender person. Pour un temps sois peu is a manifesto, a reassertion of the intimate voice of trans people. An attempt to create more culture. More culture, not more fantasy.

In Pour un temps sois peu, a hard-hitting stand-up comedy, Laurène Marx tells the story of a trans woman’s journey and the violence that goes with it: the violence of all kinds of assignments and injunctions, of medical procedures, of constant aggression, of the processes of invisibilisation at work, of the discourses and rules of a profoundly heteronormative society. In a language born of rage and the urgent need to reclaim reality, Laurène Marx exposes her experiences, her intimacy and her history with force, laughter and anger.

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In La Mariée and Bonne nuit Cendrillon, the first chapter of the Cadela Força Trilogy, Carolina Bianchi and the Cara de Cavalo collective brought to the stage reflections on the history of performance and theatricality alongside brutal stories of rape and feminicide.
Sexual trauma, the resurrection of past performances and the impact of a dose of GHB substitute – known as the rapist’s drug – administered by Carolina Bianchi on stage formed the tragic and radical itinerary of this first chapter in the form of a “Dantesque” journey.

In Brotherhood, the second chapter of the trilogy, artist and performer Carolina Bianchi examines the complexity of certain pacts of masculinity, the origins of brotherhood between men and the violent mutual codes that perpetuate rape and sexual violence as an integral part of their vocabulary.

Artist and performer Carolina Bianchi uses the principles of theatre to articulate possible avenues for this discussion, creating strong links between representation and real trauma, power structures in art and radical poetry, the origins of misogyny and sexuality in crisis. The structure of the show proves to be a trap, weakening Carolina Bianchi’s place as an author and transforming her into a character who suffers the consequences of having scrutinised the Brotherhood so closely.

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It’s a crazy race to nowhere!

Julian Vogel, on his bike or roller skates, turns relentlessly around a circular track, chasing as much as he flees from a ceramic sphere that swings like a pendulum around the stage. On this circular stage, Julian Vogel puts on a circus of all kinds, performing the entire show on his own, constantly shifting between the music and the apparatus, the plates balancing and the ones breaking on the floor.

Maintaining constant suspense with simple elements straight out of the collective imagination of the classical circus, Julian Vogel writes CERAMIC CIRCUS like composing music, using loops, rhythm and counterpoint. The clatter of plates, the roll of drums and the feats become the elements of a virtuoso composition that traces its way along a ridge between feat and fragility, balance and clumsiness, calm and suspense.

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It’s a uniformly grey world, governed by rules as precise as they are implacable, a competition without mercy. Two champions face each other, on either side of a ring in which avatars, humanoids with mechanical gestures executed on command, compete on their behalf in fiercely competitive events that are nonetheless strangely adapted from everyday life.

Somewhere between video games, visual arts, circus arts and puppetry, Alice Laloy creates a total, dystopian world. Virtuoso to the point of disturbance, the performers – acrobats, singers, contortionists, dancers – fascinate and worry at the same time, creating a space of confusion that questions the relationships of domination at work in our contemporary world, but also our capacity for revolt and change.

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It is a broken piece of which only fragments are visible, which the audience reconstructs as best they can. A piece full of holes, like the memory of something that is about to happen. An attempt to assassinate time. A study of rhythm. A declaration of love for the unpredictable, written with the precision of an accident.

To write the unexpected, so that the encounter between the theatre, the artists and the audience alone forms the show, Camille Boitel, Sève Bernard and four performers will arrive at the Comédie de Genève empty-handed. Gathering, salvaging and tinkering with whatever they find on site, they will construct the possibility of the immediate, working to undo the expectations of the performance in order to better open themselves, collectively, to the unknown.

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Just when you thought she’d been swallowed up by life, failures and complications, Marion Duval returns, ahead of schedule, better prepared to face her worst enemies and all the villains in the world, whom she can see through her invisible glasses.

Borrowing some of the major arguments put forward by Donna Haraway, Vinciane Despret and Baptiste Morizot, notably about cohabitation with other living beings and terror in the face of the end of the capitalist world, Marion Duval reinvents herself before your very eyes. But she never stops cutting the branch that supports her, or as a theatre critic would say, biting the hand that feeds her.

However, the artist rises above the traps set by her reading of things, runs the risk of becoming as hard as a rock, jumps into bottomless holes, unleashes the power of her sacred feminine in her fall, and finally envelops the audience in a new kind of free hug.

And then the magic happens: all you have to do is blink, and the stage is populated. Marion is no longer alone. A horde of extras has invaded the space and seems ready to turn heaven and earth upside down.

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