“‘Déborder le cadre’. L’Internationale situationniste, le théâtre et la performance”

Introductory article to Internationale situationniste, Théâtre, Performance, special issue, Théâtre/Public 231, January 201

“‘Ces portes entrouvertes qui filtrent le monde’. Graeme Miller : Entretien avec Clare Finburgh Delijani”

A conversation between Clare Finburgh Delijani and the UK performance artist Graeme Miller, about the impact of the Situationist International's ideas and practices on his work

“‘Élargir la part non médiocre de la vie’. La situation construite et le théâtre Contemporain”

This article exposes the extent to which theatre and theatricality informed the Situationist International's notion of the "constructed situation". Taking the examples of productions created by contemporary UK-based performance makers Graeme Miller and Corin Sworn, the article goes on to argue that the situationist constructed situation enables the important social and cultural importance of some contemporary theatre to be valued. Reciprocally, such theatre ensures an enduring significance to the conception of the constructed situation

Absence: Chloé Déchery’s A Duet Without You and Marguerite Duras

Thirty thousand years ago, explains Marguerite Duras in Negative Hands, a prehistoric man (perhaps a woman?) daubed their palms in pigment and, fingers splayed, left handprints on the granite walls of a cave next to the ocean. Duras saw these repeated, identical, flat, blue-and-black prints on the Atlantic Ocean near to Altamira in Portugal. Her film, however, depicts the view from a car window as it drives during the hours before dawn, along Paris’s main arteries, the Grands Boulevards, that lead from the Opéra to the Champs Élysées. The handprints and their creator are absent. Absence, the inability faithfully to evoke those who are absent, but the responsibility to represent them all the same, lies at the heart of Duras’s works. As the title of Chloé Déchery’s piece A Duet Without You (2015) suggests, absence is also a structuring principle in her performance. In this essay I trace the significance of the philosophy, ethics and aesthetics of absence in the landscape of modern French theatre in which Duras created her works, and from which Chloé Déchery draws

« Je cherche une langue non pas réaliste mais très écrite » Entretien avec Marie NDiaye

Le numéro s’ouvre par un entretien avec l’autrice et dramaturge Marie NDiaye. Il est consacré à la part théâtrale de son œuvre : l’écriture, les représentations, les inspirations, les enjeux de ses pièces

Le « grin » de Fanon et le théâtre postcolonial en France

This article examines the racist cliché of the ‘grin’, theorised by Frantz Fanon in Peau noire, masques blancs (1952). Fanon’s ‘grin’ contributes towards an understanding of how obliging obedience and smiling subservience were extracted by force from colonised subjects; and how the legacies of this social oppression and racist discrimination are apparent in the assimilationist policies to which postcolonial migrant and postmigrant populations are expected to conform today both in France, and in its former empire. Importantly, Fanon suggests that the apparently genial smile of the colonised subject only half conceals indignation, anger and resistance. Through the lens of recent ‘postcolonial’ theatre in France – notably Nasser Djemaï’s Une Étoile pour Noël (2005-15) and Elemawusi Agbedjidji’s, Transe-maître(s) (2018) – I illustrate how the persistent and pernicious racist stereotype of the ‘grinning’, amenable immigrant, postmigrant or postcolonial citizen can give way to protest. Mindful not to perpetuate images of subservience or oppression, these plays demonstrate how theatre can expose the mechanics of racist images, and stage counter-images. As Fanon’s fellow Martinican Aimé Césaire puts it, ‘ni asservissement, ni assimilation’: ‘émancipation’