Rébecca, Whitewashing is a duo created in 2018 in Paris that later took on different formats. I am curious about your way of working and thinking. Could you tell me about where the idea for the piece came from, the research and working process, and how you situate this performance within your body of work?

In 2016, I took part in a militant event organized by anti-racist groups fighting against racial profiling and police killings, ‘the decolonial summer camp’. It was a three-day open seminar where I learnt and understood a lot that really empowered me. The following year, I did a solo performance that I started to call Whitewashing, and I invited Aurore Déon to take part. I knew I wanted to do a show with only black women on stage to avenge all those years of my life as a director when I didn’t want to pay attention to the issue of diversity on stage. I wanted to build a team of powerful people, performers who excelled in disciplines where black people are rarely seen (ceramics, circus, fakir, opera singing, harp…). I wanted to create a Carte Noire, a kind of geography of black people in France or close by.

Personally, it was a time in my life when I hadn’t been to Martinique for twelve years. I didn’t understand my place, I was an ‘exiled chimera stammering out its identity’.

I spent several weeks there, and tried to write down what I was feeling from this place of diaspora. I decided to change my writing style, to move from a very intimate ‘I’ style to one that was closer to ‘we’.

I decided not to hesitate to pirate a major work, Alice in Wonderland. I wanted to write a grand narrative that didn’t stick to the present, to reject the documentary aspect often invoked when we talk about discrimination.

Then we started to work together, interviewing each other, proposing improvisations, challenges… watching Spike Lee films, sniffing coffee… and doing public performances.

And I decided to create Carte Noire with 7 other artists on stage, a big set design, a technical team and everything, but also to keep a light, raw, performative form to take abroad, to alternative places too, Whitewashing.

Your performances often imagine another world by strongly pointing out the defaults of the society we are living in, giving space to stories that stayed long untold, creating community, and bringing people together. How do you work on these subjects, which are still underrepresented in theaters? And how do terms like ‘invisible bodies’, ‘bodies in danger’ and ‘at risk’ relate to your work?

I love fiction but I never felt capable of writing it, because it wasn’t the genre I was expected to work in. I was destined to act, to direct, to copy major texts, validated works of text from the dominant white hetero culture. And I loved those texts, those stories. But then I had to ask myself what kind of story I wanted to tell on stage. And then I had these collective activist adventures, around the struggles for women’s rights, queer people, non-white people, fat people… I wanted powerful communities on stage, to tell the story of difference and violence in a different way, and also to give complexity, and therefore a less ‘Benetton’ version of otherness.

I work on this with the different teams, whom I choose very carefully. I need to know that they are politically aware and that they want to put their physical and intimate commitment on the line to talk about social issues. And then we try to make sure that we have space to talk about anything that might be complicated in terms of representing the issues of violence that concern us.

When creating the performance Carte Noire, for example, we work with a mediator who specializes in these issues.

In your performances, your body and the way you use nakedness are strong and you have a fascination for food and references to it. Can you elaborate on both?

I’m afraid that my answers will be philosophically disappointing… I started putting my body into play because I had the feeling that working with text, embodying texts and characters wasn’t for me. That I would always be inferior to my white fellow students at the Conservatoire.

I loved the work of Romeo Castellucci and Rodrigo Garcia and I enjoyed the possibility of already being very significant with just my body. And mine was really full of signs that French theatre didn’t know what to do with. Fat, female, lesbian, black–just looking at my body in space communicated already a lot of history.

When I was researching performance and my way of doing performances, I realized that I was so obsessed with food that I wanted to show myself in that relationship. To challenge the public to look at what is not on show. The obscene. The intimate. It’s an organic, sensual, intense, contradictory relationship. A relationship that transforms me physically, and creates a strong empathy with the people watching. Disgust, desire, hunger…

I’d been facepainting and bodypainting my body for years, and it reminded me of the colors and textures of food. At first, I mixed the two. Then, as I dug deeper, I realized that I could talk about devouring, lack and therefore power relationships. Talk about class, gender and race with this tool. And that it was universal. Everyone has a close relationship with food.