Amongst the future ruins of an ever more polarised and racialized society, Lisbon’s Alkantara Festival 2023 reinaugurates its yearly appointment with some of the most interesting national and international artist by bringing to the city’s stages Martinique-born Rébecca Chaillon’s Whitewashing, a corrosive cleansing of the colonialized self via the (literal and) metaphorical bleaching of blanchitude.
Involved in the activities of feminist, queer and anti-racist collectives, playwright, director and actress Rébecca Chaillon uses the stage to provoke, deconstruct, and emancipate, acting against the discrimination of minorities and post-colonial populations in the French art industry. Presented for the first time in Portugal within the Alkantara Festival of Lisbon, Whitewashing is a glorious example of all of the above: by taking up the role of two cleaning ladies enslaved to a still imperialist labour market, Chaillon and Mac portray the systemic violence of a white-dominant culture that relegates racialised bodies to socially devalued tasks. While investigating its hidden mechanisms and thus baring the extensive network of seemingly innocent attitudes directly inherited by the colonialist project that, de facto and to this day, establish hierarchies of power and values, the duo attempts to escape from the ubiquitous thorns of racism, giving visibility to the marginalised and moving from self-exploitation and self-loathing to self-care.
«The term whitewashing describes the portrayal of characters from other ethnic groups by white actors, or the act of deliberately covering up incriminating information. In this performance, Rébecca Chaillon appropriates and subverts the term to address skin lightening, to show the ways in which the impositions of racism weaken the self-esteem of Black women, to plait her way out of dominant beauty standards and, finally, to restore networks of autonomy, affection, and self-love. On stage, Rébecca Chaillon and Ophélie Mac first scrub bleach on the floor, and then on their own skin. They create a ritual of skin and hair care that affirms their unique existence in the face of the alienating power of racism. The audience is invited to look, and look again, as a body that society wishes to render invisible becomes increasingly naked, unavoidable, and whole».
The shift from cleaning blackness out of whiteness to cleaning whiteness out of blackness – quite literally bleaching it out – ushers in a purification, a liberation from centuries of oppression and mistreatment. «I don’t want to be a daughter to this land that covers me in mud, anymore», screams a newly empowered Mac, finding pride and beauty in her own ancestry and her own body, all the while making a mockery out of the objectification and sexualisation of female Afro-descendants as “black pearls” in French society.
With utterly gorgeous aesthetics and poetry, Whitewashing regurgitates colonial mentality and welcomes in a new era of freed bodies and imaginations in which «everything that has been broken must be put back together. Everything that has been forgotten must be remembered. Everything that founded us must be reclaimed. We must rediscover our lost language and hairstyles. We must explore secret gardens and defensive armours. We must clear the jungle of our genealogy, to one day become a plant wild enough to be emancipated».
The show was played within Alkantara Festival 2023
Teatro do Bairro Alto
rua Ten. Raul Cascais 1A – Lisbon
from Friday 10 to Saturday 11 November 2023
21:00the Alkantara Festival 2023 presents
Whitewashing
by Rébecca Chaillonwritten and directed by Rébecca Chaillon
performed by Rébecca Chaillon, Ophélie Mac
technical and stage manager Suzanne Péchenart
translation and surtitles (English) Lisa Wegener
production and management L’Oeil Ecoute – Mara Teboul, Elise Bernard & Amandine Loriol
produced by Cie Dans Le Ventre
Photo by Luca Ferreira
