J’ai une épée / Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2023

Child’s Play

On 2 November 2020, schools around France held a minute’s silence in a national tribute to teacher Samuel Paty who was decapitated near his school two weeks earlier. The teacher had shown pupils caricatures of Muhammed as part of a lesson on freedom of speech. Three days after that national tribute, four ten-years-old pupils in Albertville near the French Alps were arrested by police for “apologia” or glorification of terrorism and for making death threats. Using this exquisite example of muscular liberalism as square one, Brussels-based director and performer Léa Drouet playfully hopscotches between facts and fictions, recounting stories of upbringing, punishment and repression in an attempt to «look at how we look at children» within our overly-institutionalised and normative societies.

Indeed, by giving substance and shimmer to a childhood drawing, J’ai une épée (I have a sword) makes for a moony storytelling experience about self-defence mechanisms and vanishing points in the age of policed multiculturalism – that is, the recognition and management of diversity through a security perspective. And what’s more diverse from us than childhood?

Through infantile gestures and imaginative aesthetics, Drouet and dramaturge Camille Louis maintain «the tension that exists between the mechanisms of institutional violence and what children make up to deal with it, individually and collectively» in order to politicise the discourse around the language of surveillance, control and security within (and without) the education system. As a matter of fact, faced with the mutinous potential of unfettered little human beings who still did not buy into the various experiences of oppression and control we call “society”, schools are the first public space in which the status quo openly defends itself by way of dogmatic impositions and categorisations, thus laying the basis for the structural subjugation to come.

Opting for a minimalistic and repetitive corporal performativity of dubious efficacy, Drouet then entrusts to orality the question of how to redefine these repressive frameworks, «adjusting them to fit the worlds that children invent for themselves in order to survive» instead of stifling them. In spite of its debatable formal restitution, J’ai un épée has the merit of inviting child’s play into the action, thus opening a path for possible future (re)configurations of the big game that is life.

The show was played within Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2023
Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles
boulevard Emile Jacqmain 111-115 Emile Jacqmainlaan
Thursday 18 and Friday 19 of May, 20:30
Saturday 20 of May, 18:00
Sunday 21 of May, 15:00

Kunstenfestivaldesarts presents
J’ai une épée
by Léa Drouet

direction, text and performance Léa Drouet
dramaturgy Camille Louis
set design Élodie Dauguet
music composition Èlg
lights Nicolas Olivier
costumes Eugénie Poste
technical and stage management François Bodeux/Vaisseau
direction assistant Marion Menan
technicians TNWB Pier Gallen (technical management), Jacques Perera (lighting), Stéphanie Denoiseux (stage), Jeison Pardo (sound)
production development and distribution France Morin, Anna Six/Ama Brussels
creation Studio Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles
production Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles, Vaisseau asbl | Coproduction: Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Printemps des Comédiens – Montpellier, Le Phénix — Scène Nationale de Valenciennes, NEXT Arts Festival, Théâtre de Liège, Le Maillon Théâtre de Strasbourg – Scène européenne, Mars-Mons – Arts de la scène, Centre Culturel André Malraux – Scène Nationale de Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, La Coop asbl, Shelter Prod
with the support of La Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Service Général de la Création Artistique – Direction du Théâtre, Kunstencentrum BUDA, La Bellone House of Performing Arts, Taxshelter.be, ING and the Tax Shelter of the Belgian federal government

ph. Simon Loiseau